quotations about life
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
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 a theatre of alarms and contentions.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
Life is reduced to a bunch of fights over territory.
KOBO ABE
The Ark Sakura
Short is life, but endless is the theme.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
There are those who say that life is like a book, with chapters for each event in your life and a limited number of pages on which you can spend your time. But I prefer to think that a book is like a life, particularly a good one, which is well to worth staying up all night to finish.
DANIEL HANDLER
(as Lemony Snicket), Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
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
A life is a life. The unbearable pain of losing someone you love is identical no matter how differently it is expressed. And yet the varying shades of the global reaction to tragedy based on location, nationality, ethnicity, culture and religion belie our humanity, a harsh reminder that our "global community" is an illusion, despite our seemingly desperate desire to cling to that notion.
ARWA DAMON
"A life is a life, wherever you are", CNN, March 29, 2016
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
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
Life is the flash in black heavens.
HENRI CAZALIS
"Always"
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
What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?
UMBERTO ECO
Baudolino
Human life is a pilgrimage from the unknown to the unknown. No one knows whence he emanated or whither he is bound.
FEMI ABBAS
"A decade of royalty and faith", The Nation, September 2, 2016
I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
speech during the Great March on Detroit, Jun. 23, 1963
Let me leap naked through life's testing flame,
And bear to lose, and yet endure to win.
KENNETH RAND
"The World-Slave"
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
Life consists in molting our illusions. We form creeds today only to throw them away tomorrow. The eagle molts a feather because he is growing a better one.
ELBERT HUBBARD
The American Bible
Life is a crucible. We are thrown into it, and tried.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words