A Life Once Lived Quotes & Sayings

Once I had a shrink who said, "Your parents are the fuel you run on," because I was raised in the tyranny of good taste. If my parents hadn't taught me all that, I couldn't have made fun of it. So I thank them, and they were loving. It takes a long time to realize that they made me feel safe when I lived a life which was very not safe. — John Waters

For a year, Johnny lived the new, brutal truth that he was on his own.
But that's the way it was. What had been concrete one day proved sand the next; strength was illusion; faith meant shit. So what? So his once-bright world had devolved to cold, wet fog. That was life, the new order. Johnny had nothing to trust but himself, so that's the way he rolled - his path, his choices, and no looking back. — John Hart

The intense thereness of it-haecceity Sax had called it once, when John had asked him something about his religious beliefs-I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every moment. That's why I want to know what is this? what is this? what is this? Now, remembering Sax's odd word and his odd religion, John finally understood him; because he was feeling the thisness of the moment like a rock in his hand, and it felt as if his entire life had been lived only to get him to this moment. — Kim Stanley Robinson

A great Tamil poet, given to decadence and debauchery, once said that the story of his life could serve as an example to the youth on how one should
not live. Having lived, or rather, having sleepwalked for ten years through the desolate wastelands of depression, I survived to reach the other side. I believe that this validates my claim to write this book for you. — Indu Muralidharan

It was the uniform of a time and place, of a nearly extinct species - the belligerent middle-American redneck who had fought in Korea, come back with his faith unshaken, and then watched the 1960s unfold the way he might watch his house burn down. There had never been any Summer of Love for Arthur Schuler. He had no interest in Civil Rights, hippies or liberals - or Democrats for that matter. I heard him say once that it might have worked out very well if we had indeed brought all the planes back from Vietnam, just in time to napalm the Woodstock festival. But the man had lived. He had been an orphan of the Great Depression and seen the country and the world. He had made his way, been a barroom fighter and - he hinted - a womanizer at some distant point in the twentieth century, and had come away with an instinct for life, for the things that people do and their base and predictable motivations. We — Matthew Louis

The idea that one will die is more painful than dying, but less painful than the idea that another person is dead, that, becoming once more a still, plane surface after having engulfed a person, a reality extends, without even a ripple at the point of disappearance from which that person is excluded, in which there no longer exists any will, any knowledge, and from which it is as difficult to reascend to the idea that that person has lived as, from the still recent memory of his life, it is to think that he is comparable with the insubstantial images, the memories, left us by the characters in a novel we have been reading. — Marcel Proust

Once there was a crow, it flew from the field to the hill, from hedge to hedge, and lived its life. then it died and rotted away. -what's the sense in it? there just ISN'T any! — Maxim Gorky

Once in one's life, for one mortal moment, one must make a grab for immortality; if not, one has not lived. — Sylvester Stallone

Here are experiences which one cannot survive, after which one feels that there is no meaning left in anything. Once you have reached the limits of life, having lived to extremity all that is offered at those dangerous borders, the everyday gesture and the usual aspiration lose their seductive charm. If you go on living, you do so only through your capacity for objectification, your ability to free yourself, in writing, from the infinite strain. Creativity is a temporary salvation from the claws of death — Emil Cioran

Home. It is the place where once we lived and laughed, where we grew up with the assumption that all would be well, where we met our first love, where life stretched endlessly ahead. This is the place that now becomes a desert of the heart. — Jack McDevitt

And all at once he saw before him a precipice, as it were without bottom. He was a patrician, a military tribune, a powerful man; but above every power of that world to which he belonged was a madman whose will and malignity it was impossible to foresee. Only such people as the Christians might cease to reckon with Nero or fear him, people for whom this whole world, with its separations and sufferings, was as nothing; people for whom death itself was as nothing. All others had to tremble before him. The terrors of the time in which they lived showed themselves to Vinicius in all their monstrous extent ... Vinicius felt, for the first time in life, that either the world must change and be transformed, or life would become impossible altogether. He understood also this, which a moment before had been dark to him, that in such times only Christians could be happy. — Henryk Sienkiewicz

It felt like he had lived ten lives since he had first stepped out into the streets, and each life seemed to be more draining than the next. It was a weariness that penetrated his very bones and made him more desperate than ever for the freedom he had once been offered. — A.M. Daily

When you lived a certain kind of life, pushed along by good colleges and internships and jobs and a shared, tranquil neighborhood and a world of privilege in which your child overlapped, you were inevitably part of a long chain of connections. All of them could help one another; the possibilities were there if they wanted them, though many of them didn't seem to want them anymore, or maybe they had somehow forgotten they had once wanted them. — Meg Wolitzer

Once is a man's life, for one mortal moment, he must make a grab for immorality; if not, he has not lived. — Sylvester Stallone

