Quotes About Life

In America, my initial impression was that death or the possibility of it always seemed to come as a surprise, as if we took it for granted that we were immortal, and that death was just an option.

Life is full of signs. The trick is to know how to read them. Ghosh called this heuristics, a method for solving a problem for which no formula exists.

We don't have children to fulfill our dreams. Children allow us to let go of the dreams we were never meant to fulfill.

Yesterday misspent can't be recall'd Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches.

How beautiful and horrible life is, Hema thought; too horrible to simply call tragic. Life is worse than tragic." p 108

She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life... As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.

Children were the foot wedged in the closing door, the glimmer of hope that in reincarnation there would be some house to go to, even if one came back as a dog, or a mouse, or flea that lived on the bodies of men. If...there was a raising of the dead, then a child would be sure to see that its parents were awakened.

What a journey...what a day...what madness, so much worse than tragic! What to do except dance, dance, only dance...

I am forced to render some order to the events of my life, to say it began here, and then because of this, that happened, and this is how the end connects to the beginning, and so here I am.

Roses would be annoying weeds if the blooms never withered and died. Beauty resides in the knowledge that it doesn't last.

There's another kind of hole and that is the wound that divides family. Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

Impending death had a way of unexpectedly unearthing the past so that it came together with the present in an unholy coupling.

Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse under your wheel.

Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward.

The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark. William Yeats, "The Choice

Hema thought of Shiva, her personal deity, and how the only sensible response to the madness of life . . . was to cultivate a kind of madness within, to perform the mad dance of Shiva, . . . to rock and sway and flap six arms and six legs to an inner tune. Hema moved gently . . . she danced as if her minimalist gestures were shorthand for a much larger, fuller, reckless dance, one that held the whole world together, kept it from extinction.

Another day in paradise" was his inevitable pronouncement when he settled his head on his pillow. Now I understood what that meant: the uneventful day was a precious gift.

a world where a sparrow's fate and that of a man can be decided in the blink of a cat's eye, such is the true measure of time.

Whatever is next for me, whatever the story of my life, the roots that must nourish it are here.

As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled. She was ashamed that such a simple insight should have eluded her all these years. Make something beautiful of your life.

the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled

As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.

all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for

The minutes we spend watching the waves don't count against our life spans