LIFE QUOTES IV
quotations about life
Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.
MARY MCCARTHY
The Hounds of Summer and Other Stories
The lives of people are like young trees in a forest. They are being choked by climbing vines. The vines are old thoughts and beliefs planted by dead men.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"Seeds", The Triumph of the Egg
All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces.
BLAISE PASCAL
Pensees
The zest for life of those unusual men and women who make a great zealous success of living is due more often in good part to the craftiness and pertinacity with which they manage to overlook the misery of others. You can watch them watch life beat the stuffing out of the faces of their friends and acquaintances, although they themselves seem to outwit the dense delays of social custom, the tedious tick-tock of bureaucratic obfuscation, accepting loss and age and change and disappointment without suffering punctures in their stomach lining.
EDWARD HOAGLAND
Tigers & Ice
Living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom, Absalom!
Life is laughter amid a rosary of death.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
attributed, Only Mystery: Federico García Lorca's Poetry in Word and Image
There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
Where the Blue Begins
A shiftless clerk, I take the days on trust,
Nor strip them of their spoil before they go.
KARLE WILSON BAKER
"The Dusty Way", Blue Smoke
I seem to have always one little window looking but into life.
EMMA LAZARUS
obituary, Century Magazine, 1887
How small a porton of our life it is that we really enjoy. In youth we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age, we are looking backwards to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on some future day, when we have time.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Life is a means of extracting fiction.
ROBERT STONE
attributed, Writers at Work
This is one of those days which I am obliged to record as almost a blank in my existence.
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS
diary, November 23, 1837
Life is a moment stolen from eternity.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
How small a portion of our life it is that we really enjoy. In youth, we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age, we are looking backwards to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on some future day when we have time.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Macbeth
Success makes life easier. It doesn't make living easier.
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
Q, August, 1992
How passionately we love everything that cannot last: the dazzling crystallory of winter, the spring in bloom, the fragile flight of butterflies, crimson sunsets, a kiss, and life.
DEAN KOONTZ
Brother Odd
But all they are all there scraping along to sneeze out a likelihood that will solve and salve life's robulous rebus.
JAMES JOYCE
Finnegan's Wake
Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Orthodoxy
Football is a team game. So is life.
JOE NAMATH
attributed, Where Football Is King