When I think of the years when I had no faith, what I am struck by, first of all, is how little this lack disrupted my conscious life. I lived not without God, nor wish his absence, but in a mild abeyance of belief, drifting through the days on a tide of tiny vanities - a publication, a flirtation, a strong case made for some weak nihilism - nights all adagios and alcohol as my mind tore luxuriously into itself. I can see now how deeply God's absence affected my unconscious life, how under me always there was this long fall that pride and fear and self-live at once protected me from and subjected me to. Was the fall into belief or into unbelief? Both. For if grace woke me to God's presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe. — Christian Wiman

Powder snow skiing is not fun. It is life, fully lived, life lived in a blaze of reality. What we experience in powder is the original human self, which lies deeply inside each of us, still undamaged in spite of what our present culture tries to do to us. Once experienced, this kind of living is recognized as the only way to live - fully aware of the earth and the sky and the gods and you, the mortal, playing among them. — Dolores LaChapelle

An hour without you Is like ages but a minute with you is like my life lived for once and all — Shobhit Agarwal

When you've lived as long as I have, you tend to think you've heard
everything, that there's nothing left that can shock you anymore.
You grow a little complacent about your so-called knowledge of the
world, and then, every once in a while, something comes along that
jolts you out of your smug cocoon of superiority, that reminds you all
over again that you don't understand the first thing about life. — Paul Auster

Each of us has to blaze our own trail and figure out the best path for our own lives. Every so often, I think it's important to stop and look around to see that we're still on the trail that we once embarked upon some time ago. If somewhere along along the way we look up and the trailhead is nowhere to be found and we seem to have gone painfully off track - that's okay too. Every single day we have a choice to get back on track and when it's all said and done, it's abundantly clear that there is more than one way to get to the finish line of a life well lived. — Chris Hill

What, indeed, had I done in all my thirty years of conscious life? Not only had I failed to live my life for the sake of all, but I had not even lived it for myself. I had lived as a parasite, and once I asked myself why I had lived, the answer I received was: for nothing. — Leo Tolstoy

There will always be enemies in life, and sometimes you can be your own worst enemy. The life I once lived was fueled with pain and hate. If I can give you two pieces of advice, it would be to not live in fear or anger, and to find the love of a good woman who accepts you for your faults, and because of her, you aspire to be a noble man who is worthy of love. — Dannika Dark

People were like dogs and this was why they took pity on them
dogs alone all the hours of their days and always waiting. Always waiting for company. Dogs who, for all of their devotion, knew only the love of one or two or three people from the beginning of their lives till the end
dogs who, once those one or two had dwindled and vanished from the rooms they lived in, were never to be known again.
You passed like a dog through those empty houses, you passed through empty rooms ... there was always the possibility of companionship but rarely the real event. For most of the hours of your life no one knew or observed you at all. You did what you thought you had to; you went on eating, sleeping, raising your voice at intruders out of a sense of duty. But all the while you were hoping, faithfully but with no evidence, that it turned out, in the end, you were a prince among men. — Lydia Millet

Once more the legend flourished that the number of years lived constitutes some kind of temperamental bond, so that people of the same age are many minds with but a single thought, bearing one to another a close resemblance. The young were commented on as if they were some new and just discovered species of animal life, with special qualities and habits which repaid investigation. — Rose Macaulay

I once spent an entire night in a hotel in New York looking across the way into someone's apartment where nothing was happening but daily life, a phone call, television watching, staring into the fridge. Seeing how those strangers lived over that small distance and in absolute silence moved me deeply. — Lauren Groff

The saint, we are told,
once lived a life of sin -
nothing spectacular, of course,
just the usual things. — Nissim Ezekiel

Evangelicals tend to be "crucicentric," which means "centered on the cross." And we fail to see the comprehensive nature of Christ's work. As the early Christian bishop Irenaeus once argued, Christ moved through all stages of human life and experience and in this sense, recapitulated the life lived by humans. His holy obedience at every stage of human life created the possibility of a perfect humanity which he presented to the Father in his ascension. In his saving work, Jesus then became the author of a restored human race, something the world had never seen before. — Gary M. Burge

Once you've lived a little you will find that whatever you send out into the world comes back to you in one way or another. It may be today, tomorrow, or years from now, but it happens; usually when you least expect it, usually in a form that's pretty different from the original. Those coincidental moments that change your life seem random at the time but I don't think they are. At least that's how it's worked out in my life. And I know I'm not the only one. — Slash

In one life only had the fighting, the healing, the teaching, the praying, and the suffering held equal and perfect place, and that life could never on earth be lived again. For some dying men, he thought, there would have been comfort in the old belief that a soul comes back to earth again and again, the fighter returning to pray and the teacher to heal. Once he had half believed that himself, but now he could not. Once only had the perfect life been focused in a human body. He had not returned. Why should we? The Word now taught and healed, fought and suffered, through the yielded wills of other men. — Elizabeth Goudge

I went to a haunted house once, and I don't do well in situations like that, and I've lived my entire life not being scared or anything. — Katie Chang

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You can see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. I mean, look at it, Q: look at all those culs-de-sac, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters. — John Green

I used to be terrified of death. My grandfather was terminal in the hospital across from my high school, yet I never visited him. That fact still haunts me to this day. Years later, my arms were around my grandmother as she struggled with her last breaths. I told her we were with her and everything was going to be okay. She died as I held her tightly and I felt her body lose life. It was the most peaceful moment I ever experienced, and I felt joy for her. It was an emotional, intellectual, and spiritual moment for me. I wasn't afraid anymore ... One day years later I received the phone call every parent dreads. My daughter was in a serious automobile accident. As I raced to her I prepared myself for the news she had died. Once again, I felt an unexpected and profound emotion. She lived, but in the face of that horrifying time there was a strange overall calm. I realized, no matter what, everything was going to be okay. I remembered I wasn't afraid anymore. — John K. Brown

They were not unfortunate girls who, as outcasts or in the belief that they were cast out by society, grieved wholesomely and intensely and, once in a while at times when the heart was too full, ventilated it in hate or forgiveness. No visible change took place in them; they lived in the accustomed context, were respected as always, and yet they were changed, almost unaccountably to themselves and incomprehensibly to others. Their lives were not cracked or broken, as others' were, but were bent into themselves; lost to others, they futilely sought to find themselves. — Soren Kierkegaard

Once upon a time there was a hazel-eyed boy with dimples. I called him Khalil. The world called him a thug.
He lived, but not nearly long enough, and for the rest of my life I'll remember how he died.
Fairy tale? No. But I'm not giving up on a better ending. — Angie Thomas

You're 82 years old. You've shrunk six centimetres, you only weigh 45 kilos yet you're still beautiful, graceful and desirable. We've lived together now for 58 years and I love you more than ever. I once more feel a gnawing emptiness in the hollow of my chest that is only filled when your body is pressed next to mine. — Andre Gorz

What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain? Well, there was all this to reflect upon, while I endured a special kind of remorse: a hurt inflicted at long last on one who always thought he knew how to avoid being hurt - and inflicted for precisely that reason. — Julian Barnes

There are no guarantees with finally being honest and coming clean with people. Sometimes you don't win love back. Sometimes you lose the love you had. Sometimes you crush people that cared. Sometimes you break apart families. Sometimes you lose your career. Sometimes you lose your way of life. Sometimes you end up worse off than you were before. However, you walk away with a heart free from lies, regret and you have closure. Within time, you find yourself in a life that is far from the prison you once lived in. This type of freedom is the scariest road you will ever travel. However, it is the road God will never let you travel alone. — Shannon L. Alder

Because I'd lived through adversity once before, what I learned about myself was like a reminder of something I'd once known but had nearly forgotten-namely, that beneath the elegant clothing, and the accomplished dancing, and the clever conversation, my life had no complexity at all, but was as simple as a stone falling toward the ground. My whole purpose in everything during the past ten years had been to win the affections of the Chairman. — Arthur Golden

Fame can take a toll on your personal life. Half of us were in short-lived marriages or not married at all. When you are doing something you love so much that you once did for free, and then someone pays you to do it, it's like a blessing. But you have to be prepared for it. — Big Bank Hank

Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.
This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome. — Vladimir Nabokov

When you're working with wood, every stroke of the tool dulls the edge just a little. Once, in my last year at the violin-making school, I had been passing through the workshop when I overheard one of the younger students ask the instructor how it was that his tools stayed sharp so much longer than ours. "I use them less," he said, looking out the window, which was where he addressed his replies to obvious questions. It took him two cuts to get where we took fifty. Art didn't need to cut a hundred times to get where he wanted to be. He lived the life he wanted to live the first time around. — James N McKean

To my surprise, the more I searched about Qi Xiangfu, the more I found of a life lived partly online. He once wrote a short memoir in which he described himself in the third person, with the formality usually reserved for China's most famous writers. — Evan Osnos

There are moments in one's life which are like frontier posts marking the completion of a period but at the same time clearly indicating a new direction. At such a moment of transition we feel compelled to view the past and the present with the eagle eye of thought in order to become conscious of our real position. [ ... ] At such moments, however, a person becomes lyrical, for every metamorphosis is partly a swan song, partly the overture to a great new poem, which endeavors to achieve a stable form in brilliant colors that still merge into one another. Nevertheless, we should like to erect a memorial to what we have once lived through in order that this experience may regain in our emotions the place it has lost in our actions. — Karl Marx

A spot whereon the founders lived and died
Seemed once more dear than life; ancestral trees,
Or gardens rich in memory glorified
Marriages, alliances, and families,
And every bride's ambition satisfied. — William Butler Yeats

Once upon a time, there was a boy who learned to read at the age of 5. This changed his life. Owing to the adventure tales he read, he discovered a way to escape from the poor house, the poor country, and the poor reality in which he lived. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

My life is over.
My one forever love has
been snatched away,
condemned by my own
father's rules to die,
just because he loved me.

