Brief Lives Quotes & Sayings

There is a time somewhere in each of our lives, certainly before we reach the age of thirty, when our youth achieves a kind of perfection. A glorious time when we are perfectly balanced between youth and maturity, between optimism and worldliness, between idealism and inertia. It is a brief period, lasting only a year or perhaps a few of them, when it is clear that we have finally become all we are ever going to be. — Lee Vidor

Resurrection plants are usually tiny, no bigger than your fist. They are ugly and small and useless and special. When it rains, their leaves puff up but do not become green for forty-eight hours because it takes time for photosynthesis to start up. During those strange days of its reawakening the plant lives off of pure concentrated sugar, an intense sustained infusion of sweetness, a year's worth of sucrose coursing through its veins in just one day. This little plant has done the impossible: it has transcended the wilted brown of death. The miracle is not sustainable, of course, and within a day or two things will inevitably go back to normal. Such a crazy life takes its toll, and in the long term, even a resurrection plant withers and dies completely. But for a brief, glorious moment it knows something that no other plant has ever known: how to grow without being green. — Hope Jahren

If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives would be not only meager but in a youth-worshiping country like America painfully brief. — Gore Vidal

I watched the raindrops slide down the window, finding pathways through the dust. It's fascinating to watch how they do that - one of them leads the way, and then the others follow in that path, perhaps veering slightly and making it wider, but generally sticking to the same direction unless acted on by something powerful like the wind picking up or a sudden turn. Watch them sometime; their reluctance to chart their own course is remarkable. And if raindrops exhibit that - raindrops that have nothing at stake in their brief lives - how unsurprising is it that people do it too, following paths carved by others, even if it leads nowhere good -Eve — Michele Jaffe

In brief, I regard love as a more decisive focus of meaning than death. In terms of Heidegger's argument, this is because I think he misdescribes the importance of the deaths of others and focuses exclusively on my relation to my own death. But, in reality, the deaths of others have a more urgent and immediate impact on our lives than the purely notional knowledge that I too will one day die. — George Pattison

This was the story of our lives: minor insurrections, tiny victories, a brief chance to ridicule our oppressors, little floating vessels of hope amid a great sea of uncertainty, deprivation and fear. — Jojo Moyes

The best thing the universe ever gave us is that we'll all be forgotten. [...] I kinda like the idea. That when we die, despite any pain or fear or embarrassment we experienced during our lives, despite any heartbreak or grief, we get to be dispersed back into nothingness. It makes me feel brave, knowing I'll get a blank slate at the end. You get a brief glimmer of consciousness to do with what you will and then it's given back to the universe again. I'm not religious, but even I can appreciate that that's redemption, on the grandest scale. Oblivion isn't scary; it's the closest thing to genuine absolution of sin that I can imagine. — Krystal Sutherland

In a brief moment of lucidity, I was sure that we'd all gone crazy. But then that moment of lucidity was displaced by a supersecond of superlucidity (if I can put it that way), in which I realized that this scene was the logical outcome of our ridiculous lives. It wasn't a punishment but a new wrinkle. It gave us a glimpse of ourselves in our common humanity. It wasn't proof of our idle guilt but a sign of our miraculous and pointless innocence. But that's not it. That's not it. We were still and they were in motion and the sand on the beach was moving, not because of the wind but because of what they were doing and what we were doing, which was nothing, which was watching, and all of that together was the wrinkle, the moment of superlucidity. Then, nothing. — Roberto Bolano

I think a fictional invention grows according to its own development, not the author's. Characters in fiction are not simply as alive as you and me, they are more alive. Becky Sharp, Elizabeth Bennett, and Don Quixote may not outlive the burning out of the sun, but they will certainly outlive the brief candle of our lives. — Cynthia Ozick

To exist in this vast universe for a speck of time is the great gift of life. Our tiny sliver of time is our gift of life. It is our only life. The universe will go on, indifferent to our brief existence, but while we are here we touch not just part of that vastness, but also the lives around us. Life is the gift each of us has been given. Each life is our own and no one else's. It is precious beyond all counting. It is the greatest value we can have. Cherish it for what it truly is ... Your life is yours alone. Rise up and live it. — Terry Goodkind

10. Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see. The span we live is small - small as the corner of the earth in which we live it. Small as even the greatest renown, passed from mouth to mouth by short-lived stick figures, ignorant alike of themselves and those long dead. — Marcus Aurelius

Death is not the end of who we are. It is only a brief pause in the endless cycle of our lives. Each of us is a spirit that cannot die. — Frederick Lenz

When we talk about our lives, long or short, brief and tragic or enduring beyond comprehension, we impose a continuity on them, and that continuity is a lie. — Anne Rice

Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest been lived already, or is impossible to see. The span we live is small - small as the corner of the earth in which we live it. — Marcus Aurelius

There were two worlds, two lives, for each person: this one
brief, narrow, finite; and the hereafter
eternal, limitless, infinite. Fame, to mean anything, should go with one into the next world, where one could enjoy it perpetually. — Courtney Anderson

Of what import are brief, nameless lives ... to Galactus? — Stan Lee

Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their whole lives in the course of a single day. From the point of view of a mayfly, human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that they ever do anything. From the point of view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one of billions of brief lives flickering tenuously on the surface of a strangely cold, anomalously solid, exotically remote sphere of silicate and iron. — Carl Sagan

The Dark Angel had seen much over the course of the past millennia, the passing of hundreds of thousands of mortal lives. He felt neither remorse nor mercy for the enemies he had felled in the course of wars and battles. He did what he had to do and believed that the people of Earth did not deserve all the good things they had received. For him, most people were harmful parasites who, in the process of their brief mortal lives, tried to get ahead by climbing over each other and destroying their own homes. He looked down on them and their love of material things. He believed that the star of humankind was waning, and that its brief stay on Earth would serve, at most, to swell the ranks of slaves in the underworld, where eventually darkness would eat them away. — A.O. Esther

The preachers have got it completely backward. If life is eternal, then life is cheap. Value does not come from surplus; it comes from rarity. Prices rise as supply drops. The reality that our lives are brief is what makes them precious. The fact that they will end makes them more meaningful. "Ultimate purpose" is no purpose at all: it is the surrender of purpose. It is the pretense that faith equals meaning. — Dan Barker

There is nothing so American as our national parks. The scenery and the wildlife are native. The fundamental idea behind the parks is native. It is, in brief, that the country belongs to the people, that it is in process of making for the enrichment of the lives of all of us. The parks stand as the outward symbal of the great human principle. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

While I do not agree with the whole of the idea, there is some truth to it. Otherwise, why do some experience matrimonial bliss independent of the amount of time spent in courtship? I have found that, oftentimes, the married couples who married after a brief courtship are just as happy as those who have known each other their entire lives." "That — Jennifer Joy

In my rather brief medical practice,' said David modestly, 'I found that people spend their whole lives imagining they are about to die. Their only consolation is that one day they're right. — Edward St. Aubyn

Worry! What a waste of time. All the holy books were right. Clearly 'worry' was the mark of a primitive and spiritually unevolved person. What was that line from Yeats, about the bemused Chinese sages? All things fall and are built again. Ancient glittering eyes. This was wisdom. People had been raging and weeping and destroying things for centuries and wailing about their puny individual lives, when - what was the point? All this useless sorrow? Consider the lilies of the field. Why did anyone ever worry about anything? Weren't we, as sentient beings, put upon the earth to be happy, in the brief time allotted to us? — Donna Tartt

Touched by her fingers, the two surviving chocolate people copulate desperately, losing themselves in a melting frenzy of lust, spending the last of their brief borrowed lives in a spasm of raspberry cream and fear. — Neil Gaiman

From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea. — Algernon Charles Swinburne

My life has been like all the lives, long and hard and full of sadness and confusion and horror, a frightening, difficult dream punctuated by brief moments of joy. And as is the case with all people's lives, the moments of joy are never often enough and never long enough. — James Frey

Worry implies that we don't quite trust God is big enough, powerful enough, or loving enough to take care of what's happening in our lives.
Stress says the things we are involved in are important enough to merit our impatience, our lack of grace towards others, or our tight grip of control.
Basically, these two behaviors communicate that it's okay to sin and not trust God because the stuff in my life is somehow exceptional. Both worry and stress reek of arrogance. They declare our tendency to forget that we've been forgiven, that our lives are brief ... and that in the context of God's strength, our problems are small, indeed. — Francis Chan

In the third section, A Discussion, people discuss what The Story meant to them and how they are going to use it in their work and in their lives. Some readers of this book's early manuscript preferred to stop at the end of The Story, without reading further, and interpret its meaning for themselves. Others enjoyed reading A Discussion that follows because it stimulated their thinking about how they might apply what they'd learned to their own situation. Everyone knows that not all change is good or even necessary. But in a world that is constantly changing, it is to our advantage to learn how to adapt and enjoy something better. In any case, I hope each time you re-read Who Moved My Cheese? you will find something new and useful in the brief story, as I do, and that it will help you deal with change and bring you success, whatever you decide success is for you. I hope you enjoy what you discover, and I wish you well. — Spencer Johnson

The classic images Shakespeare, Balzac, and Tolstoy created were born from their mental wombs. But today's practitioners of literacture have lost that creativity. Their minds give birth only to shattered fragments and freaks, whose brief lives are nothing but cryptic spasms devoid of reason. Then they sweep up these fragments into a bag they peddle under the label 'postmodern' or 'deconstructionist' or 'symbolism' or 'irrational. — Liu Cixin

It is crucial that we realize the great value of human existence, the opportunity and the potential that our brief lives afford us. It is only as humans that we have the possibility of implementing changes in our lives. — Dalai Lama

I ask of you your lives," Elend said, voice echoing, "and your courage. I ask of you your faith, and your honor - your strength, and your compassion. For today, I lead you to die. I will not ask you to welcome this event. I will not insult you by calling it well, or just, or even glorious. But I will say this.
"Each moment you fight is a gift to those in this cavern. Each second we fight is a second longer that thousands of people can draw breath. Each stroke of the sword, each koloss felled, each breath earned is a victory! It is a person protected for a moment longer, a life extended, an enemy frustrated!"
There was a brief pause.
"In the end, they will kill us," Elend said, voice loud, ringing in the cavern. "But first, they shall fear us! — Brandon Sanderson

I wondered ...if meeting people with creativity and passion when you were at an impressionable enough age actually kind of ruined you for life among normal people.

For a long time, I'd searched the world, thinking I could start up new friendships like the ones I'd had before. But I never met people like that again. I know people will think that's what everyone believes about their college friends, but it's true. Maybe we're like flowers that open up at that brief moment in our lives, and after that, we close up again, one by one. — Jennifer Finney Boylan

What gives a person's brief time on this planet meaning is engaging in small acts of kindness. Bestowing an act of kindness upon other people is the greatest gift that a person will ever give to other people and such acts shall renew the gifting person. When we unreservedly accept and love our brethren, we become the ineluctable wind that vivifies the lives of other people. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Simply raising the theme of animals in the Third Reich means that our narrative is no longer only an account of what human beings have done to one another, but also about our relations with the natural world. If,viewed against the magnitude and terror of historical events, our personal lives appear almost trivial, the lives of animals may seem more so, and even
to raise the subject can at first seem either insensitive or pedantic. At the
same time, this new dimension places the events in an even vaster perspective still, one in which even the greatest battles and horrendous
crimes can begin to fade into insignificance. This is the standpoint of evolutionary time, in which humankind itself may be no more than a
relatively brief episode. Perhaps the focus on animals may help us to find
a more harmonious balance between the personal, historic, and cosmic
levels, on which, simultaneously we conduct our lives. — Boria Sax

Delirium: "What's the name of the word for the precise moment when you realize that you've actually forgotten how it felt to make love to somebody you really liked a long time ago?"
Dream: "There isn't one."
Delirium: "Oh. I thought maybe there was. — Neil Gaiman

Mothers don't go to heaven when they die. They get special permission from God to stay around a bit longer and watch over their children, no matter what has passed between them in their brief mortal lives. — Elif Shafak

To live a good life: We have the potential for it. If we can learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference. This is how we learn: by looking at each thing, both the parts and the whole. Keeping in mind that none of them can dictate how we perceive it. They don't impose themselves on us. They hover before us, unmoving. It is we who generate the judgments - inscribing them on ourselves. And we don't have to. We could leave the page blank - and if a mark slips through, erase it instantly. Remember how brief is the attentiveness required. And then our lives will end. And why is it so hard when things go against you? If it's imposed by nature, accept it gladly and stop fighting it. And if not, work out what your own nature requires, and aim at that, even if it brings you no glory. None of us is forbidden to pursue our own good. — Marcus Aurelius

