Quotes About Life

That such a final, tragic, and awful thing is suicide can exist in the midst of remarkable beauty is one of the vastly contradictory and paradoxical aspects of life and art.

I was late to understand that chaos and intensity are no subsitute for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life. Normal people are not always boring. On the contrary. Volatility and passion, although often more romantic and enticing, are not intrinsically preferable to a steadiness of experience and feeling about another person.

I never again looked at the sky and saw only vastness and beauty. From that afternoon on I saw that death was also and always there.

The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension.

We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds... But love is, to me, the ultimately more extraordinary part of the breakwater wall: it helps to shut out the terror and awfulness, while, at the same time, allowing in life and beauty and vitality.

When energy is profoundly dissipated, the ability to think is clearly eroded, and the capacity to actively engage in the efforts and pleasures of life is fundamentally altered, then depression becomes an illness rather than a temporary or existential state.

While she might not have opted for this illness, neither does she entirely regret it; she prefers, as she writes so movingly, a life ofpassionate turbulence to one of tedious calm.

Feeling normal for any extended period of time raises hopes that turn out, almost invariably, to be writ on water. I

We have given sorrow many words, but a passion for life few.

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist.

Manic-depression is a disease that both kills and gives life. Fire, by its nature, both creates and destroys.

but there is an extra twist of almost painful nostalgia brought about by having lived a life particularly intense in moods. This makes it even harder to leave the past behind, and life, on occasion, becomes a kind of elegy for lost moods. I miss the lost intensities, and I find myself unconsciously reaching out for them, as I still now and again reach back with

He was not, it was clear, going to gaze meaningfully into my eyes over long dinners and fine wines, nor discuss literature and music over late-night coffee and port... Yet not once in the years we have been together have I doubted Richard's love for me, nor mine for him. Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe.

Even in my blackest depressions, I never regretted having been born. It is true that I had wanted to die, but that is peculiarly different from regretting having been born.

There is, for me, a mixture of longings for an earlier age; this is inevitable, perhaps, in any life, but there is an extra twist of almost painful nostalgia brought about by having lived a life particularly intense in moods. This makes it even harder to leave the past behind, and life, on occasion, becomes a kind of elegy for lost moods.

here is, for me, a mixture of longings for an earlier age; this is inevitable, perhaps, in any life, but there is an extra twist of almost painful nostalgia brought about by having lived a life particularly intense in moods. This makes it even harder to leave the past behind, and life, on occasion, becomes a kind of elegy for lost moods.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower," wrote Dylan Thomas

Fire, by its nature, both creates and destroys.

These comings and goings, this grace and godlessness, have become such a part of my life that the wild colors and sounds now have become less strange and less strong; and the blacks and greys that inevitably follow are, likewise, less dark and frightening...But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met.

I did not wake up one day to find myself mad. Life should be so simple.

Having heard so often, and so believably, John Donne's bell tolling softly that "Thou must die," one turns more sharply to life, with an immediacy and appreciation that would not otherwise exist.

The elemental human desire to add meaning and permanence to life-to avoid the fate rendered by Dante as no more memorial/ Than foam in water or smoke upon the wind - take on additional depth and urgency for those who have intense moods and brooding dispositions.

The merrier the heart, alleged Burton, the longer the life. Modern science tends to support his contention: positive emotions such as joy act as breathers from stress and in doing so they help to restore physical and psychological health after draining or stressful times.

It isn't ever delicate to live.