It’s like life’s this slippery slope and we’re never really in control and sometimes it seems like running into a tree is the worst thing that could ever happen, when really it’s what stops us from going over the cliff. –Brian Strause, Maybe a Miracle

A life without a quiet center easily becomes destructive. –Henri JM Nouwen

Everything is endured, disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui—in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off. … And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige even of relief. –Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life

In the end what matters most is
How well did you live
How well did you love
How well did you learn to let go.
–(?)

It is beautiful,
how, as we live,
we grow old in the living.
–Jane Hirshfield, “Ode to Time”

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed—by doing nothing. –Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

I say embrace the total geek in yourself and just enjoy it. Life is too short to be cool. –Shirley Manson

If we live our lives the right way, then everything we do can become a work of art. –Lauren Ambrose, in Six Feet Under

Life is wasted on the living. –Richard Jenkins, in Six Feet Under

What is life? we ask, knowing that the answer will come not as a headline but as an aggregate. Life is dewclaws and corsages and dust mites and alligator skin and feathers and whale’s whiskers (as mammals, whales do have hair) and tree-frog serenades and foreskins and blue hydrangeas and banana slugs and war dances and cedar chips and bombardier beetles. Whenever we encounter something that is rare, we mentally add it to the seemingly endless list of forms that life can take. We smile in amazement as we discover yet another variation on an ancient theme. To hear the melody, we must hear all the notes. –Diane Ackerman, The Rarest of the Rare

When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn’t matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly. It probably doesn’t matter if, while trying to be modest and eager watchers of life’s many spectacles, we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong thing or light up with wonder like the children we all are. It probably doesn’t matter if a passerby sees us dipping a finger into the moist pouches of dozens of lady’s slippers to find out what bugs tend to fall into them, and thinks us a bit eccentric. Or a neighbor, fetching her mail, sees us standing in the cold with our own letters in one hand and a seismically red autumn leaf in the other, its color hitting our sense like a blow from a stun gun, as we stand with a huge grin, too paralyzed by the intricately veined gaudiness of the leaf to move. –Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

Light
Will someday split you open
Even if your life is now a cage…
–Hafiz, “In a Tree House”

Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. –Mark Twain, Notebook

Life: we laugh and laugh, then cry and cry, then feebler laugh, then die. –ditto

Life is at best a dream and at worst a nightmare from which you cannot escape. –Mark Twain, Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts

But such is human life. Here today and gone tomorrow. A dream—a shadow—a ripple on the water—a thing for invisible gods to sport with for a season and then toss idly by—idly by. It is rough. –Mark Twain, “Closed Out” sketch, included in a letter to Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, January 28, 1866

Life was a fever-dream made up of joys embittered by sorrows, pleasure poisoned by pain; a dream that was a nightmare-confusion of spasmodic and fleeting delights, ecstasies, exultations, happinesses, interspersed with long-drawn miseries, griefs, perils, horrors, disappointments, defeats, humiliations, and despairs—the heaviest curse devisable by divine ingenuity… –Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth

Life is purgatory at all times, & a swindle & a crime—yesterday it was hell. –Mark Twain, in a letter to WD Howells, September 24, 1902

Life was what happened when all the what-ifs didn’t, when what you dreamed or hoped or … feared might come to pass passed by instead. –Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

Life’s a series of blows. What is born a drum is beaten till death. –Carlo Gébler, Life of a Drum

You struggle with money. You struggle without money. You struggle with love. You struggle without love. But it’s how you manage. You have to keep laughing, you have to be fun to be with, and you have to live with style—not fancy-schmancy, but in a way which is present and meaningful and has some beauty to it. –Pierce Brosnan, in an interview in Parade, June 15, 2008

Epiphanies like these are so much more likely to occur for me in grocery stores and laundromats, rather than in the more traditional places of reverence and prayer. They are moments in which the baseline about what is good and important in my life changes. Often they come just when it feels like life has played another rotten trick on me and nothing in my life is ever going to go as I expect. Through these hardships comes the realization that it is in the most ordinary aspects of my life—the ones in which everything can, and does, go wrong—that I am offered glimpses of the extraordinary. In these flashes of insight, I understand for a moment that one of the great dividends of darkness is an increased sensitivity to light. And in these rare and expansive moments, I am called to delight. –Martha Manning, Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface

When my mother didn’t come back I realized that any moment could be the last. Nothing in life should simply be a passage from one place to another. Each walk should be taken as if it is the only thing you have left. –Peter Høeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow

When you are washing the dishes, washing the dishes must be the most important thing in your life. Just as when you are drinking tea, drinking tea must be the most important thing in your life. Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the whole world revolves—slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment. Only this actual moment is life. –Thich Nhat Hanh