Every new book we read in our brief and busy lives means that a classic is left unread. — B.R. Myers

You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less. — Neil Gaiman

None of us knows how long he shall live or when his time will come. But soon, all that will be left of our brief lives is the pride our children feel when they speak our names. — Hiroyuki Sanada

In his brief 21 years on this earth, Michael Smith Jr. touched countless lives. — Mike DeWine

In brief: consciousness is a phenomenon in the zone of evolution. This world lights up to itself only where or only inasmuch as it develops, procreates new forms. Places of stagnancy slip from consciousness; they may only appear in their interplay with places of evolution.
If this is granted it follows that consciousness and discord with one's own self are inseparably linked up, even that they must, as it were, be proportional to each other. This sounds a paradox, but the wisest of all times and peoples have testified to confirm it. Men and women for whom this world was lit in an unusually light of awareness, and who by life and word have, more than others, formed and transformed that work of art which we call humanity, testify by speech and writing or even by their lives that more than others have they been torn by the pangs of inner discord. Let this be a consolation to him who also suffers from it. Without it nothing enduring has ever been begotten. — Erwin Schrodinger

Each form is inadequate, like a graft to be rejected by its intractable and unrelenting host and thus can only serve a brief and momentary purpose coherent to a context rooted in contiguous reason. This unbridled brash Spirit is, to itself, burdensome, yet dynamic, for it sees no flaw in working within the confines of a closed system to achieve ends that extend beyond it. This Spirit is, in fact, self-deceptive for to achieve such ends, it becomes necessary to bound manipulable fragments of the Self with a twine by which these parts can be joined indissolubly and maneuvered adroitly with the skill of a marionettist. — Ashim Shanker

We walked for some time, and grew to know each other, as best as we'd allow. These are some of the high points. They lack continuity. I don't apologize. I merely pointed it out, adding with some truth, I feel, that most liaisons lack continuity. We find ourselves in odd places at various times, and for a brief span we link our lives to others and then, our time elapsed, we move apart. Through a haze of pain occasionally, usually through a veil of memory that clings, then passes, sometimes as though we have never touched. — Harlan Ellison

Belief sloshes around in the firmament like lumps of clay spiralling into a potter's wheel. That's how gods get created, for example. They clearly must be created by their own believers, because a brief resume of the lives of most gods suggests that their origins certainly couldn't be divine. They tend to do exactly the things people would do if only they could, especially when it comes to nymphs, golden showers, and the smiting of your enemies. — Terry Pratchett

I cannot imagine a more realistic faith than the Christian faith. At every turn, we are told we are death-determined creatures and that our lives, our all too brief lives, at the very least will be complex if not difficult. — Stanley Hauerwas

A universe without purpose should neither depress us nor suggest that our lives are purposeless. Through an awe-inspiring cosmic history we find ourselves on this remote planet in a remote corner of the universe, endowed with intelligence and self-awareness. We should not despair, but should humbly rejoice in making the most of these gifts, and celebrate our brief moment in the sun. — Lawrence M. Krauss

Brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Abandoning the tiny story of me and embracing the forever Story of Jesus will allow our little lives to be filled with the wonder of God as we live for the unending applause of His name. And joining our small stories to His will give us what we all want most in life, anyway: the assurance that our brief moments on earth will count for something in a Story that never ends. — Louie Giglio

-On sharing the love story of the Persian prince Khushraw and the niece of the queen of Armenia Shirin (who were looking for each other but in opposite directions): Both lovers then departed, looking for each other in opposite directions, a theme universal in its pathos, because we all spend our brief lives doing just that, even if we physically share our beds with the same person every night for years. Always we carry an image in our head of a better person, of an ideal person, which blurs our chances of finding happiness. — Fatema Mernissi

For just a little while, in all our lives, we're granted brief glimpses at the way things really operate. In those times, we learn the hardest lessons. To coin a few phrases, there are none so blind as those who will not see ... and sometimes, the sweetest kittens have the sharpest claws. — Edward Morris

