quotations about life
Life is the jailer of the soul in this filthy prison, and its only deliverer is death.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Some people fake their death, I'm faking my life.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
Life is made up of three kinds of people -- those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.
LOUISE ERDRICH
Love Medicine
This life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Anywhere Out of the World", Le Spleen de Paris
The life so short, the craft so long to learn.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
"Parliament of Fowls"
Life is much the same when it's going well-- resonant and unremarkable. But who, not under disaster's seal, can understand what life is like when it begins to crumble?
MARY OLIVER
"Storm in Massachusetts, September 1982", Dream Work
Your responsibility is to be an explorer, not a tourist in this adventure that is your life.
MARY ANNE RADMACHER
Honey In Your Heart
What fills us is real, sweet, dopey, funny life.
ANNE LAMOTT
"Time Lost and Found", Sunset
Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
You're alive. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change.
NEIL GAIMAN
The Graveyard Book
Life seems like a haunted wood, where we tremble and crouch and cry.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"A Woman's Apology"
Life is being, not having.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
You have not lost all when you have life.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
The Ghost in My Life
Life should be a fruitful garden,
Fair in blossom, and rich in seed;
Conscience, the sharp and faithful warden,
Watchful against the frost and weed.
Study should its labyrinths trace
Where wisdom's pleasant waters flow;
And industry the garden grace
With plants that choicest gifts bestow.
C. B. LANGSTON
"What Should Life Be?"
It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
All the Pretty Horses
Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?
MARY OLIVER
"Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?", West Wind
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
attributed, The Waking Dream
There is nothing men are so anxious to keep, and yet are so careless about, as life.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Mankind", Les Caractères
Life is a series of sudden disappearances, leave-takings without the proper goodbyes.
KELLY LINK
Stranger Things Happen