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded. –Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. –Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable. –Helen Keller, Let Us Have Faith

The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is—to live dangerously! –Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Life is perhaps most wisely regarded as a bad dream between two awakenings, and every day is a life in miniature. –Eugene O’Neill, Marco Millions

Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis: I am always in the convalescent stage. I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes illness worthwhile. –George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methusaleh

When you’re young, you always feel that life hasn’t yet begun—that “life” is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays—whenever. But then suddenly you’re old and the scheduled life didn’t arrive. You find yourself asking, “Well then, exactly what was it I was having—that interlude—the scrambly madness—all that time I had before?” –Douglas Coupland, Life After God

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. –Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism”

I still don’t know why I didn’t manage to keep a better footing on the slippery path called life, why some people go through it straight down the main road while others wander endlessly around dim alleyways. –Einar Mar Gudmundsson, Angels of the Universe

Life without ... examination is not worth living. –Plato, quoting Socrates in Apology 38a

To keep on living an empty life
takes patience from an empty person.
–Vivienne Loomis, “la faim”

’Tis a queer life, and the only humor proper to it seems quiet astonishment. Others laugh, weep, sell, or proselyte. I admire. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a letter to Mary Moody Emerson, August 1, 1826

Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you. ... Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute? –Thornton Wilder, Our Town

Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. –Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life. –Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt

Life does not consist mainly—or even largely—of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one’s head. –Mark Twain, Autobiography

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances. –Cesare Pavese, journal, May 5, 1936

Living is an illness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It’s a palliative. The remedy is death. –Nicolas-Sébastien Chamfort, Maximes et Pensées

We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to. –Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

Fairness is the exception to the rule in life. –MK Wren, A Gift Upon the Shore

Still, the dark and amazing adventure of life is beckoning. I’ll stick around, out of curiosity and because I enjoy breathing and stretching my healthy limbs. –Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City

I have an ordinary life—and though some might think this is dull, I tell you it is sweet. Ordinary life is a miraculous thing. –Tracy Thompson, The Beast: A Reckoning with Depression

Look. This is your world! You can’t not look. There is no other world. This is your world; it is your feast. You inherited this; you inherited these eyeballs; you inherited this world of color. Look at the greatness of the whole thing. Look! Don’t hesitate. Open your eyes. Don’t blink. –Chogyam Trungpa

My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn. –Louis Adamic

I promise to make you so alive that the fall of dust on furniture will deafen you. –Nina Cassian

The soul moves in circles, said Plotinus. Hence our lives are not moving straight ahead; instead, hovering, wavering, returning, renewing, repeating. –James Hillman

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. –Cesare Pavese

The only sensible way to regard life is that it is a privilege you are willing to pay for. –Robert Henri

The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced. –Aart van der Leeuw

It’s like putting a horse on top of a horse and then climbing on and trying to ride. Riding a horse is hard enough. Why add another horse? Then it’s impossible. –Suzuki Roshi, re: questioning one’s life and purpose

Life is so meaningless we might as well try to make ourselves extraordinary. –Francis Bacon

There it is. I don’t believe in anything, but I’m always glad to wake up in the morning. It doesn’t depress me. I’m never depressed. My basic nervous system is filled with this optimism. It’s mad, I know, because it’s optimism about nothing. I think of life as meaningless and yet it excites me. I always think something marvelous is about to happen. –ditto

As for the meaning of life, I do not believe that it has any. I do not ask what it is, but I suspect it has none and this is a source of great comfort to me. We make of it what we can and that is all there is about it. –Isaiah Berlin

We labor under a number of delusions, one of which is that life makes sense; ie, that we are sane. We persist in this view despite massive evidence to the contrary. We live fragmented, compartmentalized lives in which contradictions are carefully sealed off from each other. We have been taught to think linearly rather than comprehensively. –Edward Hall

If I could only remember that the days were not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart, the fires which keep the poet alive as the citizen never lives, which burn all the roofs of security. –Edmund Wilson

Very occasionally, if you really pay attention, life doesn’t suck. –Joss Whedon, in the liner notes to the Once More, with Feeling soundtrack

It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in a while exhilarating. –Stephen King, Insomnia

Our lives are quiet. We like to be disturbed by delight. –Sophia Grojsman

You could catalog the thousand ways people shrink from life, as if chance and change are by their nature toxic, disfiguring. –Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch

… even free people are eternally enslaved by the processes of living. –Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

People don’t really start to live until death comes knocking on their door. When will I start to live? –Hallgrímur Helgason, 101 Reykjavík

How swiftly the solid bottom of one’s life can go. –John Haines, The Snow, the Stars, the Fire