Pity moment, blah! Let's turn it around! We do not even need to go into the story of it. We acknowledge this moment and release it. We love and accept and forgive ourselves. And we acknowledge that this is a tiny stitch, a brief pinprick in the needlepoints we are creating of our lives. And we also acknowledge that this lifetime of ours is but a tiny little stitch in the ever-expanding, infinite needlepoint of the Universe. Self-pity is not a reason good enough for us to be out of alignment with peace. — Alaric Hutchinson

I have this fantasy that the second movie would begin with a brief statement by all of the young actors who had played the children in the first movie, explaining how it had ruined their lives, so we would catch up with Emily Browning drinking heavily in the back of a burlesque bar, and maybe Liam Aiken would be living underneath a bridge, and then instead of the twins who played Sunny, we would just try to find the oldest woman in the world, and get an interview with her sitting in a trailer park. — Daniel Handler

I've told you two things : First, you're much more insignificant than you ever imagined and second, the future is miserable. But you should be happy, because we may live in a universe without purpose but that means the purpose in our lives is the purpose we create. And we should consider ourselves fortunate to have evolved in this place in the middle of nowhere and evolved a consciousness so we can understand the universe from the earliest moments of the big bang to the far future. So instead of being depressed, you should enjoy your brief moment in the sun. — Lawrence M. Krauss

Suffering creates a vivid contrast illuminating joy, happiness, and satisfaction. It is a harsh lesson on the other side of sublime. We all must suffer, whether we choose to or not. There must be value in that which is given in our lives, even though we hope and try to live joyfully and enjoy our brief time on earth. — Brent Green

To reject any vast group of one's cultural ancestors in the cause of some current theory is not just arrogance; it's posthumous mass murder. It's the same kind of thinking that makes genocide possible. The masses (albeit the dead masses) and the pathetic little lives they lived are irrelevant compared to this greater purpose we have at hand. Write them out of the record. They never existed.
...
One could not judge things by the brief span of one's own lifetime. That was at the core of modern arrogance: only my lifetime counts. My lifetime is 'forever.' Time before it and time after it do not exist. Everything of importance must come to pass in my lifetime. This is what drives the frenzy for change. — Tony Hendra

Some people are not meant to be a part of our lives forever. Some people visit our lives for a brief period, not to stay in it, but to show us something that we have been unable to see it ourselves. In the form of a gift, a lesson or a piece of wisdom, they change the course of our life and help us to fulfill our destiny. — Purba Chakraborty

Let us fill a cup and drink to that most noble, ridiculous, laughable, sublime figure in our lives ... The Young Man Who Was. Let us drink to his dreams, for they were rainbow-colored; to his appetites, for they were strong; to his blunders, for they were huge; to his pains for they were sharp; to his time for it was brief; and to his end, for it was to become one of us. — Herman Wouk

Because in all of the whole human race
Mrs. Lovett, there are two kinds of men and only two
There's the one staying put in his proper place
And the one with his foot in the other one's face
Look at me, Mrs Lovett, look at you.
No, we all deserve to die
Even you, Mrs Lovett, even I!
Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief
For the rest of us death will be a relief — Stephen Sondheim

For a brief while, the women ask us questions: are we looking forward to our debuts? Did we enjoy this opera or that play? As we give our slight answers, they smile, and I cannot read what is behind their expressions. do they envy us our youth and beauty? Do they feel happiness and excitement for the lives that lie ahead of us? Or do they wish for another chance at their own lives? A different chance? — Libba Bray

You are so young, Lyra, too young to understand this, but I shall tell you anyway and you'll understand it later: men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. We bear their children, who are witches if they are female, human if not; and then in the blink of an eye they are gone, felled, slain, lost. Our sons, too. When a little boy is growing, he thinks he is immortal. His mother knows he isn't. Each time becomes more painful, until finally your heart is broken. Perhaps that is when Yambe-Akka comes for you. She is older than the tundra. Perhaps, for her, witches' lives are as brief as men's are to us. — Philip Pullman

They all deserve to die.
Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why.
Because in all of the whole human race
Mrs Lovett, there are two kinds of men and only two
There's the one they put in his proper place
And the one with his foot in the other one's face
Look at me, Mrs Lovett, look at you.
Now we all deserve to die
Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why.
Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief
For the rest of us death will be a relief
We all deserve to die. — Stephen Sondheim

God sees you not only as a mortal being on a small planet who lives for a brief season - He sees you as His child. He sees you as the being you are capable and designed to become. He wants you to know that you matter to Him. — Dieter F. Uchtdorf

I am not bitter because of what has happened. On the contrary. I am secure in knowing that what we had was real, and I am happy we were able to come together for even a short period of time. And if, in some distant place in the future, we see each other in our new lives, I will smile at you with joy, and remember how we spent a summer beneath the trees, learning from each other and growing in love. And maybe, for a brief moment, you'll feel it, too, and you'll smile back, and savor the memories we will always share together.
I love you, Allie.
Noah — Nicholas Sparks

This is it, I thought. This is the part of us that makes our brief, improbable little lives worth living: the ability to reach through our own isolation and find strength, and comfort, and warmth for and in each other. This is what human beings do. This is what we live for, the way horses live to run. — Martha N. Beck

Today, men, I ask you your lives."
"I ask of you your lives and your courage. I ask of your faith, your honor
your strength, and your compassion. For today I lead you to die. I will not ask you to welcome this event. I will not insult you by calling it well, or just, or even glorious. But I will say this ...
... "Each moment you fight is a gift to those in this cavern. Each second we fight is a second longer that thousands of people can draw breath. Each stroke of the sword, each koloss felled, each breath earned is another victory! It is a person protected for a moment longer, a life extended, an enemy frusturated!"
There was a brief pause.
"In the end they shall kill us. But first they shall fear us! — Brandon Sanderson

(Until the end of their lives, these men and women would tell stories about the summer they followed Lyndon Johnson and his Flying Windmill around Texas; as Oliver Knight of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram would write about one trip, "That mad dash from Navasota to Conroe in which I dodged stumps at 70 MPH just to keep up with that contraption will ever be green in my memory.") At the landing site, there would be the brief respite — Robert A. Caro

They all fear death, but they want to hurry and cast away the time remaining between now and the grave. 'I can't wait till this day's over,' they say. 'I wish this week would end,' they say. 'I can't wait until next month,' they say. All of life they will ever know lies in the present breath that they are granted. But they, who would think us crazy for throwing away socks, throw away everything in their rush to obliterate their lives and be devoured all the sooner by their greatest fear. The end and its grave-mold. Their beginning is their end: a brief, nervous twitch of panic and dread, and nothing more. — Nick Tosches

This power became addicting to many elected officials who, instead of going to Washington, DC, for a brief time to represent their constituency, wanted to hold their positions for extended periods of time - even for life. This growing power and the progressive intrusion of government into the lives of the people was so insidious that it went largely undetected. — Ben Carson

Yet powerful as they were, as powerful as music that brings heart-piercing pain, tears, laughter, with its enchantments, they were as music, subordinate to their own creator. Humans need not, Paks saw, worship their immortality, their cool wisdom, their knowledge of the taig, their ability to repattern mortal perceptions. In brief mortal lives humans met challenges no elf could meet, learned strategies no elf could master, chose evil or good more direct and dangerous than elf could perceive. Humans were shaped for conflict, as elves for harmony; each needed the other's balance of wisdom, but must cleave to its own nature. It was easy for an immortal to counsel patience, withdrawal until a danger passed . . . — Elizabeth Moon

Mr. Poe opened his mouth to say something, but erupted into a brief fit of coughing. "I have made arrangements," he said finally, "for you to be raised by a distant relative of yours who lives on the other side of town. His name is Count Olaf. — Lemony Snicket

Life is only a brief stop on the road to eternity. Our loved ones, acquaintances, and strangers pass away before our very eyes on a daily basis. Yet each of us carries on with our lives as if we will live forever. This is merely an illusion; of course, as it is an inevitable consequence of life that each of us must die. — Jeff W. Horton

There was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

There is a brief time for sex, and a long time when sex is out of place. But when it is out of place as an activity there still should be the large and quiet space in the consciousness where it lives quiescent. Old people can have a lovely quiescent sort of sex, like apples, leaving the young quite free for their sort. — D.H. Lawrence

Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see. The span we live is small - small — Marcus Aurelius

Some things exist in our lives for but a brief moment. And we must let them go on to light another sky. — Renee Ahdieh

Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Or that this noble vintage is grape juice, and the purple robes are sheep wool dyed with shellfish blood. Or making love - something rubbing against your penis, a brief seizure and a little cloudy liquid. Perceptions like that - latching onto things and piercing through them, so we see what they really are. That's what we need to do all the time - all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust - to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrusts them. Pride is a master of deception: when you think you're occupied in the weightiest business, that's when he has you in his spell. — Marcus Aurelius

Our lives have been depicted as an enclosure in endlessness (parenthesis). As life is brief, we pass on without bringing anything with us, in this manner the genuine importance of life is to offer and to serve humankind. When we result in these present acknowledgments, it provides us a superior viewpoint in life and how to identify with others. This living is demonstrated to bring enormous returns other than the result of individual gain. — Gladys Adevey

She held in her hands for one brief moment the globe which we spend our lives in trying to shape, round, whole, and entire from the confusion of chaos. — Virginia Woolf

They'd lived their lives on tightropes, never knowing where the next paycheck was coming from or if one was coming at all, their personal lives a mishmash of backstage affairs and dressing room brawls endured for the brief heady adrenaline rush brought by the orchestra's overture and glare of white lights. — Michael Callahan

If the most connected we've ever felt with another person was in that brief moment of apology and regret after physical abuse, then we'll seek that abuse for the rest of our lives. — Vironika Tugaleva

Don't be upset that you can't attain constant happiness. It's the quickest way to feel like a failure in life. If each of our lives represented a page in a book, happiness would be the punctuation. It breaks up the parts that are too long. It closes off some things, divides others. But it's brief - showing up when it's needed and filling tired paragraphs with breaks. — Tarryn Fisher

In this scheme of things we don't create our lives; we are summoned by life. The important answers are not found inside, they are found outside. This perspective begins not within the autonomous self, but with the concrete circumstances in which you happen to be embedded. This perspective begins with an awareness that the world existed long before you and will last long after you, and that in the brief span of your life you have been thrown by fate, by history, by chance, by evolution, or by God into a specific place with specific problems and needs. Your job is to figure certain things out: What does this environment need in order to be made whole? What is it that needs repair? What tasks are lying around waiting to be performed? As the novelist Frederick Buechner put it, At what points do my talents and deep gladness meet the world's deep need? — David Brooks

And for this imperfect immortality, what prices have been paid? How many livers, lungs, and veins? Shredded, polluted, shot? How many children deserted, family secrets betrayed, sordid trysts laid out for strangers to see? How many wives and husbands shoved to the side? How many ovens scorched with our hair? Gun barrels slid between our lips? Bathtubs slowly reddened by our blood and twisting drowned that drowned us? How many flawed pages burned in disgust and reduced to ashes? How many flawless moments observed from just a slight distance so that, later, we might reduce them to words? All with an unspoken prayer that these hard-won truths might outlast the brief years of our lives. — Kristopher Jansma

You want fantasy? Here's one ... There's this species that lives on a planet a few miles above molten rock and a few miles below a vacuum that'd suck the air right out of them. They live in a brief geological period between ice ages, when giant asteroids have temporarily stopped smacking into the surface. As far as they can tell, there's nowhere else in the universe where they could stay alive for ten seconds.
And what do they call their fragile little slice of space and time? They call it real life. — Terry Pratchett

The world is still new ... it seems old to us, but only seems because our lives are so short ... our human race has been around for such a brief amount of time that the universe hasn't had the chance to detect us yet. One blink is all it needs to miss our dance through actuality. — Carlton Mellick III

Tukum is at times forgetful about his pigs, being readily distracted by other children, dragonflies, puddles of water, and wild foods.
Nevertheless, Tukem is a very proud little boy, and since his nami lives Lukigin, where his mother has already gone, he has decided to go away for good. This morning he put on his thin neck the cowrie collar with its brief string of shells which is his sole belonging, he smeared his body with pig grease until it shone, in order to make a fine impression at Lukigin ... Then he set off alone on the long journey in the sun across the woods and fields, a small brown figure with a flat head and pot belly. His back was turned on Wuperainma, his pigs and his friends, his childhood, and he clutched a frail stick in his hand. — Peter Matthiessen

Our lives are so brief and unimportant. The cosmos cares nothing for us. For what we've done; Had we wrought evil instead of good. Had I chosen to abuse the Apple instead of seal it away. None of it would have mattered. There is no counting. No reckoning. No final judgement. There is simply silence. And darkness. Utter and absolute ...
-Altair — Assassins Creed

Our time is brief, and it will pass no matter what we do. So let us have purpose in spending it. Let us spend it so that our time matters to each of us, and matters to all those whose lives we touch. — Philip Zimbardo

Your perspective is vital to your happiness. Some, blind to the bountiful opportunities around them, live lives of sadness and despair with brief moments of joy. Be alive to the abundant potential that surrounds you so that you live a life of peace and happiness with periods of challenging growth. — Richard G. Scott

They all deserve to die.
Even you, Mrs. Lovett
Even I.
Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief
For the rest of us death would be relief. — Stephen Sondheim

They are beyond me.
These humans.
With their brief lives and their tiny dreams and their hopes that seem as fragile as glass.
Until you see them by starlight, that is. — Amie Kaufman

These include Philip Marshall Dale, Medical Biographies: The Ailments of Thirty-Three Famous Persons (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952); Brian Dillon, The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives (New York: Faber and Faber, 2010); Douglas Goldman et al., Retrospective Diagnoses of Historical Personalities as Viewed by Leading Contemporary Psychiatrists (Bloomfield, NJ: Schering Corporation, 1958); Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Free Press, 1993); Jeffrey A. Kottler, Divine Madness: Ten Stories of Creative Struggle (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006); Philip Mackowiak, Post-Mortem: Solving History's Great Medical Mysteries (Philadelphia: American College of Physicians, 2007); Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); David Rettew, Child Temperament: New Thinking About the Boundary Between Traits and Illness (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). Articles — Claudia Kalb

We realize, though, because we must, that remembrance is finite. It crosses only so many generations before it fades to indistinction. One man remembers his father and perhaps his grandfather and the details of the lives that were lived. But it's harder to see further back in time. I know the name of my great-grandfather, but our living time did not intersect. We did not walk the earth at the same time. Thus, to me he's a photograph; a story I heard my grandfather tell. He's not a life I remember. And my children may not know him at all, unless by chance they can find him in a book. In time, he will be forgotten entirely, just as we all will with enough revolutions of the earth around the slowly expiring sun. Each fragile heart now beating will one day stop ... We are little more than one tree's growth of leaves in hillside forest. We will enjoy our brief moment in the sun, only to fall away with all the other to make way for the next bright young generation. — Phillip Lewis

Venice is ever the fragile labyrinth at the edge of the sea and it reminds us how brief and perilous the journeys of our lives are; perhaps that is why we love it so. City of plagues and brief liaisons, city of lingering deaths and incendiary loves, city of chimeras, nightmares, pigeons, bells. You are the only city in the world whose dialect has a word for the shimmer of canal water reflected on the ceiling of a room. — Erica Jong

Deep within everyone's heart there always remains a sense of longing for that hour, that summer, that one brief moment of blossoming. For several weeks or months, rarely longer, a beautiful young woman lives outside ordinary life. She is intoxicated. She feels as if she exists beyond time, beyond its laws; she experiences not the monotonous succession of days passing by, but moments of intense, almost desperate happinness. — Irene Nemirovsky

Someday this upside-down world will be turned right side up. Nothing in all eternity will turn it back again. If we are wise, we will use our brief lives on earth positioning ourselves for the turn. — Randy Alcorn

What sense does it make to kill an animal because you enjoy the way it tastes? It might be easy to ignore the issue when you don't see it first hand, but billions of animals are killed for meat every day, living their brief lives tortured in a slaughterhouse. We kill animals for profit and pleasure, when we have the resources to get the nutrients we need from plants that we can produce ourselves. — Joseph P. Kauffman

They are such thin things, these lives of ours; cheap got, cheap lost, mere flickers against the ever dark, brief shadows on a wall. This life no more substantial than breath, a light which fills the chambers of our bodies, and is gone. — James D. Bradley

The angel of God, having secretly
Betrothed us one winter day,
Watches over our carefree lives
With fixed, darkening eyes
Because of this we love the sky,
Keen air, the fresh wind
And the blackening branches
Behind the iron fence.
Because of this we love the stern
Dark city with its many waterways.
And we love our partings,
And our brief meetings. — Anna Akhmatova