Quotes About Life (page 60)
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Mr L Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn't know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr L Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a...
Douglas Adams
It is not merely enough to love literature if one wishes to spend one's life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forever on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possiblity of learning a truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear.
Harlan Ellison
He believed that he must, that he could and would recover the good things, the happy things, the easy tranquil things of life. He had made mistakes, but he could overlook these. He had been a fool, but that could be forgiven. The time wasted--must be relinquished. What else could one do about it? Things were too complex, but they might be reduced to simplicity again. Recovery was possible.
Saul Bellow
You could pay Arthur Janov to teach you to scream about history, or you could learn prayer or a mantra, or you could write your life down and hope to make peace with it, write it down, or paint it, or turn it into improvisational theater, but that was the best you could probably do. You were stuck.
Rick Moody
I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally do, everything changes inside you, you can never be the same again. I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden, without the slightest flicker of a doubt, I understood that my life was my own, that it belonged to me and no one else.
I’m talking about freedom, Fogg. A sense of despair that becomes so great, so crushing, so...
Paul Auster
and God was there like an island I had not rowed to, still ignorant of Him, my arms, and my legs worked, and I grew, I grew, I wore rubies and bought tomatoesand now, in my middle age, about nineteen in the head I'd say, I am rowing, I am rowingthough the oarlocks stick and are rustyand the sea blinks and rollslike a worried eyebal, but I am rowing, I am rowing, though the wind pushes me backand I know that that island will not be perfect, it will have the flaws of life, the absurdities of...
Anne Sexton
Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal...
Graham Swift
As mankind grew obsessed with its hours, the sorrow of lost time became a permanent hole in the human heart. People fretted over missed chances, over inefficient days; they worried constantly about how long they would live, because counting life’s moments had led, inevitably, to counting them down. Soon, in every nation and in every language, time became the most precious commodity.
Mitch Albom
If he could have his way, Satan would distract us from our heritage. He would have us become involved in a million and one things in this life–probably none of which is very important in the long run–to keep us from concentrating on the things that are really important, particularly the reality that we are God’s children. He would like us to forget about home and family values. He’d like to keep us so busy with comparatively insignificant things that we don’t have time to make the effort to...
Marvin J. Ashton