Life as we live it is unaccompanied by signposts. –Holly Hickler, “A Teacher’s Viewpoint,” in Vivienne: The Life and Suicide of an Adolescent Girl

This life has been a test. If this had been an actual life, you would have received instructions on where to go and what to do. –Claire Danes, in My So-Called Life

The trick is to assume your life is going to work out. Of course, it never does, so you do the next best thing: you take it one disaster at a time. –Fisher Stevens, in Early Edition

I think depression and despair are reasonable reactions to the nature of life. Life has its ups and downs. It is unreliable and conditional and provisional. It can be, as we used to say in my youth, a real bummer. Failure, disease, death: standard life events. Is it any surprise if some of the time, some of us feel like hell? –Chase Twichell, “Toys in the Attic”

Life is not just a diurnal property of large interesting vertebrates; it is also nocturnal, anaerobic, cannibalistic, microscopic, digestive, fermentative: cooking away in the warm dark. Life is well maintained at a four-mile ocean depth, is waiting and sustained on a frozen rock wall, is clinging and nourished in hundred-degree desert temperatures. And there is a world of nature on the decay side, a world of beings who do rot and decay in the shade. –Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild

Once you stop pretending that everything’s shitty and you can’t wait to get out of it, which is the story I’d been telling myself for a while, then it gets more painful, not less. Telling yourself life is shit is like an anesthetic, and when you stop taking the Advil, then you really can tell how much it hurts, and where, and it’s not like that kind of pain does anyone a whole lot of good. –Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

… sometimes it’s moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. –ditto

There is a life which is magnificent, tortured, and full of tragedy. And then there’s work, which is well paid. For which you create a different, more distinct, tragedy-free, harmonious life. On paper. –Sergei Dovlatov, The Compromise

Life’s like an hourglass glued to the table. –Anna Nalick, “Breathe (2am)”

We begin to live when we have conceived life as a tragedy. –William Butler Yeats, in his autobiography

Living fully doesn’t necessarily mean that you cram your day full of activity or go climb Everest or become the next Mother Teresa. It could just mean taking pleasure in who you are at this moment, making full use of all of your senses. Just breathe. Stretch. Notice beauty and laughter. Feed yourself—figuratively and literally—because you’re hungry for life again and because, well, who doesn’t love to eat? –Mary D. Esselman and Elizabeth Ash Vélez, The Hell with Love: Poems to Mend a Broken Heart

I hadn’t gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it’s only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you’re time-traveling. In this life we grow backwards. –Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

She thought that a lifetime was just like a day of watching television. In the early hours there was a sequence—nursery programmes followed by school serials. After that it became a jumble—a comedy half-hour and then a drama full of sex or murder; a boring stretch that seemed to go on for ever in which people did nothing but talk nonsense; an interlude of romance; more mayhem, more boredom, then nothing. –Clare Boylan, Beloved Stranger

Life is just a dream on the way to death. –Mia Kirshner

There was nothing to erase the stink of being alive. –Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

I really haven’t had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. –Kurt Cobain

Life is so only-once, so single-chanceish! It all depends on your arranging and synchronizing it so that when opportunity knocks you’re right there waiting with your hand on the doorknob. –Sylvia Plath, journal, January 10, 1953

Life is messy. Wonderfully messy. Relish it. –Frédéric Fekkai

Oh, the wild joys of living! –Robert Browning, “Saul”

Life is just one damn thing after another. –Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams (Note: The quote has also been attributed to Frank Ward O’Malley)

It is not true that life is one damned thing after another—it is one damn thing over and over. –Edna St. Vincent Millay, in a letter, October 24, 1930

Life is an abnormal business. –Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros

There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country … Life is unfair. –John F. Kennedy

Life is one long struggle in the dark. –Lucretius, De Rerum Natura

The value in life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them; a man may live long yet live very little. –Michel de Montaigne, Essays

Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece. –Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

To burn with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. –Walter Pater, Studies in the History of The Renaissance

There must be more to life than having everything! –Maurice Sendak, Higglety Pigglety Pop!

Our life is what our thoughts make it. –Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

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. –Jean Anouilh, Time Remembered

It’s like every time Fate gets nauseous, my life is the bucket. –Joe Regalbuto, in Murphy Brown

So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me; for all is vanity and a striving after wind. –Eccles. 2.16-17

You don’t get to choose how you’re going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you’re going to live. Now. –Joan Baez

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life. –Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

There’s something I would like to understand. And I don’t think anyone can explain it ... There’s your life. You begin it, feeling that it’s something so precious and rare, so beautiful that it’s like a sacred treasure. Now it’s over, and it doesn’t make any difference to anyone, and it isn’t that they are indifferent, it’s just that they don’t know, they don’t know what it means, that treasure of mine, and there’s something about it that they should understand. I don’t understand it myself, but there’s something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it? What? –Ayn Rand, We the Living

Human life is mainly a process of filling in time until the arrival of death or Santa Claus. –Eric Berne, Games People Play

I wanted a perfect ending ... Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what is going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity. –Gilda Radner

Life is a swirling eddy of despair in an ever-blackening universe. –anonymous

Life is something to do when you can’t get to sleep. –Fran Leibowitz, Metropolitan Life

[Life:] You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave. –Quentin Crisp

Life was something unpleasant that happened to me on the way to the grave. –(?)

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse. –Joseph Brodsky

Please watch out for each other and love and forgive everybody. It’s a good life. Enjoy it. –Jim Henson

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways. –Stephen Vincent Benet

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, pee in it, and serve it to the people that piss you off. –Jack Handey

Life is like a B-Grade movie. You don’t want to leave in the middle, but you don’t want to see it again. –Ted Turner

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us. –Bill Watterson

Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom. –Arthur Schopenhauer

... not appreciating the weirdness of life is a punishment of its own. –Rachel Ellen Sherman

Human life begins on the other side of despair. –Jean-Paul Sartre, “Les Mouches”

Anyone who says he is not emotional is not getting what he should out of life. –Ezer Weizman

Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove. –Ashleigh Brilliant

Perhaps we are looking at this from a wrong perspective, this search for the truth, the meaning of life, the reason of God. We all have this mindset that the answers are so complex and so vast that it is almost impossible to comprehend. I think, on the contrary, that the answers are so simple; so simple that it is staring us straight in the face, screaming its lungs out, and yet we fail to notice it. We’re looking through a telescope, searching the stars for the answer, when the answer is actually a speck of dirt on the telescope’s lens. –Jason Q.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. –Henry David Thoreau

Live with intention. Walk to the edge. Listen hard. Practice wellness. Play with abandon. Laugh. Choose with no regret. Continue to learn. Appreciate your friends. Do what you love. Live as if this is all there is. –Mary Anne Hershey

These are the bad facts: Men have much easier lives than women. Men have the advantage. So do white people. So do rich people. So do beautiful people. These are the bad facts. You’re born, you take a look at yourself; if you’re a black woman instead of a white man your life is ten times harder. –Fran Lebowitz

Life does not cease to be funny when people die anymore than it ceases to be serious when people laugh. –George Bernard Shaw

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness, weakness. –Henry David Thoreau

Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination. –Christopher Isherwood

Life is one long process of getting tired. –Samuel Butler

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament. –George Santayana

Life is a predicament which precedes death. –Henry James

Human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery … –Alfred North Whitehead

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of life. –Cyril Connolly

Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of a dilemma. –HL Mencken

Life is a dead-end street. –ditto

Life is like an onion: you peel off layer after layer and then you find there is nothing in it. –James Gibbons Huneker

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. –Woody Allen, in Annie Hall

That’s essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly. –ditto

Life can little else supply
But a few good fucks and then we die.
–John Wilkes

Life is a Goddamned, stinking, treacherous game and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are bastards. –Theodore Dreiser

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. – Mahatma Gandhi

… begin to think multidimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life … to appreciate the fact that life is complex. –M. Scott Peck

The art of contentment is the recognition that the most satisfying and the most dependably refreshing experiences of life lie not in great things but in little. The rarity of happiness among those who achieved much is evidence that achievement is not in itself the assurance of a happy life. The great, like the humble, may have to find their satisfaction in the same plain things. –Edgar A. Collard

If you mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,
This is the best season of your life.
–Wu-Men

There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness. –(?)

Life is like a box of chocolates. It’s a cheap thoughtless perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable because all you ever get back is another box of chocolates, so you’re stuck with unidentifiable whipped mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there’s nothing left to eat. Sure, once in a while there’s a peanut butter cup or an English toffee, but they’re gone too fast and the taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts. If you’re desperate enough to eat that, all you have left is an empty box filled with useless brown paper wrappings. –(?)

The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives. –Albert Schweitzer

Life mocks me even in death. –Griffin Dunne, in An American Werewolf in London

Merely to exist is not enough. –Rabindranath Tagore

This business of living—it’s confusing, exhausting. –Ed Flanders, in St. Elsewhere

To live is to feel oneself lost. –Ortega Y. Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy. I can’t figure it out. What am I doing right? –Charles M. Schultz

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. –William James

What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death. –Dave Barry, on life

Is there life before death? –Belfast graffiti

I hate life, I hate death, and everything in between just doesn’t interest me. –Chris Rapier

Life is a terminal condition—whatever you do, you die eventually. –comment in Derdriu’s philosophy class [seen on Isca BBS]