LIFE QUOTES VIII
quotations about life
Life is too transcendentally humorous for a man not to take it seriously. Compared with it, Death is but a shallow jest.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
Simon the Jester
The great river-courses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed; and those other streams, the life-currents that ebb and flow in human hearts, pulsate to the same great needs, the same great loves and terrors. As our thought follows close in the slow wake of the dawn, we are impressed with the broad sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main headings of its history--hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and death.
GEORGE ELIOT
Romola
Store well Life's sheaves, the grains of thought--
Your harvest will be good,
If sheaves are bound by ties of love,
And evil you've withstood.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Gathering of the Sheaves"
A truce to philosophy! -- Life is before me and I rush into possession. Hope, glory, love, and blameless ambition are my guides, and my soul knows no dread.
MARY SHELLEY
The Last Man
A man gathers a life around him like a hedgehog collecting leaves on its spines; what sticks to you defines you, and without them you're bare, defenseless, a yolk without a shell.
K. J. PARKER
Evil for Evil
To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations.
EMILY DICKINSON
letter to T. W. Higginson, winter 1871
Our life is in the loom; it rolls up and is hidden as fast as it is woven. It is to be taken out of the loom only when we leave this world; then only shall we see the pattern.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
We are meant to taste of life ... and drink the cup of it to the dregs, bitter and sweet alike.
JACQUELINE CAREY
Kushiel's Dart
But how could you live and have no story to tell?
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
White Nights
Each new epoch in life seems an encounter. There is a tussle and a cloud of dust, and we come out of it triumphant or crest-fallen, according as we have borne ourselves.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"The Rainy Day"
Life doesn't retreat.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Rain Taxi, winter 2000/2001
Meeting each other and leaving each other. Leaving and meeting. That's what life is!
AUGUST STRINDBERG
A Dream Play
Live to the point of tears.
ALBERT CAMUS
Notebooks
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?
JOHN GREEN
An Abundance of Katherines
Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
attributed, Lindbergh: Flight's Enigmatic Hero
How deceptively light they are, the truly decisive steps we take in life.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
Life packed a clever one-two punch: cruelty and absurdity.
DEAN KOONTZ
Velocity