I am without a home,
without a single person to love.
And after having
discovered love, lived for a short
while surrounded by love,
that is to much to bear.

I am a pariah, at church,
at school. The few people
I once called friends have
betrayed me and caused
the death of my husband,
our innocent child.

And so they should die too.
All of them. Dad. Bishop
Crandall. Trevor, Becca, Emily.
With the pull of a 10mm hair
trigger, their lives will end at sacrament meeting.
Such lovely irony!

And when I finish there,
I'll hide in the desert,
reload, and go in search
of Carmen and Tiffany,
who started the rumors.
And Derek, just because. — Ellen Hopkins

When I first took this job at the factory it was not my intention to work there very long, for I once possessed higher hopes for my life, although the exact nature of these hopes remained rather vague in my youthful mind. While the work was not arduous, and my fellow workers congenial enough, I did not imagine myself standing forever at my designated assembly block, fitting together pieces of metal into other pieces of metal, with a few interruptions throughout that day for breaks that were supposed to refresh our minds from the tedium of our work or for meal breaks to allow us to nourish our bodies. Somehow it never occurred to me that the nearby town where I and the others at the factory lived, travelling to and from our jobs along the same fog-strewn road, held no higher opportunities for me or anyone else, which no doubt accounts for the vagueness, the wispy insubstantiality, of my youthful hopes. — Thomas Ligotti

In his essay,Agastya had said that his real ambition was to be a domesticated male stray dog because they lived the best life.They were assured of food,and because they were stray they didn't have to guard a house or beg or shake paws or fetch trifles or be clean or anything similarly meaningless to earn their food.They were servile and sycophantic when hungry;once fed,and before sleep,they wagged their tails perfunctorily whenever their hosts passes,as an investment for future meals.A stray dog was free,he slept a lot,barked unexpectedly and only when he wanted to,and got a lot of sex. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

Between one heartbeat and the next, a man can dream his entire life; tomorrow will open up in front of him and yesterday will retreat into time's abyss. There is no better place for personal memories than obscurity. Once lived, the past has very little value. And yet we carry its lifeless body into all future moments, allowing it to crush us with its weight, to identify us, and to speak for us. Even the most capable adults seem reluctant to make a decision without first consulting the past - the corpse - and listening to its endless rebukes. A wise man will ignore such counsel and observe the world from an infinite perspective. — Miguel Ruiz

She was fast approaching thirty, and with that impending birthday the way she thought of her own life was beginning to change. When she was twenty, she thought of people in their thirties as, well, old: after all, they had lived as long as she had and half as long again, and so they must have been tired, with the beginnings of aches in their bones and the first intimations of their own mortality.

But the peculiar horror of growing older was not what she expected. In fact, she felt the same age as she had eight years ago, and twenty-eight years of life had managed to compress themselves into a life-span that once comfortably held twenty. It wasn't that she was getting older, but that the years were getting shorter, and were therefore more precious. You had to use them sparingly. — Dexter Palmer

Once upon a time, thirty thousand years ago, there lived a little boy in the Rhine valley. He was a tiny part of nature, a tiny ripple on an endless sea. You too. Sophie, you too are living a tiny part of nature's life. There is no difference between you and that boy.'
'Except that I'm alive now.'
'Yes, but that is precisely what I wanted you to try and imagine. Who will you be in thirty thousand years? — Jostein Gaarder

Gansey turned the key. The engine turned over once, paused for the briefest of moments - and then roared to deafening life. The Camaro lived to fight another day. The radio was even working, playing the Stevie Nicks song that always sounded to Gansey like it was about a one-winged dove. — Maggie Stiefvater

She was a friendly creature, and lived a life so really isolated from any ordinary companionship that her simple little talks with Jane and Mrs. Cupp were a pleasure to her. The Cupps were neither gossiping nor intrusive, and she felt as if they were her friends. Once when she had been ill for a week she remembered suddenly realising that — Frances Hodgson Burnett

It was as simple as that. Once he had yearned for choice. then, when he had had a choice, he had made the wrong one: the choice to leave. And now he was starving.
But if he had stayed ...
His thoughts continued. If he had stayed, he would have starved in other ways. He would have lived a life hungry for feelings, for color, for love. — Lois Lowry

. . . death isn't anything I need to be afraid of. I'm not a perfect man. But I think I'm a good man. I've lived a hell of a life, even with all the heartache. Millie told me once that the ability to devastate is what makes a song beautiful. Maybe that's what makes life beautiful too. The ability to devastate. Maybe that's how we know we've lived. How we know we've truly loved."

