quotations about life
Flirting with death is the spice of life.
MARGARET LOCK
Twice Dead
The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a pattern of systems.
BRUCE LEE
Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living
If you have no wounds, how can you know if you're alive?
EDWARD ALBEE
The Play About the Baby
From whatever point he starts, whatever path he follows, modern man comes to the same conclusion: behind its visible appearances, life hides a meaning that is eternally inaccessible to penetration by the spirit that seeks for its discovery, caught in the dilemma of being aware that it is impossible to find it, and yet also impossible to renounce the hopeless quest.
ARTHUR ADAMOV
"Le refus", L'Heure Nouvelle
Life! Don't talk to me about life.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
If I don't have time to live my life well the first time, when am I going to find the time to go back and live it over?
ROBERT FULGHUM
Uh-Oh
The life most of us live are lives we are forced to live by immediate needs, influences, and pressures.
WALTER MOSLEY
Black Genius
Though life's tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn.
JOHN BARTH
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor
Life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men
Life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains.
ROBINSON JEFFERS
"Shine, Perishing Republic"
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began,
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Fellowship of the Ring
Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
My life is one long blooper reel!
TOM WILSON
Ziggy, Jan. 12, 2000
Life was not fair. If you wanted something you had to take it. Before someone else took it from you. Neatly dissected down to its essence, life was one long series of lily pad hoppings. The quick and the resourceful were able to adapt and survive; all others were simply crushed as a more nimble creature landed on the lily pad they had occupied for too long.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Winner
Life is an incurable disease.
ABRAHAM COWLEY
To Dr. Scarborough
As long as you were prepared to stay in it life found room for you. Life was like that, helplessly promiscuous, a doorman who let everyone in.
GLEN DUNCAN
Talulla Rising
Funny. You talk of life as if it were a train you have to catch up with. How long have you been trying, three days? And not got a glimpse of it yet, in spite of caviar and champagne?
VICKI BAUM
Grand Hotel
Our daily lives have a kaleidoscopic quality, a feeling of walking down a breakfast buffet and spooning out things onto your plate. And there's a lot to eat at this brunch of experience. Too many pineapple rings, too many sausages, too much syrup.
NICHOLSON BAKER
interview, Interview Magazine, September 16, 2013
Every day is a careful balance fought between the despondency that threatens to swamp me and the incredible joy of living.
CHRIS ABANI
Kalakuta Republic
Life is one long struggle in the dark.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura