quotations about life
Child, child, have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away.
THOMAS WOLFE
You Can't Go Home Again
The trouble with life ... is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it's always the same beginning; and the same ending.
MARTIN AMIS
introduction, Experience
Life was never anything but a perpetual see-saw between gravity and jest.
GEORGE ELIOT
Romola
Life is a lot like math. There's always new stuff to do, always another problem to solve. Work through it one problem at a time.
STEPHANIE SANTILLO
"Sheehan valedictorian: 'Life is a lot like math'", My Record Journal, June 3, 2016
To feed death with her works is here life's doom.
SRI AUROBINDO
Savitri
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life -- It goes on.
ROBERT FROST
attributed, A New Treasury of Words to Live By
Life is made up of three kinds of people -- those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.
LOUISE ERDRICH
Love Medicine
The joy of living, its beauty, is all bound up in the fact that life can surprise you.
FRANK HERBERT
Children of Dune
Yes, life is but a waste,
A cheerless pathway, where
No healthy fruit allures the taste,
No flowerets balm the air,
If Love, the wild rose, ne'er luxuriates there.
WILLIAM B. TAPPAN
"Love"
Life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
O harp of life, so speedily unstrung!
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"Two Moods"
You just do it. You force yourself to get up. You force yourself to put one foot before the other, and goddamn it, you refuse to let it get to you. you fight. you cry. You curse. Then you go about your business of living. That's how I've done it. There's no other way.
MARILYN MONROE
My Story
Life is wasted on the living.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
I think the serious things really are the things that make for happiness--people and things that are compatible, love.... So many people are content just to sit around and talk about them instead of getting out and attaining them. As if life were a joke of some kind.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Mosquitoes
I warmed both hands before the fire of Life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
I Strove with None, for None was Worth My Strife
What is the meaning of life?... A simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
He or she who has made the best of the life after death has made the best of the life before it.
SAMUEL BUTLER
"How to Make the Best of Life", Essays on Life, Art and Science
Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.
PHILIP ROTH
American Pastoral
Each life is one short word slowly uttered.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Blue Jay's Dance
Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books -- but it is terrible when one has to live it. It is almost impossible to sleep for more than twelve hours a day, and the remaining twelve hours have to be filled in somehow.
JEAN ANOUILH
The Collected Plays