"The ability to devastate," I repeated. And my voice broke. If that wasn't a perfect description of the agony of love, I didn't know what was. — Amy Harmon

It was one of the secret opinions, such as we all have, of Peter Brench, that his main success in life would have consisted in his never having committed himself about the work, as it was called, of his friend Morgan Mallow.
This was a subject on which it was, to the best of his belief, impossible with veracity to quote him, and it was nowhere on record that he had, in the connexion, on any occasion and in any embarrassment, either lied or spoken the truth. Such a triumph had its honour even for a man of other triumphs
a man who had reached fifty, who had escaped marriage, who had lived within his means, who had been in love with Mrs Mallow for years without breathing it, and who, last but not least, had judged himself once for all. — Henry James

What is the perfect amount of possessions? I think that most people don't know. If you have lived in Japan or the United States all your life, you have almost certainly been surrounded by far more than you need. This makes it hard for many people to imagine how much they need to live comfortably. As you reduce your belongings through the process of tidying, you will come to a point where you suddenly know how much is just right for you. You will feel it as clearly as if something has clicked inside your head and said, "Ah! This is just the amount I need to live comfortably. This is all I need to be happy. I don't need anything more." The satisfaction that envelops your whole being at that point is palpable. I call this the "just-right click point." Interestingly, once you have passed this point, you'll find that the amount you own never increases. And that is precisely why you will never rebound. — Marie Kondo

My biography of Frank Sinatra is not paean to his music but rather an illumination of the man behind the music, who once described himself as 'an 18-karat manic-depressive who lived a life of violent emotional contradictions with an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as happiness.' — Kitty Kelley

The young man, who does not know the future, sees life as a kind of epic adventure, an Odyssey through strange seas and unknown islands, where he will test and prove his powers, and thereby discover his immortality. The man of middle years, who has lived the future that he once dreamed, sees life as a tragedy; for he has learned that his power, however great, will not prevail against those forces of accident and nature to which he gives the names of gods, and has learned that he is mortal. But the man of age, if he plays his assigned role properly, must see life as a comedy. For his triumphs and his failures merge, and one is no more the occasion for pride or shame than the other; and he is neither the hero who proves himself against those forces, nor the protagonist who is destroyed by them. Like any poor, pitiable shell of an actor, he comes to see that he has played so many parts that there no longer is himself. — John Edward Williams

I've spent my entire life listening to people tell me why I can't be loved and how I'm nothing but a worthless piece of shit. I always told myself that I didn't care, that I didn't need anyone else. It was a lie, you know. I do care and I want Kiara. If it costs me my life to be with her, it doesn't matter. I've already lived past my prime, anyway. I get up every morning with more pain in my joints than the day before. If I have to die, I'd rather die knowing someone cared about me, just once. Is that really too much to ask? (Nykyrian)
For us? Yes. It is. We are the gutter and the gutter is all we'll ever be. Don't reach out for the stars. They'll burn you until there's nothing left. (Syn)
Then let me burn. (Nykyrian) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

No prophet or apostle has lived a celibate life is what I'd like to tell her. No one who's ever told me celibacy is a viable option has ever been celibate. They don't even use the word. They say 'abstinent,' which implies there will be an end. They don't consider what my life will be like, if I never marry. Which is likely, given who I am, and the ways I'm different. People stand at the pulpit, or they come to my house, and tell me not to need what every human needs. Afterward, they go home and undress. They lie down next to the person they love most, or once did. — Nicole Hardy

I believed that one person owes a duty to another with no payment for it in return. I believed that it was my duty to love a woman who gave me nothing, who betrayed everything I lived for, who demanded her happiness at the price of mine. I believed that love is some static gift which, once granted, need no longer be deserved - just as they believe that wealth is a static possession which can be seized and held without further effort. I believed that love is a gratuity, not a reward to be earned just as they believe it is their right to demand an unearned wealth. And just as they believe that their need is a claim on my energy, so I believed that her unhappiness was a claim on my life. For the sake of pity, not justice, I — Ayn Rand

Once - twice - you gave me the chance to escape from my life, and I refused it: refused it because I was a coward. Afterward I saw my mistake - I saw I could never be happy with what had contented me before. But it was too late: you had judged me - I understood. It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I have lived on - don't take it from me now! — Edith Wharton

He had the aloofness of manner you often find in those who have lived much alone in unfrequented places ... they seem always to hold something back. They have a life in themselves that they keep apart ... this hidden life is the only one that signifies to them. And no and then their eyes betray the weariness with the social round into which hazard or the fear of seeming odd has for a moment forced them. They seem then to long for the monotonous solitude of some place of their predilection where they can be once more alone with the reality they have found. — W. Somerset Maugham

I live in New York City. I could never live anywhere else. The events of September 11 forced me to confront the fact that no matter what, I live here and always will. One of my favorite things about New York is that you can pick up the phone and order anything and someone will deliver it to you. Once I lived for a year in another city, and almost every waking hour of my life was spent going to stores, buying things, loading them into the car, bringing them home, unloading them, and carrying them into the house. How anyone gets anything done in these places is a mystery to me. — Nora Ephron

What to keep of all these reels of film, what to throw away? If we could only take 1 memory on our journey, what would we choose? At the expense of what or whom? And most importantly, how to choose among all these shadows, all these spectres, all these titans? Who are we, when all is said and done? Are we the people we once were or the people we wish we had been? Are we the pain we caused others or the pain we suffered at the hands of others? The encounters we missed or those fortuitous meetings that changed the course of our destiny? Our time behind the scenes that saved us form our vanity or the moment in the limelight that warmed us? We are all of these things, we are the whole life that we have lived, its highs and lows, its fortunes and its hardships, we are the sum of the ghosts that haunt us ... we are a host of characters in one, so convincing in every role we played that it is impossible for us to tell who we really were, who we have become, who we will be. — Yasmina Khadra

The truth of living is proved not by the inevitability of death but by the wonder that we lived at all. Remembering lives from the past ratifies that truth, more and more so the older we get. When I was growing up, my father told me once, "Do by look for happiness; life itself is happiness." It took me years to understand what he meant. The value of a life lived; the sheer value of living. — Nina Sankovitch

Generations of British writers would look up to Roget as a kindred soul who could offer both emotional as well as intellectual sustenance. In the stage directions to Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie includes an homage to Roget: The night nursery of the Darling family, which is the scene of our opening Act, is at the top of a rather depressed street in Bloomsbury. We might have a right to place it where we will, and the reason Bloomsbury is chosen is that Mr. Roget once lived there. So did we in the days when his Thesaurus was our only companion in London; and we whom he has helped to wend our way through life have always wanted to pay him a little compliment. For Barrie, Roget's masterpiece was synonymous with virtue itself. To describe the one saving grace of the play's villain, Captain Hook, Barrie adds, "The man is not wholly evil--he has a Thesaurus in his cabin. — Joshua Kendall

It's true this world our breathing laboured
inspires nothing more than obvious disgust
a desire to flee without our share
and no longer read the headlines
we long to return to our ancestral home
where our forebears once lived under an angel's wing
we long to find that strange morality
which sanctified life to the end
we crave something like loyalty
like the embrace of mild addictions
something that transcends yet contains life
we cannot live far from eternity — Michel Houellebecq

I don't like to change things too much. I think pretty hard about things before I jump in, and once I do, I feel, 'All right, I don't want to waste the energy of buying, selling this, going on Consumer Reports, test driving, buying, selling a house.' I feel life is to be lived. — Greg Fitzsimmons

Millie told me once that the ability to devastate is what makes a song beautiful. Maybe that's what makes life beautiful too. The ability to devastate. Maybe that's how we know we've lived. How we know we've truly loved. — Amy Harmon

She was in that highly-wrought state when the reasoning powers act with great rapidity: the state a man is in before a battle or a struggle, in danger, and at the decisive moments of life - those moments when a man shows once and for all what he is worth, that his past was not lived in vain but was a preparation for these moments. — Leo Tolstoy

Once there was a little old lady who lived next-door. I was eleven when I decided to kill her. But I didn't. As an eleven-year-old I was shocked, upset and angry enough to take the life of the frail-looking, white-haired woman, but I lacked the ingenuity and resolve to put a plan into action. It's easy to want to kill someone but hard to actually do it. Especially when you're a kid. That's why I waited until I was eighteen. — G.H. Finn

Because they were young. Because one is young only once in a life lived only once. Because recklessness is the only fist to throw at nothingness. How much aliveness can one bear? — Jonathan Safran Foer

At least once every human should have to run for his life, to teach him that milk does not come from supermarkets, that safety does not come from policemen, that 'news' is not something that happens to other people. He might learn how his ancestors lived and that he himself is no different
in the crunch his life depends on his agility, alertness, and personal resourcefulness. — Robert A. Heinlein

I once saw, on a flower pot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to build a remembered field. I have lived to see this episode repeated in a thousand guises, and since I have spent a large portion of my life in the shade of a nonexistent tree I think I am entitled to speak for the field mouse. — Loren Eiseley

