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 is wasted on the living.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
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"
Still, life had a way of adding day to day.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Mrs. Dalloway
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
Life is lumpy. And a lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in a breast are not the same lump. One should learn the difference.
ROBERT FULGHUM
Uh-Oh
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
The joy of living, its beauty, is all bound up in the fact that life can surprise you.
FRANK HERBERT
Children of Dune
A man's life is like a well, not like a snake--it should be measured by its depth, not by its length.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
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
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"
Life is made up of three kinds of people -- those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.
LOUISE ERDRICH
Love Medicine
Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Philosophical Essays
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
Our lives teach us who we are.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
London Independent, Feb. 4, 1990
Each life is one short word slowly uttered.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Blue Jay's Dance
Life is often like that, the best balancing on a knife edge with the worst.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Obsidian Butterfly
Life is like invading Russia. A blitz start, massed shakos, plumes dancing like a flustered henhouse; a period of svelte progress recorded in ebullient despatches as the enemy falls back; then the beginning of a long, morale-sapping trudge with rations getting shorter and the first snowflakes upon your face. The enemy burns Moscow and you yield to General January, whose fingernails are very icicles. Bitter retreat. Harrying Cossacks. Eventually you fall beneath a boy-gunner's grapeshot while crossing some Polish river not even marked on your general's map.
JULIAN BARNES
Talking It Over