Quotes About Living

It was a small tortoise with Julia's initials set in diamonds in the living shell, and this slightly obscene object, now slipping impotently on the polished boards, now striding across the card-table, now lumbering over a rug, now withdrawn at a touch, now stretching its neck and swaying its withered, antediluvian head, became a memorable part of the evening, one of those needlehooks of experience which catch the attention when larger matters are at stake.

This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.

Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I...

It's worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. p. 201

You'd think you'd been singled out of all the women in the world for this crowning indignity. What if I do! she cried angrily. It isn't an indignity for them. It's their one excuse for living. It's the one thing they're good for. It is an indignity for me.

I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires -- all for eighty dollars a month.

There was the union of his soul with Gloria's, whose radiant fire and freshness was the living material of which the dead beauty of books was made.

Uncle had only paid hundred a month for whole great big house in Minneapolis.

Oh, what did it matter? This night, this glow, the cessation of anxiety and the sense that if living was not purposeful it was, at any rate, essentially romantic!

one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses.

Then you don't think the artist works from his intelligence? No. He goes on improving, if he can, what he imitates in the way of style, and choosing from his own interpretation of the things around him what constitutes material. But after all every writer writes because it's his mode of living.

I believe in holding still. I believe that the secrets we hold in our hearts are our anchors, that even the unspoken between us is a measure of our every promise to the living and to the dead. And all our promises, like all our hopes, move us through life with the power of an ocean liner pushing through the sea.

Hyperinflation is the worst economic malady that can befall a nation. It wipes out the value of money, savings, assets, and thus work. It is worse even than a deep recession. Hyperinflation robs you of what you have now (savings), whereas a recession robs you of what you might have had (higher standards of living if the economy had grown).

Is it not in the nature of loss that we measure the dizzying intensity of love? And in the hope of meeting again, the strength to go on living?

De hecho, lo raro y excepcional es estar vivo.

O meu misticismo é não querer saber. É viver e não pensar nisso.

I've never aspired to be more than a dreamer. I paid no attention to those who spoke to me of living. I've always belonged to what isn't where I am and to what I could never be. Whatever isn't mine, no matter how base, has always had poetry for me.

Para o homem vulgar, sentir é viver e pensar é saber viver. Para mim, pensar é viver e sentir não é mais que o alimento de pensar.

One man reads in order to know, all in vain. Another enjoys himself in order to live, again all in vain.

Aquilo que, creio, produz em mim o sentimento profundo, em que vivo, de incongruência com os outros, é que a maioria pensa com a sensibilidade, e eu sinto com o pensamento. Para o homem vulgar, sentir é viver e pensar é saber viver. Para mim, pensar é viver e sentir não é mais que o alimento de pensar.

Better to write than to dare live, even if living means merely to buy bananas in the sunlight, as long as the sun lasts and there are bananas for sale. Later, perhaps… yes, later…

Death means being subject to some external reality, and we, in each and every moment of our lives, are both a reflection and an effect of what surrounds us. Death underlies every living gesture. We are born dead, we live dead, and we enter death already dead. Composed of living cells and in a state of permanent dissolution, we are made of death.

Viver é não pensar.

If the office in the Rua dos Douradores represents Life for me, the second floor room I live in on that same street represents Art. Yes, Art, living on the same street as Life but in a different room; Art, which offers relief from life without actually relieving one of living.