We can put it this way: the man who has faith is the man who is no longer looking at himself and no longer looking to himself. He no longer looks at anything he once was. He does not look at what he is now. He does not even look at what he hopes to be as the result of his own efforts. He looks entirely to the Lord Jesus Christ and His finished work, and rests on that alone. He has ceased to say, "Ah yes, I used to commit terrible sins but I have done this and that." He stops saying that. If he goes on saying that, he has not got faith. Faith speaks in an entirely different manner and makes a man say, "Yes I have sinned grievously, I have lived a life of sin, yet I know that I am a child of God because I am not resting on any righteousness of my own; my righteousness is in Jesus Christ and God has put that to my account. — D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Though I've lived in the rural West most of my life, I never once fell in love with a horse. Not once. Neither end. — Edward Abbey

Racing takes so much determination, guts, and sacrifice to be on top. I once craved, lived, and breathed racing. I can honestly say now, I'm ready to slow down and enjoy my life. Maybe I'll cut loose and have a cheeseburger or some pizza. Those types of indulgencies are not allowed when you constantly have to monitor your weight. — Chantal Sutherland

Bathed in light, submerged in sound and rapt in feeling, the sentient body, at once both perceiver and producer, traces the paths of the world's becoming in the very course of contributing to its ongoing renewal. Here, surely, lies the essence of what it means to dwell. It is, literally to be embarked upon a movement along a way of life. The perceiver-producer is thus a wayfarer, and the mode of production is itself a trail blazed or a path followed. Along such paths, lives are lived, skills developed, observations made and understandings grown. But if this is so, then we can no longer suppose that dwelling is emplaced in quite the way Heidegger imagined, in an opening akin to a clearing in the forest. To be, I would now say, is not to be in place but to be along paths. The path, and not the place, is the primary condition of being, or rather of becoming. — Tim Ingold

Bakersville was never going to be the same. She'd been to other small towns where the residents all thought serial killers looked like monsters, that no member of their community could hide such dark desires. Once upon a time, she'd lived in one.
And the monster there had ripped her life apart. — Elizabeth Heiter

It must be dawn, and the last breath went out of this body on the table - how long before? Irretrievably gone from this world, as dead as though she had lived a thousand years ago. Men have cut the isthmus of Panama and joined the two oceans; they have bored tunnels that run below rivers; built aluminum planes that fly from Frisco to Manila; sent music over the air and photographs over wires; but never, when the heartbeat of their own kind has once stopped, never when the spark of life has fled, have they been able to reanimate the mortal clay with that commonest yet most mysterious of all processes; the vital force. And this man thinks he can - this man alone, out of all the world's teeming billions! ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

Once upon a time, I thought faeries lived only in books, old folktales, and the past. That was before they burst upon my life as vibrant, luminous beings, permeating my art and my everyday existence, causing glorious havoc. — Brian Froud

I thought I understood the story very well, because I've lived with it for so long. But movies change and take on a life of their own once they start to be made, and you have to keep your eye on the real ball, not the ball that's in your head. — Andrew McCarthy

Only yesterday mankind lived in fear of the scourges of smallpox, cholera and plague that once swept nations before them. Now our major concern is no longer with the disease organisms that once were omnipresent; sanitation, better living conditions, and new drugs have given us a high degree of control over infectious disease. Today we are concerned with a different kind of hazard that lurks in our environment-a hazard we ourselves have introduced into our world as our modern way of life has evolved. — Rachel Carson

This momentary bridge. The wonder of a shared memory, returned. Of a place once theirs and a life that had already been lived. — Paul Yoon

A city finds its life through the humans who inhabit it. When they go, what is truly left? Just silent stones, witnesses to the history but mute in its telling, remaining thus while slowly turning to rubble. It saddens me that life's moments are thus lost, that one cannot experience the past in the same rich vibrancy as the present. You live the moments and then relegate them to memory, now just two-dimensional shadows, pictures without depth, stripped of their purest emotion, their tactile connections no longer accessible. You try to recall, but can bring back only a fraction of the event lived. The rest is gone, never to be as full and complete as it was in that one place at that one time. That was what I thought as I studied these stone remains; that all the tangible things experienced here abide somewhere in time, but can never again be wholly re-animated, now just ghosts imbedded in the crumbling walls and in the fading memories of those who once lived here. — Michael Puttonen

Gods are boring creatures, Bet. Most are nosthing more than spoiled children with powers they never hesitate to use against those weaker. And while your father can be juvenile at times, there is a danger to him. He understands his power ans he's fierce with it. More than that, he doesn't prey on those weaker, he only attacks those who are stronger/ That was what dreq me to him and why i agreed tp be the mother of his daugher. His strength, and the fact that he never once did he use it against me. Your father is like having a lion for a pet. You know that it's a creature of utter and supreme violence whose mere nature and talent is murder, and yet it lies down at your side and purrs for your touch alone. There is nothing more titillating.
But more than that was hpw you father made me feel. He awoke something inside me that had never lived before. He breathed life into my soul and I was a better person for having known him — Sherrilyn Kenyon

To confer the gift of drawing, we must create an eye that sees, a hand that obeys, a soul that feels; and in this task, the whole life must cooperate. In this sense, life itself is the only preparation for drawing. Once we have lived, the inner spark of vision does the rest. — Maria Montessori

this one is a matter of personal testimony; I could put together a whole volume of tales I've been told along the lines of "I used to be an atheist, and I was [strung out on drugs] [cruel to my family] [divorcing my wife] [etc.], but then I found Jesus and became a new man of high character and deep happiness, therefore Jesus was real." The entire churchgoing people of America must once have been raving angry atheist hedonists in broken relationships - which suggests that at an earlier time in our civic life, the parties were much more fun and the libertines far more common. Unfortunately, I've never been able to identify this magical period in recent history, even though I've lived through a few generations now. Yet all the Christians today seem to be citing this mythical past of ubiquitous godlessness. I really regret that I missed it all. Having — P.Z. Myers

Womanhood is a wonderful thing. In womankind we find the mothers of the race.There is no man so great, nor none sunk so low, but once he lay a helpless, innocent babe in a woman's arms and was dependent on her love and care for his existence. It is woman who rocks the cradle of the world and holds the first affections of mankind. She possesses a power beyond that of a king on his throne.
... Womanhood stands for all that is pure and clean and noble. She who does not make the world better for having lived in it has failed to be all that a woman should be. — Mabel Hale

The Dream Lover is a historical novel at once expansively researched yet intimately imagined. George Sand may be the ultimate Berg heroine. 'A life not lived in truth,' Berg writes, 'is a life forfeited.' In this latest work, Elizabeth Berg has poured her own great gifts and her own great heart into the story of a woman determined to refuse any such forfeiture, no matter the cost. — Leah Hager Cohen

Her husband once said that he believed some sort of mathematical equation could be applied to life - since the longer you lived, the greater its seeming velocity. She always attributed this to familiarity. If you kept the same habits - and if you lived in the same place, worked in the same place - then you no longer spent a lot of time noticing. Noticing things - and trying to make sense of them - is what makes time remarkable. Otherwise, life blurs by, as it does now, so that she has difficulty keeping track of time at all, one day evaporating into the next. — Benjamin Percy

The sensation was part of the general strangeness that made him feel like a man waking from a long sleep to find himself in an unknown country among people of alien tongue. We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours. Of the points in his wife's character not in direct contact with his own, Glennard now discerned his ignorance; and the baffling sense of her remoteness was intensified by the discovery that, in one way, she was closer to him than ever before. As one may live for years in happy unconsciousness of the possession of a sensitive nerve, he had lived beside his wife unaware that her individuality had become a part of the texture of his life, ineradicable as some growth on a vital organ; and he now felt himself at once incapable of forecasting her judgment and powerless to evade its effects. — Edith Wharton

And soon all the people who had accompanied me through life would be gone, too, and then even the people who had known us, and no one would remain on earth who had ever seen us, and those descended from us perhaps would know stories about us, perhaps once in a while they would pass by buildings where where we had lived and they would mention that we had lived there. And then the stories would fade, and our graves would go untended, and no one would guess what it had been like to wake before dawn in our breath-warmed bedrooms as the radiators clanked and our wives and husbands and children slept. And we would move from the nearer regions of the dead who are remembered into the farther regions of he forgotten, an on past those, into a space as while and big as the sky replicated forever. — Ian Frazier

There's something about houses that intrigues me. I mean, they're the place where families spend all their time together, making the house filled with love, life, and laughter. I always look at houses and wonder what's going on inside. Without the people who lived in them, they're just a shell, but once they're filled, they become sacred ground, the place where memories are made. — Taylor Dean

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light. — Barry Lopez

I never lived the life of 'Oh, you're so good-looking'. People thought I was a girl when I was little, because I looked like a girl-maybe because my mother would keep my hair really long in a bowl cut. I was in a coffee shop once and the waitress was like, 'What do you want, Miss?' I was 10 or 11-the worst age to have that happen. I had a jean jacket on and a Metallica pin. I thought I was really cool. — Bradley Cooper

Hypatia's case then was this. She lived in a time when her intellectual heritage, a seven-hundred-year-old tradition, was crumbling. The supports that had once seemed so secure - the Museum and the libraries - had all been swept away by the swell of ignorant dogmatism. Almost alone, virtually the last academic, she stood for the intellectual values, for rigorous mathematics, ascetic Neoplatonism, the crucial role of the mind, and the voice of temperance and moderation in civic life. — Michael A.B. Deakin

But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative ... Nothing could be without its opposite bound up with it. Could space exist in a building without objects that stopped it? Could energy exist without matter, or matter without energy? Matter and energy, the inert and the active, once considered opposites, were now known to be one. — Patricia Highsmith