Life Quotes

It is always consoling to think of suicide,it's what gets one through many a bad night.

~ Gillian Flynn

I killed four flies while waiting. Damn, death was everywhere. Man, bird, beast, reptile, rodent, insect, fish didn't have a chance. The fix was in. I didn't know what to do about it. I got depressed. You know, I see a boy at the supermarket, he's packing my groceries, then I see him sticking himself into his own grave along with the toilet paper, the beer and the chicken breasts.

~ Charles Bukowski

This is how it is in life and love. In life and love we are with people for a while, and then we join other people, people we have not met, and we walk with them, and we leave behind all the things we used to be. Sometimes we leave people behind too... This happens everyday. Everyday this happens and scarcely anybody cares.

~ Daniel Handler

Every time you take a step, even when you don't want to. . . . When it hurts, when it means you rub chins with death, or even if it means dying, that's good. Anything that moves ahead, wins. No chess game was ever won by the player who sat for a lifetime thinking over his next move.

~ Ray Bradbury

Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.

~ E.m. Forster

I see a brightportionunder the overhead lightthat shades intodarknessand then into darkerdarknessand I can't see beyond that.

~ Charles Bukowski

Life is a temporary condition, Henry. And it's uncertain. That's why you have to seize chances when you find them. Pursue what you want. Take risks. Live, love...all of it. Every last one of us is going to die, but if we don't live as we truly want, if we're not with the one we want to be with, we're dead already.

~ Martha Brockenbrough

The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish form our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in times of despair.

~ Bertrand Russell

Keep your words. This pain is no life. You only feel pain because you're alive, boy! the keeper thundered. This is the mystery of it. Life is lived on the ragged edge of the cliff. Fall off and you might die, but run from it and you are already dead!

~ Ted Dekker

Life and death- what paltry words, what tarnished bookends,what unjust summation for drawing breath one moment and failing to release it the next.

~ Rebecca Rasmussen

In my life Why do I give valuable time To people who don't care if I live or die ?

~ Morrissey

Our essence is change. We are movement. Being out of balance is life. Perfect balance. Stasis. That is death. Life yearns for perfection. Death is perfection.

~ Chris Boucher

And so I have to live. Because we live for more than just ourselves, Most of the time we live for others, keep putting one foot before the other, left and right, left and right, so that walking becomes a habit, just like breathing. Ina n out, left and right.

~ Thrity Umrigar

Failures plagued me. Things I had omitted or ignored, neglected. What I should have given and hadn’t. I felt the biting pang of every unfulfillment.

~ Richard Matheson

Each memory was brought to life before me and within me. I could not avoid them. Neither could I rationalize, explain away. I could only re-experience with total cognizance, unprotected by pretense. Self delusion was impossible, truth exposed in this blinding light. Nothing as I thought it had been. Nothing as I hoped it had been. Only as it had been.

~ Richard Matheson

War is being reminded that you are completely at the mercy of death at every moment, without the illusion that you are not. Without the distractions that make life worth living.

~ Francesca Lia Block

Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,But young men think it is, and we were young.

~ A.e. Housman

And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.

~ Anita Shreve

God waits only the separation of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward. Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over, and death is so certain an entrance to happiness -- to glory?

~ Charlotte Brontë

Tonight I want to stand on the side of a cliff and look down, dare the wind to gust and knock me off. Everyone thinks that falling to your death is the worst thing that can happen. But that’s a lie. The worst thing is to be alive for no reason.

~ Tammara Webber

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

~ T.s. Eliot

You’ve thrown down the gauntlet. You’ve brought my wrath down upon your house. Now, to prove that I exist I must kill you. As the child outlives the father, so must the character bury the author. If you are, in fact, my continuing author, then killing you will end my existence as well. Small loss. Such a life, as your puppet, is not worth living.But… If I destroy you and your dreck script, and I still exist… then my existence will be glorious, for I will become my own master.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

It can't be that life is so senseless and horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and senseless, why must I die and die in agony? There is something wrong!

~ Leo Tolstoy

I'm sure we all have dreams of leaving at some time in our lives, but when we reach the bottom, most of us go running home.

~ Deborah Curtis

When you go against the flow of nature and betray the spiritual laws existing within, there is, and always will be, a negative reaction. Those who try escaping life before fate shakes their hand, will forever be stuck on earth, chained to the place they so badly wanted to leave. What a complicated misery. I guarantee you it will be torture to be invisible and ignored by those you love when you can see them - but you are already dead for them to hear you utter another word. Talk about agony, more so, than remaining on this plane and continuing your spiritual cycle as it was written to be lived.

~ Suzy Kassem

Since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.

~ David Eagleman

In the end, living is defined by dying.

~ Bernard Beckett

If we lived for ever, what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love death - not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. . . . Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him. Behind the coffins and the skeletons that stay the vulgar mind lies something so immense that all that is great in us responds to it. Men of the world may recoil from the charnel-house that they will one day enter, but Love knows better. Death is his foe, but his peer, and in their age-long struggle the thews of Love have been strengthened, and his vision cleared, until there is no one who can stand against him.

~ E.m. Forster

I am seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death... . I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter--the Eternity they have entered--where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fulness.

~ Emily Brontë

In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.

~ Nicole Krauss

Quoting son, Noah Levine: Once you see what the heart really needs, it doesn’t matter if you’re going to live or die, the work is always the same. (25)

~ Stephen Levine

Anyone in this world can have the power of life and death over someone else. It's horrible, but true. All you need to do is take it. And once you have -- there is no going back. (The Killer's Cousin)

~ Nancy Werlin

When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute?

~ Dan Simmons

Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.

~ E.m. Forster

I am not ready to die,But I am learning to trust deathAs I have trusted life.I am movingToward a new freedom

~ May Sarton

Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

shot in the eyeshot in the brainshot in the assshot like a flower in the danceamazing how death wins hands downamazing how much credence is given to idiot forms oflifeamazing how laughter has been drowned outamazing how viciousness is such a constantI must soon declare my own war on their warI must hold to my last piece of groundI must protect the small space I have made that hasallowed me lifemy life not their deathmy death not their deaththis place, this time, nowI vow to the sunthat I will laugh the good laugh once againin the perfect place of meforever.their death not my life.

~ Charles Bukowski

What is the difference between a living thing and a dead thing? In the medical world, a clinical definition of death is a body that does not change. Change is life. Stagnation is death. If you don't change, you die. It's that simple. It's that scary.

~ Leonard Sweet

Why is it we have so little choice? We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated - defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Sill, to cease living is unacceptable.

~ Banana Yoshimoto

There is only one true wealth in all the universe--living time.

~ Frank Herbert