Life Quotes

You're both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You're the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You're the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody's something, but you are also your you.

~ John Green

There's my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don't say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.

~ Samuel Beckett

Sometimes we tell our stories and sometimes our stories tell us.

~ Patti Callahan Henry

Who am I? I am the spine that the mountains hang upon! I am the tears that the rivers cry! I am the lungs that breathe the wind! I am the wolf that kills the stag, the hawk that kills the mouse, the spider that kills the fly! I am the stag, the mouse and the fly that are eaten! I am the snake of the world devouring its tail! I am everything untamed and untameable!

~ Patrick Ness

I'm not just a reader or a writer; I inhale written words like they're my oxygen. It's not a hobby. It's a passion. People intrigue me. Life intrigues me. I see a story behind every pair of eyes I meet, history in every voice. I'll see someone wearing a smile and wonder what put it there. Words allow me to immerse myself in a whole other world. I get to become a different person.

~ Nicola Haken

Stories have endings; that's why we tell them, for reassurance that there is meaning in our lives. But like a diagnosis, a story can become a prison, a straight road mapped out by the people who went before. Stories are not the truth.

~ Sarah Moss

Where, then, do we find the truth? We find it in the body, in the woods, in the water, in the soil. We find it in music, dance, and sometimes in poetry. We find it in a baby’s face, and in the adult’s face behind the mask. We find it in each other’s eyes, when we look. We find it in an embrace, which is, when we feel into it, being to being, an incredibly intimate act. We find it in laughter and sobs, and we find it in the voice behind the spoken word. We find it in fairy tales and myths, and the tales we tell, even if fictional. Sometimes embroidering a tale enlarges it as a vehicle for the truth. We find it in silence and stillness. We find it in pain and loss. We find it in birth and death.

~ Charles Eisenstein

I can't imagine a life without a story.

~ Banana Yoshimoto

The mountains themselves call us into greater stories.

~ Donald Miller

People still have the same story, the one where they get born and they do stuff and they die, but now the story means something different to what it meant before.

~ Neil Gaiman

Very well, you do so love rules! I shall make some up for you on the spot, so that my little moppet is not forced to wander the world in a soup of stories without laws. A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

How many beginnings can a story have, Daddy?As many as you can eat, my lamb. But only one ending. Or maybe it's the other way around: one beginning and a whole Easter basket of endings.Papa, don't be silly... A story has to start somewhere. And then it has to end somewhere. That's the whole point. That's how it is in real life.But that's not how it is in real life, Rinny. Real life is all beginnings. Days, weeks, children, journeys, marriages, inventions. Even a murder is the beginning of a criminal. Perhaps even a spree. Everything is prologue. Every story has a stutter. It just keeps starting and starting until you decide to shut the camera off. Half the time you don't even realize that what you're choosing for breakfast is the beginning of a story that won't pan out till you're sixty and staring at the pastry that made you a widower. No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story. Or never even get one so much as half-begun.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

They've all got stories, Jess thought. I need to know them. Best of all, he could know them. He could learn anything here. It felt like limitless possibilities.

~ Rachel Caine

Life isn’t really linear. Although it’s generally perceived that way. The stories we tell are woven like snakes around a divining rod. A center of time containing all that’s ever been told and heard. Remembered and forgotten. Lost and found. Our pasts, presents and futures are unwound, stretched flat, cut into pieces and held up with human arms.

~ Thomas Lloyd Qualls

Live as if they're going to tell stories about you.

~ Shari Arnold

In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.

~ Guillermo Del Toro

There are always two sides to a story.

~ Una Mccormack

Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page any more than they begin on the first page

~ Cornelia Funke

Fictions are realities we don't think of, that are happening to people we know nothing about.

~ Sanhita Baruah

How can life end in the middle of the story? Because life always does.

~ Linda Grant

My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.

~ Neil Gaiman

...stories don’t just make us matter to each other—maybe they’re also theonly way to the infinite mattering he’d been after for so long.

~ John Green

Stories are how we think. They are how we make meaning of life. Call them schemas, scripts, mental maps, ideas, metaphors, or narratives. Stories are how we inspire and motivate human beings. Great stories help us to understand our place in the world, create our identity, discover our purpose, form our character and define and teach human values.

~ Jeroninio Almeida

Why do bad things happen to good people?''Because it makes a good story.

~ Andrew Kaufman

I tried to convey to the boy how people’s lives are often altered by curved lines read slowly from paper, sand, or stone.

~ Simon Van Booy

The story you live is the ripple you leave.

~ Michele Jennae

For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are the selfsame tale and contain as well all within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

And there are really never endings, happy or otherwise.

~ Erin Morgenstern

Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.

~ Alain De Botton

And suddenly, as if her head had cleared, she was quite sure that wonderful things did indeed exist. Even if they’re only in my own mind, she thought, they’re there and worth fighting for. I mustn’t give in.

~ Diana Wynne Jones

You always look on the dark side of life. I believe in capturing the moment...Joy is so fleeting. You never know when it might be snatched away.

~ Susan Wiggs

...studies show that in general, optimists die ten years earlier than pessimists.I find that hard to believeOf course you do, you're an optimist. You have a misguided belief that things will go your way. You don't see the dangers till it's too late. Pessimists are more realistic. That seems like a sad way to govern your life.It's a safe way to govern your life.

~ Susin Nielsen

Some people are optimists. Some people are pessimists. I'm just a realist who believes that some things are worth fighting for.

~ C. Joybell C.

A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists. If death does take him, he is probably unaware of the fact; it amounts to no more for him than a shock or a spasm.

~ Marguerite Yourcenar

Always let your heart sing, no musical talent needed.

~ Benny Bellamacina

Optimism is a belief and I adapt belief as a way of life.

~ Fe-En-Dios

We each appear only one time in history. Whatever occurs in our life will never occur again. Our life is significant and worthy of living if we are brave, love fearlessly, and remain optimistic regardless of our earthly hardships.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Never go tapping into the lives of others like you know them and their story! Their story is not yours, tell yours, for that is all you know.

~ Auliq Ice

Life can be tough and harsh at times. That's what makes it great. Every day is a celebration of survival.

~ Jonathan Heatt

Yes, it will all end one day; but today is worth living.

~ Innocent Mwatsikesimbe