quotations about life
Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.
JOHN DOS PASSOS
Three Soldiers
For life, with all it yields of joy and woe,
And hope and fear (believe the aged friend),
Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love--
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is.
ROBERT BROWNING
A Death in the Desert
Life is reduced to a bunch of fights over territory.
KOBO ABE
The Ark Sakura
Life is a sculpture, chip, chip, chip. In good time, with good patience, even the most formidable rock can be shaped.
BERNARD BECKETT
Malcolm & Juliet
Life is the flash in black heavens.
HENRI CAZALIS
"Always"
Life is magical. There is something wonderful in being alive, in having within one's self all sorts of possibilities.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall.
THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain
There was that law of life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
NORMAN MAILER
The Deer Park
We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing
(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth--
we call it life.
ANNE CARSON
Grief Lessons: Four Plays
Life is a parade of metamorphoses.
KATIE LESLIE
"How Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson's rough start in North Texas prepared her for tough job", Dallas Morning News, September 1, 2016
He lived the life he lived, like anybody, I guess, and he paid his dues, like everybody. Maybe what I mean when I say he made his life so hard was that he always tried to pay his dues in front.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
Our life a harp is, with unnumbered strings,
And tones and symphonies; but our poor skill
Some shallow notes from its great music brings.
JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY
"Dolores"
Life is a crucible. We are thrown into it, and tried.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Life
You have been good to me....
You have not made yourself too dear
to juggle with.
LOLA RIDGE
"Comrades"
Will our life not be a tunnel between two vague clarities? Or will it not be a clarity between two dark triangles?
PABLO NERUDA
The Book of Questions
Life like a shroud on men and women lies.
MAURICE BROWNE
"At Dusk"
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"A Psalm of Life"
What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?
UMBERTO ECO
Baudolino
Life? Bah! It has no value. Of cheap things it is the cheapest. Everywhere it goes begging. Nature spills it out with a lavish hand. Where there is room for one life, she sows a thousand lives, and it's life eats life till the strongest and most piggish life is left.
JACK LONDON
The Sea-Wolf
Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods