Alive But Not Living Quotes & Sayings

I was beginning to realize that all the food in the world, and all the running shoes, could not make me happy. The material things were worthless. I had lost my family. I wasn't loved, I wasn't free, and I wasn't safe. I was alive, but everything that made life worth living was gone. — Yeonmi Park

There is a whole generation of young people just like us wandering around Europe and the rest of the world, trying to find some meaning for why they are alive and what they should choose to do with their time. When Martha leaves and we sit in front of the fire in the living room, I look to Lily until she turns to me and I can see the grief that hides just under the surface of her expression. We are, or at least were, two of those lost souls: wanderers, backpackers, season workers, Wwoofers, Workawayers, travellers: searching the world for something or someplace to hold on to. And we have come home not because we have retired from trying to find answers and are ready to settle into adulthood, but because my death has come upon us fast and unexpected. I am not the first person of this generation of travellers- or any person who lives in this godless, superficial society- to die. But I think that it feels to Lily and to me, my mother too perhaps, that I may very well be. — Annie Fisher

He dragged me up. "You're bruised all to hell, your hand is broken, and can you even imagine how much more pain waits for you tonight?" he asked. "Why won't you just learn? Why must you make me keep hurting you?"
"I'm not making you do anything, Gisbourne. Hurt me if you want, but I've felt pain. I know what pain is. And it's less than love, than loyalty, than hope. You can make me cry, or scream, or whatever else. All that will mean is that I feel the pain, that I'm still alive. And as long as I'm living I can promise I'm not afraid of you, Gisbourne. I'm afraid of sitting quiet while people like you and Prince John going by unchecked. That's what I'm afraid of. I'm stronger than your damn pain, and I do not give up. — A.C. Gaughen

But they were not living, thought Harry: They were gone. The empty words could not disguise the fact that his parents' moldering remains lay beneath snow and stone, indifferent, unknowing. And tears came before he could stop them, boiling hot then instantly freezing on his face, and what was the point in wiping them off or pretending? He let them fall, his lips pressed hard together, looking down at the thick snow hiding from his eyes the place where the last of Lily and James lay, bones now, surely, or dust, not knowing or caring that their living son stood so near, his heart still beating, alive because of their sacrifice and close to wishing, at this moment, that he was sleeping under the snow with them. — J.K. Rowling

And I declared that the dead, who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive. But better than both is the one who has never been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 4:2-3) — Anonymous

The dog writhing in the gutter, its back broken by a passing car, knows what it is to be alive. So too with the aged elk of the far north woods, slowly dying in the bitter cold of winter. The asphalt upon which the dog lies knows no pain. The snow upon which the elk has collapsed knows not the cold. But living beings do. — George Greenstein

Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners ... — Daniel Dennett

We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive. — Thich Nhat Hanh

But you cant be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you have exhausted the possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere; all that could not have been invented and created just to be thrown away. And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to the rock. And the earth dont want to just keep things, hoard them; it wants to use them again. — William Faulkner

Many African societies divide humans into three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalised ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered. Many ... can be recalled by name. But they are not the living-dead. There is a difference. — James W. Loewen

Sometimes living can be hard, but it's only because we're alive that we can make each other laugh,cry ... be happy! In this world, if that's not a reason for being born in this world ... I don't know what is! — Natsuki Takaya

But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career. — Madeleine L'Engle

I do not particularly like the word 'work.' Human beings are the only animals who have to work, and I think that is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Other animals make their livings by living, but people work like crazy, thinking that they have to in order to stay alive. The bigger the job, the greater the challenge, the more wonderful they think it is. It would be good to give up that way of thinking and live an easy, comfortable life with plenty of free time. I think that the way animals live in the tropics, stepping outside in the morning and evening to see if there is something to eat, and taking a long nap in the afternoon, must be a wonderful life. For human beings, a life of such simplicity would be possible if one worked to produce directly his daily necessities. In such a life, work is not work as people generally think of it, but simply doing what needs to be done. — Masanobu Fukuoka

Justice, as it turned out, was a lot harder than war. War was largely a series of technical questions, a matter of taking living human bodies and making them dead. There were infinite variations in the tactics and the strategy, of course, nuances in weaponry and technique, but the basic premise was bedrock: you'd done it right if you were alive at the end of the day, and the other poor fool was not. — Brian Staveley

To know your life is to know intimately what you are feeling. Or to put it another way: to be aware of what state of mind predominates in consciousness. The noting of mental states encourages a deeper recognition of what is happening while it is happening. It allows us to be more fully alive in the present rather than living our life as an afterthought. It enables us to watch with mercy, if not humor, the uninvited swirl of "mixed emotions" not as something in need of judgment but as a work in progress. — Stephen Levine

One day, as he slept in a cave, he dreamed that he saw his own body sleeping. He came out of the cave on the night of a new moon. The sky was clear, and he could see millions of stars. Then something happened inside of him that transformed his life forever. He looked at his hands, he felt his body, and he heard his own voice say. "I am made of light, I am made of stars."
He looked at the stars again, and he realized that it's not the stars that create the light, but rather the light that creates the stars. "Everything is made of light," he said, "and the space in-between isn't empty." And he knew that everything that exists is one living being, and that light is the messenger of life, because it is alive and contains all information. (xvi) — Miguel Ruiz

That's the way it is when you love. It makes you suffer, and I have suffered much in the years since. But it matters little that you suffer, so long as you feel alive with a sense of the close bond that connects all living things, so long as love does not die! — Hermann Hesse

Suddenly energized, she jumped to her feet and bounced up and down on the couch. Clean clothes went flying off the pile. Maybe she should feel bad because she'd just seen what a huge flaw she'd uncovered in herself. But she didn't.

She felt free and alive. Up to now, she hadn't really been living. Not fully and completely. That had to change. Immediately.

"What are you doing? I'm hearing weird sounds."

"I'm pulling a Tom Cruise. And I;m also waving a bra around. HUnter, this is amazing? YOu've changed everything. We should have talked like this long ago."

"You're freaking me out, sis. Do I need to call someone? — Jennifer Bernard

all of us were here for a little while, and then we were somewhere else; we were not alive at all; we approached living, but we never achieved it. We are going to die. Everybody was going to die. — John Fante

He no longer wished to be dead. At the same time, it cannot be said that he was glad to be alive. But at least he did not resent it. He was alive, and the stubbornness of this fact had little by little begun to fascinate him - as if he had managed to outlive himself, as if he were somehow living a posthumous life. — Paul Auster

If it were possible to live without causing harm to any living being at all, then indeed we might well choose not to eat carrots or other vegetables. But that is not possible - merely by being alive, we necessarily cause harm to many, many beings: we step on them inadvertently, we breathe them in without noticing, we kill them when we brush our teeth or wash our bodies, etc. — Sharon Gannon

The worst possible thing you can do when you're down in the dumps, tweaking, vaporous with victimized self-righteousness, or bored, is to take a walk with dying friends. They will ruin everything for you. First of all, friends like this may not even think of themselves as dying, although they clearly are, according to recent scans and gentle doctors' reports. But no, they see themselves as fully alive. They are living and doing as much as they can, as well as they can, for as long as they can. They ruin your multitasking high, the bath of agitation, rumination, and judgment you wallow in, without the decency to come out and just say anything. They bust you by being grateful for the day, while you are obsessed with how thin your lashes have become and how wide your bottom. — Anne Lamott

I saw the tears of the oppressed
and they have no comforter;
power was on the side of their oppressors
and they have no comforter.
And I declared that the dead,
who had already died,
are happier than the living,
who are still alive.
But better than both
is the one who has never been born,
who has not seen the evil
that is done under the sun. — Anonymous

It is true that not even Christ is seen, but he exists; he is risen, he is alive, he is close to us, more truly than the most enamored husband is close to his wife. Here is the crucial point: to think of Christ not as a person of the past, but as the risen and living Lord, with whom I can speak, whom I can even kiss if I so wish, certain that my kiss does not end on the paper or on the wood of a crucifix, but on a face and on the lips of living flesh (even though spiritualized), happy to receive my kiss. — Raniero Cantalamessa

I am astonished at the high prices paid for works by painters who are dead, prices none of them could expect when they were alive. It is a kind of tulip trade, in which living painters suffer but do not profit. — Vincent Van Gogh

I'm terrified to lose you, but I am way more terrified of living without you while you're alive and well. For the record, I would rather have a single day of truly being with you than twenty thousand days of going through the motions with someone who doesn't have my heart. I don't care if I never have the chance to grow old and decrepit with you. I want today. I want to watch creepy movies with you and the dogs, burn toast in your apartment. I want to feel you inside of me. I want to experience everything with you while we're both alive. WE ARE BOTH ALIVE. A good life is about quality, not quantity. I just want to be with you for however long that may be. But I can't force you to see things the way I do. When — Penelope Ward

Poverty is a great educator. Having no boundaries and refusing to be ignored, it mostly teaches hopelessness. But not always. Politics is also a great educator. Mostly it teaches, I am afraid, cynicism. But not always. Television is a great educator as well. Mostly it teaches consumerism. But not always. It is the "not always" that keeps the romantic spirit alive in those who write about schooling. The faith is that despite some of the more debilitating teachings of culture itself, something can be done in school that will alter the lenses through which one sees the world; which is to say, that nontrivial schooling can provide a point of view from which what IS can be seen clearly, what WAS as a living present, and what WILL BE as filled with possibility — Neil Postman

After that, we were like flies stuck in honey, alive but not really living. — Martha Hall Kelly

You can find things in the traditional religions which are very benign and decent and wonderful and so on, but I mean, the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon. The God of the Bible - not only did He order His chosen people to carry out literal genocide - I mean, wipe out every Amalekite to the last man, woman, child, and, you know, donkey and so on, because hundreds of years ago they got in your way when you were trying to cross the desert - not only did He do things like that, but, after all, the God of the Bible was ready to destroy every living creature on earth because some humans irritated Him. That's the story of Noah. I mean, that's beyond genocide - you don't know how to describe this creature. Somebody offended Him, and He was going to destroy every living being on earth? And then He was talked into allowing two of each species to stay alive - that's supposed to be gentle and wonderful. — Noam Chomsky

But not just alive like I was yesterday and the day before. Alive like I knew I was alive. Like I could feel the breaths coming into my chest. And I knew I was the person inside my own body. — Matt De La Pena

I enjoy the wild things,
Call me at 3 am and tell me you're waiting at my door. Give me sunsets in different cities and road trips on dirt tracks not sighted on maps.
Whiskey for breakfast & cheap thrills for dinner.
Give me happiness in a smile and nothing of certainty but the way we make eachother feel.
There so much life in living while you're alive & id give absolutely anything to have it all with you. — Nikki Rowe

We're not a people worth saving, plain and simple. We're completely beyond that - both the undead and the few still living. Yeah, 'living.' Some life, huh? But it's the only life we could ever possibly live if we want to stay alive another day. It's our life that terrifies me. — Bryant A. Loney

Well, life is not just a business of standing on dry land and occasionally getting your feet wet. It is merely an illusion that some of us stand on one bank and some on the opposite. So long as we stand like that we are not living at all, but dreaming. So jump, jump in, and let the shock wake us up. Even if we drown, at least for a moment or two before we die we shall be awake and alive. — Paul Scott

He used to call vampires "the breathing ghosts"- for, as he put it, we existed in a kind of limbo-land between the living and the dead. We breathed, but we were not alive. We flitted through the air, but we still left foot prints on the ground. We were, and are, neither one nor the other, but something else entirely. — Eleanor Keane

Man African societies divide humans into 3 categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalized ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered. Many ... can be recalled by name. But they are not living-dead. There is a difference. — Kevin Brockmeier

The Outside had taught him that there wasn't much difference between loving someone and being afraid for them. Loving a person meant need them to stay: alive, around. But the shadow that love can't help cast is fear: fear that they won't stay alive or around - fear they'll be reckless, or doomed, or just walk away and not consider you ever again. With love, you're scared it will disappear. With fear, you're scared it never will. The trick, Will understood now but would never quite manage to put into practice, was getting used to both of them at the same time. It was living in between. — Michael Christie

Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts. — Jean-Paul Sartre

We're meant to stay connected to our hearts, you see. Feeling our feelings, present in the moments we're given. But we don't do that. And that's when we get in trouble ...
We mature and take responsibility for ourselves and others, and that's a good thing. But we're never meant to lose that alive quality, to get cut off from our true hearts. Growing up isn't the same thing as shutting down ...
We can fight it. We have to fight it. Because when our hearts shut down, we become mere shells of who we once were. We don't laugh - not honestly, not from the heart. We don't dream. We don't feel our feelings or use our gifts. We end up trying to just survive instead of live. It's like we've handed our hearts over to the enemy of our souls and said, 'Here you can have it. I'm giving up. — Denise Hildreth Jones

Here lies a
wretched corse, of wretched soul bereft:
Seek not my name: a plague consume you wicked
caitiffs left!
Here lie I, Timon; who, alive, all living men did hate:
Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass and stay
not here thy gait. — William Shakespeare

Living cells must have food in the form of sugar, they must breathe, and they must grow, at least a little. But without leaves-and therefore without photosynthesis-that's impossible. No being on the planet can maintain a centuries-long fast, not even the remains of a tree, and certainly not a stump that has had to survive on its own. It was clear that something else was happening with this stump. It must be getting assistance from neighboring trees, specifically from their roots. Scientists investigating similar situations have discovered that assistance may either be delivered remotely by fungal networks around the root tips-which facilitate nutrient exchange between trees-or the roots themselves may be interconnected. In the case of the stump I had stumbled upon, I couldn't find out what was going on, because I didn't want to injure the old stump by digging around it, but one thing was clear: the surrounding beeches were pumping sugar to the stump to keep it alive. — Peter Wohlleben

And yet as my eyes turned to Stephen facing the sunrise from Simon in the darkness of my mind, it was as if Simon had been the living face and Stephen's the one I was imagining - or a photograph, a painting, something beautiful but not really alive for me. My whole heart was so full of Simon that even my pity for Stephen wasn't quite real - it was only something I felt I ought to feel, more from my head than from my heart. And I knew I ought to pity him all the more because I could pity him so little. — Dodie Smith

One day you see a man walking down the road, the next day you come to his yard and find him dead ... Why is it that he cannot do what the living do? It is because the thing that gave power to these parts is no longer there. That is the duppy, and that is the most powerful part of any man. Everybody has evil in them, and when a man is alive ... he will not abandon himself to many evil things. But when the duppy leaves the body, it no longer has anything to restrain it and it will do more terrible things than any man ever dreamed of.
- From 'Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica', Zora Neale Hurston, 1938 — Charles A. Cornell

Pursuing happiness, and I did, and I still do, is not at all the same as being happy
which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances ... If the sun is shining, stand in it
yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass
they have to because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centered. What you are pursuing is meaning
a meaningful life. There's the hap
the fate, the draw that is yours, and it isn't fixed, but changing the course of the stream, or dealing new cards, whatever metaphor you want to use
that's going to take a lot of energy. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms. The pursuit isn't all or nothing
it's all AND nothing. — Jeanette Winterson

If we apply the term revolution to what happened in North America between 1776 and 1829, it has a special meaning. Normally, the word describes the process by which man transforms himself from one kind of man, living in one kind of society, with one way of looking at the world, into another kind of man, another society, another conception of life ... The American case is different: it is not a question of the Old Man transforming himself into the New, but of the New Man becoming alive to the fact that he is new, that he has been transformed already without his having realized it. — W. H. Auden

I've lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough. It's so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life. — Tony Kushner

As it was all was lost. He was alive, yes, he was alive, he felt this for the first time. But he knew now that he was living in a prison, that he had to make the best of it in there and would soon rage and would have to speak this thieves' cant, the only language at his disposal, in order not to be so abandoned. — Ingeborg Bachmann

To them I'm simply an object from the past that they wish will disappear Then why do I exist? Why am I alive? When I thought about this I could find no answer. But as you live you need a reason otherwise it's the same as being dead, I then came to this conclusion I exist to kill every human besides myself. Fighting only for yourself living while only loving yourself If you think that everybody else simply exist to allow you to experience that feeling nothing is better then that world. As long as there are people in this world for me to kill and continue to feel that joy of living my existence will not vanish. — Masashi Kishimoto

While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.
Cyril Connolly (English critic and editor, 1903-1974) — Cyril Connolly

I do know many a band out there, because believe me, we've played with most of them, who are together because they have to be. They might not talk to each other offstage, but they realize they can earn a living by going out and keeping that music alive. — Gerry Beckley

On the list of qualities necessary to humans trying to make our way through life, truth scores fairly low. Why do people believe and do weird things? Because in the end, feeling alive is more important than telling the truth. We have evolved as living creatures to express ourselves, to be creative, to tell stories. We are instruments for feeling, faith, energy, emotion, significance, belief, but not really truth. — Louis Theroux

The ultimate goal of the resistance movement is a planet not just living, but in recovery, growing more alive and more diverse year after year. A planet on which humans live in equitable and sustainable communities without exploiting the planet or each other.
Goal 1 : To disrupt and dismantle industrial civilization; to thereby remove the ability of the powerful to exploit the marginalized and destroy the planet.
Goal 2 : To defend and rebuild just, sustainable, and autonomous human communities, and, as part of that, to assist in the recovery of the land. — Aric McBay

You are a living, breathing, organic being. Of course you can feel pain, of course you can feel hurt, of course it feels overwhelming sometimes as the jagged, rough, and hard world outside bumps up against your soft skin. You are not a machine that rams through each experience, performing tasks with no emotions. You are alive. You are alive. You are alive. Be kind to this soft creature as it learns its way around a busy and loud world. Be easy with yourself because some days you'll be the only one who is. But that's okay because you're the only one that makes a real difference. — Emily Maroutian

The violin wasn't alive. It wasn't a baby or an animal, not living.
But that would be easier to believe if I hadn't felt it breathe and sing. — Jessica Martinez

Happily ever after does not mean they don't experience exasperation with each other, or are somehow exempt from life's hardships and misery. Living happily ever after is hard work, but you do it because you want to stay in love with the other person. Because your life without this one other, very special person would be something not full, but only half-alive — Nadia Lee

Emma and I had both died twice, and for me, that second one actually stuck. Now I was a "resurrected American," better known, in colloquial terms, as life-challenged. Or undead. Or the living dead. But I'm not a zombie. I'm just a little less alive than your average high school junior. — Rachel Vincent

When the organization called soul is free, moving and operative, initial as well as terminal, it is spirit. Qualities are both static, substantial, and transitive. Spirit quickens; it is not only alive, but spirit gives life. Animals are spirited, but man is a living spirit. He lives in his works and his works do follow him. Soul is form, spirit informs. It is the moving function of that of which soul is the substance. Perhaps the words soul and spirit are so heavily laden with traditional mythology and sophisticated doctrine that they must be surrendered; it may be impossible to recover for them in science and philosophy the realities designated in idiomatic speech. But the realities are there, by whatever names they be called. — John Dewey

Life was nothing but endless torture. He no longer felt any pleasure watching the sun rise, his every waking moment was sour, ruining the taste of anything that could have brought him enjoyment. As he had never really felt that he was living, he was not afraid of death. He was even happy that, in death, he would find the sole proof that he had been alive. — Martin Page

We want not only life but an intense awareness of being alive. The large tendency of our mechanical and standardized civilization is to blunt that awareness by surrounding us with ideas and forms that require the lowest degree of consciousness. One lives in it less by reflection than by reflex. The effect of the uniform blows with which the environment strikes us is to make us insensitive to any but the most violent stimuli; two-thirds of life ceases to exist for us because the valves of attention require cataclysmic upheavals before they will open. Lacking the capacity to be excited by any but the most gross and violent stimuli, we spend our lives in a frantic race with boredom. — Denham Sutcliffe

Oh yes", said the old woman, "but I've heard these so-called stoves are by no means all they are supposed to be. I never saw a stove in my day, and yet never ailed a thing, at least as long as I could really be called alive, except for nettle rash one night when I was in my fifteenth year.. It was caused by some fresh fish that the boys used to catch in the lakes thereabouts."
The man did not answer for a while, but lay pondering the medical history of this incredible old creature who, without ever setting eyes on a stove, had suffered almost no ailments in the past sixty-five years. — Halldor Laxness

As the theologian Alan Jones has said:

One of our problems is that very few of us have developed any distinctive personal life. Everything about us seems secondhand, even our emotions. In many cases we have to rely on secondhand information in order to function. I accept the word of a physician, a scientist, a farmer, on trust. I do not like to do this. I have to because they possess vital knowledge of living of which I am ignorant. Secondhand information concerning the state of my kidneys, the effects of cholesterol, and the raising of chickens, I can live with. But when it comes to questions of meaning, purpose, and death, secondhand information will not do. I cannot survive on a secondhand faith in a secondhand God. There has to be a personal word, a unique confrontation, if I am to come alive. — M. Scott Peck

I've noticed that houses take on the personality of the people who live in them. I'm not sure how it happens, but they become alive in some way, as if they have their own spirit. — Shannon Wiersbitzky

The setting, concerns, and mood of The Woodlanders are consonant with the Wessex of the earlier novels. There is an element of nostalgia in Hardy's treatment of the woodlands of Little Hintock. Although such rural economies were very much alive in Hardy's day, he strikes an elegiac note in his evocation of a world that will inevitably pass away. However, the woodlands do not form the backdrop to an idyllic pastoral of humanity living in tranquil harmony with nature. The trees, which are such a dominant presence in the novel, compete with each other for nourishment and light, are vulnerable to disease and damage, and are frightening in their moaning under the lash of the storm. The woodlands represent the Darwinian struggle for existence that Hardy sees as extending not only to the inhabitants of this little world but also beyond ... — Geoffrey Harvey

Pyschoanalysts are fond of pointing out that the past is alive in the present. But the future is alive in the present too. The future is not some place we're going to, but an idea in our mind now. It is something we're creating, that in turn creates us. The future is a fantasy that shapes our present. — Stephen Grosz

Our ability to fulfill any assignment is greatly enhanced when we understand the importance of the temple and pay close attention to all that is said and done there. The temple is for redeeming not only the dead but the living as well. All are alive in God, and He is no respecter of persons. Blessings always come from hearing and obeying His word, and His word is never more clear than in the temple. — John H. Groberg

There was something wrong about thse people. But perhaps, just as it is true of my love, they could not go on living except in the way they do. If it is true that man, once born into the world, must somehow live out his life, perhaps the appearance that people make in order to go through with it, even if it is as ugly as their appearance, should not be despised. To be alive. To be alive. An intolerably immense undertaking before which one can only gasp in apprehension. — Osamu Dazai

I didn't know a living person could hurt you so badly.
When the pain originates with someone who is gone, it's your own memory that hurts you. Walking through the house, touching things they've touched, hearing sounds they heard, wondering what they would've thought of one thing or another. This is pain that I know, pain that I can handle, pain that is so much a part of me that if it were removed I would not be whole.
But when it's someone who's alive who hurts you, the pain can't be escaped. The things they've touched are still warm because they were just there, the sounds they hear reach your ears too - sometimes their own voice, and it's excruciating to bear. I know what he thinks about this, that, or the other because I can hear him saying so. But not to me. He doesn't talk to me anymore. — Mindy McGinnis

Look, I really don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive, you've got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. And therefore, as I see it, if you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy, or at least your thoughts should be noisy, colorful and lively. — Mel Brooks

His eyes danced like a teenager. "Eat anyone alive today?" her father joked.
Ruby returned his wicked grin and sauntered into the living room. "Not today, but tomorrow's another day. — Stephanie Greenhalgh

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living. — Cyril Connolly

JAMIE'S SONG 'KILL ME':

In the darkness of the night,
you come to me to fight.
You tell me stories of your life,
and make me miss you all the while.

I used to crave you but now I find,
I'm not living, I'm blind.
And the daylight has combined,
with the hollow that's inside.

This black space that's in me,
is all you've left me to feel.
The love you took from me,
was all I had, is all I feel.
But now there's nothing left of me.

You should've killed me,
or buried me alive.
You could've shot me,
even stabbed me with a knife.

I wish you'd killed me;
I wish you'd kill me instead. — Neha Yazmin

I'm alive now, but I don't know if I will be tomorrow. The state of being alive is not guaranteed, but should I let that stop me from living? — Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

Practice involves putting your consciousness in suspended animation. Practicing is not living. But when you build your skills through an ever-changing sequence of experiences, you're alive. — Scott Adams

But the living must fear death, or they would not struggle to stay alive. — Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

You are pure-hearted, Branza, and lovely, and you have never done a moment's wrong. But you are a living creature, born to make a real life, however it cracks your heart. However sweet that other place was, it was not real. It was an artifact of your mam's imagination; it was a dream of hers and a desire; you could not have stayed there forever and called yourself alive. Now you are in the true world, and a great deal more is required of you. Here you must befriend real wolves, and lure real birds down from the sky. Here you must endure real people around you, and we are not uniformly kind; we are damaged and impulsive, each in our own way. It is harder. It is not safe. But it is what you were born to. (357) — Margo Lanagan

It's impossible to move through the stages of grief when a person is both dead and alive, the way Min is. It's like she's living permanently in an airport terminal, moving from one departure lounge to another but never getting on a plane. Sometimes I tell myself that I'd do anything for Min. That I'd do whatever was necessary for her to be happy. Except that I'm not entirely sure what that would be. — Miriam Toews

Occasionally they would hear a harsh croak or a splash as some amphibian was disturbed, but the only creature they saw was a toad as big as Will's foot, which could only flop in a pain-filled sideways heave as if it were horribly injured. It lay across the path, trying to move out of the way and looking at them as if it knew they meant to hurt it.
'It would be merciful to kill it,' said Tialys.
'How do you know?' said Lyra. 'It might still like being alive, in spite of everything.'
'If we killed it, we'd be taking it with us,' said Will. 'It wants to stay here. I've killed enough living things. Even a filthy stagnant pool might be better than being dead.'
'But if it's in pain?' said Tialys.
'If it could tell us, we'd know. But since it can't, I'm not going to kill it. That would be considering our feelings rather than the toad's.'
They moved on. — Philip Pullman

We discover the vast difference between living and feeling alive when we discover inspiration." The quickest way to true happiness is not by ambling and obsessing about the limited pursuit of happiness, but by the immediate and actionable pursuit to be inspired. — Elaina Marie

It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision. — W.G. Sebald

The Bible does not deny that we were various things - addicts, homosexuals, hateful, prideful, pornographic masturbators - but that is what we were (past tense) (1 Cor. 6:9-11; Titus 3:3-5). The emphasis in Scripture is on what we are and what we are called to be. The Christian does not say, Hello, my name is _ and I am an X Y or Z." The Christian says I was dead, but now I am alive. The Christian says I am a struggling sinner, yet I am a saint. The Christians says I am a new creation; I am transformed. — Paul O'Brien

A house is such a strange thing. Everything else gets more worn when people handle it, and sometimes you can feel a person's poison if you get too close to him, but that's not what happens to a house. Even a good house falls apart quickly when nobody stops by. A house is alive only when there are people living in it, brushing against it, staying in it. — Kyung-Sook Shin

This brings me back to the statement that thee is no such thing as living matter. In the cell, all the parts and pieces are separate units, working precisely together, but not themselves alive. Life is not IN any of these parts and pieces, just as in your automobile, there is no automobility in any piece or part, in a spark plug or a carburetor needle. Automobility is a superior quality which coheres to the total motor car to the total motor car. Similarly, life is a super-quality that coheres to the total cell. — Wallace Johnson

Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago. — G.K. Chesterton

The real glory of meditation lies not in any method but in its continual living experience of presence, in its bliss, clarity, peace, and most important of all, complete absence of grasping. The diminishing of grasping in yourself is a sign that you are becoming freer of yourself. And the more you experience this freedom, the clearer the sign that the ego and the hopes and fears that keep it alive are dissolving, and the closer you will come to the infinitely generous "wisdom of egolessness." — Sogyal Rinpoche

I detest tradition for tradition's sake; the half-alive; that which is not real. I feel no hatred of individuals, but of customs, traditions; superstitions that go against life, against truth, against the reality of experience, against the spontaneous living out of the sense of wonder-of fresh experience, freshly seen and communicated. — Alfred Stieglitz

Always I find when I begin to write there is one character who obstinately will not come alive ... He never does the unexpected thing, he never surprises me, he never takes charge. Every other character helps, he only hinders. And yet one cannot do without him. I can imagine a God feeling in just that way about some of us. The saints, one would suppose, in a sense create themselves. They come alive. They are capable of the surprising act or word. The stand outside the plot, unconditioned by it. But we have to be pushed around. We have the obstinancy of non-existence. We are inextricably bound to the plot, and wearily God forces us, here and there, according to his intention, characters without poetry, without free will, whose only importance is that somewhere, at some time, we help to furnish the scene in which a living character moves and speaks, perhaps the saints with the opportunities for their free will. — Graham Greene

I was alive in the past, and I'm alive now, sitting here talking to you. But what you see here isn't really me. This is just a shadow of who I was. You are really living. But I'm not. Even these words I'm saying right now sound empty, like an echo. — Haruki Murakami

Books. The more I thought about how to stop and get myself back together as one sane, whole person, the more I thought about books. I thought about escape. Not running to escape but reading to escape. Cyril Connolly, twentieth-century writer and critic, wrote that "words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living." That was how I wanted to use books: as an escape back to life. I wanted to engulf myself in books and come up whole again. — Nina Sankovitch

I digress, but here's the rub: The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory. The living, thank heaven, retain the ability to surprise and to disappoint. Your Hazel is alive, Waters, and you mustn't impose your will upon another's decision, particularly a decision arrived at thoughtfully. She wishes to spare you pain, and you should let her. You may not find young Hazel's logic persuasive, but I have trod through this vale of tears longer than you, and from where I'm sitting, she's not a lunatic. — John Green

I was right when I said a very long time ago that our age would leave few living documents behind it: it was rare for anyone to keep a diary, letters were short and businesslike--"I'm alive and well"--and few memoirs were written. There are many reasons for this. Let me mention just one, not perhaps recognized by everybody: we were too often at loggerheads with our own past to give it proper thought. Within the half-century, our ideas on people and events have changed many times; conversations were broken off in mid-sentence; thoughts and feelings could not but be affected by circumstances. — Ilya Ehrenburg

Ever since you and I were boys of fifteen, I have been in countless battles, from skirmishes to giant wars that determined the fate of nations; if there is one thing I have learned from all that experience, Garanth, it is that battles are alive. Battles are living things. As with beasts, you must try to know them, you must handle them with care and some love, but you must never take your eyes off them, or they will go for your throat. Battles are wild beasts that can never be truly tamed, Garanth. You need both a whip and meat if you want them to turn on your foes and not yourself. The general . . . does not understand this. — Kaoru Kurimoto

Cyril Connolly, twentieth-century writer and critic, wrote that 'words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.' That was how I wanted to use books: as an escape back to life. I wanted to engulf myself in books and come up whole again.
p.20 — Nina Sankovitch

The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole tribe of men who made their living simply by selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston had nothing to do with the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being nonexistent persons. — George Orwell

One must try to make one's life as pleasant as possible. I'm alive and it's not my fault, which means I must somehow go on living the best I can, without bothering anybody, until I die.'
'But what makes you live? With such thoughts, you'll sit without moving, without undertaking anything ... '
'Life won't leave one alone as it is. — Leo Tolstoy

And she was terribly aware that she was alive. Not just living and breathing, but ... alive. — Mary Balogh

The only victory that really counts in prison is survival. But survival means more than simply being alive. It's not just the body that must survive a jail term; the spirit and the will and the heart have to make it through as well. If any one of them is broken or destroyed, the man whose living body walks through the gate, at the end of his sentence, can't be said to have survived it. And it's for those small victories of the heart, and the spirit, and the will that we sometimes risk the body that cradles them. — Gregory David Roberts

If tomorrow doesn't happen, would you still do what you're about to do today? If that answer is no, you're alive, but you're not living. — Greg Plitt

And then I though about us ... these children who fell down life's cartoon holes ... dreamless children, alive but not living
we emerged on the other side of the cartoon holes fully awake and discovered we were whole. — Douglas Coupland

Jesus no longer belongs to the past but lives in the present and is projected toward the future; Jesus is the everlasting "today" of God. This is how the newness of God appears to the women, the disciples, and all of us: as victory over sin, evil, and death - over everything that crushes life and makes it seem less human. And this is a message meant for me and for you, dear sister, you, dear brother. How often does Love have to tell us, "Why do you look for the living among the dead?" Our daily problems and worries can wrap us up in ourselves, in sadness and bitterness...and that is where death is. That is not the place to look for the One who is alive! — Pope Francis

A heartbreaking paradox: if only I can finish my work so that it will live. Yet if it is finished, completed, a part of me but departed from me, I lost it alive, living but separate; and if it does not leave me, it is incomplete, insufficient, and half-dead that I keep it. — Helene Cixous

17 v When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But v he laid his right hand on me, w saying, Fear not, x I am the first and the last, 18and the living one. y I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and z I have the keys of Death and Hades. — Anonymous