Broken But Alive Quotes & Sayings

They have had their moment of freedom. Webley has only been a guest star. Now it's back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death - death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowledge that it will die ... . "I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn't free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can't even give you hope that it will be different someday - that They'll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology's elaborate terror, and stop using every form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level - and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive ... .." The guest star retires down the corridors. — Thomas Pynchon

I believe we're at the verge of the greatest time to be alive in this world.But Washington is holding us back. How we tax, how we regulate. We're not embracing the energy revolution in our midst, a broken immigration system that has been politicized rather than turning it into an economic driver.We're not protecting and preserving our entitlement system or reforming for the next generation. All these things languish while we have politicians in Washington using these as wedge issues. — Jeb Bush

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

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

And I realise the only way to tell the others
is through the way my voice can take these broken words
and turn it into music.
Turn it into poetry.
And I sing to make myself come alive,
but also for you,
because I'd like this to mean something.
To not disappear with the dark I will enter one day
and so now I will tell.
If not for you, then for my own heart,
because it tells me to,
and I'm learning to listen. — Charlotte Eriksson

You!" he cried. "You never hated because you never lived. I know what you are all of you, from first to last
you are the people in power! You are the police
the great, fat smiling men in blue and buttons! You are the Law, and you have never been broken. But is there a free soul alive that does not long to break you, only because you have never been broken? — G.K. Chesterton

Music eliminates my gravity. When I'm singing, I'm a ravenous pterodactyl. I'm alive and free and hungry, and I know who I am. But the flood is coming; it's weighing me down, making me prisoner to my loneliness and pain.
-character Joanna (Broken) — J. Matthew Nespoli

To be alive is to be broken. And to be broken is to stand in need of grace. Honesty keeps us in touch with our neediness and the truth that we are saved sinners. There is a beautiful transparency to honest disciples who never wear a false face and do not pretend to be anything but who they are. Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel — Kara Tippetts

Discovering more joy does not, save us from th inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreaks without being broken. — Desmond Tutu

We all get our hearts broken. We get fucked up and throw up and we cry and listen to sad songs and say we're never doing that again. But to be alive is to do it again. To love is to risk everything — Caroline Kepnes

The thing is that when you find true love it lives on, No matter if you two seperate but the love stays alive, broken, gasping for breath, love and affection, but in agony, waiting for everything to end. — Alamvusha

The truth is that life will break us and burn us at some point on the journey. This is not pessimistic or cynical but descriptive of the geography of being alive. It is part of how we are transformed by the journey. Yet when we're broken or burned by events, we feel betrayed by God. When we're broken or burned by people, we feel betrayed by other souls. — Mark Nepo

John, we cannot allow the shadow-sickness to find a place inside our hearts. In this broken cosmos we grieve. We rightly feel fury, but we must not let go of joy's embrace, which is beyond our understanding. To feel all of this means that we are alive. — Wm. Paul Young

Bleeding for a decade
For a decade,
We bleed like there is no hell but the earth
We bleed like we were born to dare
We bleed like there is nothing alive inside.
We find a clue
After a decade
Bleeding is just to breath
Simply keeps us alive. — Arzum Uzun

don't you dare, for one minute,
believe that my kindness makes me
anything but insurmountable.
i did not unzip my chest to every kind of hurt,
and stagger back, wounded and alive,
just to hear you call me weak for trying.
i opened my door to heartache -
i gave her the fucking key.
my softness for wayward strangers
has made me nothing less
than a halfway house for aching soles.
so when you open your mouth
and call me 'baby'
understand that i am not your next victim
in a laundry list of broken girls.
you think i don't know you? people like you?
people with mouths for hands.
i've got skin like topsoil
and your teeth could never take root.
so when you go looking to make a plaything
of a sunburst,
you better look for someone with less fire
than me.
because softness or no,
i will eat you alive
before i let you make a meal of me. — Ashe Vernon

I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we're grass - our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you're imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you're saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean? — John Green

I was desperate. I had to keep Annabeth alive. I imagined all the bubbles in the sea - always churning, rising. I imagined them coming together, being pulled toward me. The sea obeyed. There was a flurry of white, a tickling sensation all around me, and when my vision cleared, Annabeth and I had a huge bubble of air around us. Only our legs stuck into the water. She gasped and coughed. Her whole body shuddered, but when she looked at me, I knew the spell had been broken. She started to sob - I mean horrible, heartbroken sobbing. She put her head on my shoulder and I held her. — Rick Riordan

Dreams last so long
Even after you're gone
I know you love me
And soon you will see
You were meant for me
And I was meant for you
Go about my business, I'm doing fine
Besides, what would I say if I had you on the line
Same old story, not much to say
Hearts are broken every day
I'm half alive but I feel mostly dead
I try to tell myself it'll be all right
I just shouldn't think anymore tonight — Jewel

Getting honest with ourselves does not make us unacceptable to God. It does not distance us from God, but draws us to Him - as nothing else can - and opens us anew to the flow of grace. While Jesus calls each of us to a more perfect life, we cannot achieve it on our own. To be alive is to be broken; to be broken is to stand in need of grace. It is only through grace that any of us could dare to hope that we could become more like Christ. — Brennan Manning

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. — Gregory David Roberts

When you're a young man like yourself, life is full of wonders. Everything new. Everything an adventure. But as the years roll on, things become ordinary. Colors lose their vibrance. Stars lose their glitter. You become less in awe of the world. It loses its magic.

I don't see this as a painful thing. I think it's a mercy. I believe it's all just so it makes it easier to let the whole thing go when it's our time to pass on. But when you've lived as long as I have, the weight of the years and the tarnished luster of the world can break you down. And it's hard to be alive and be so broken. — Eric Powell

Eventually, the room was cleared, and we stood there together, chests heaving, a spray of shifters and humans on the floor in front of us. We weren't entirely undamaged - I'd taken a bruising shot to my right thigh, and Ethan had slices across his belly where he'd been caught with the edge of a bar of steel broken from someone's office chair.
But we were alive.
We glanced over at each other. I was just about to speak, but before I could get out words, his hand was at the back of my head, his mouth pressing against mine. The intensely possessive kiss left me gasping for breath, but even as he pulled back, his fingers stayed knotted in the back of my hair. — Chloe Neill

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad. — Kingsley Amis

Josh wanted to be the one to break the color barrier. When the Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson he knew it was over for him. He wasn't going to make the big leagues, and he also knew that because of his health and his bad knees his career with the Grays was about over. He didn't know what to do with himself. They say a man can't die of a broken heart, and I guess that's true. But I'll tell you this, all of this sure lessened Josh's will to keep going, to keep fighting to stay alive. — Ted Page

Throughout my lifetime I've left pieces of my heart here and there. And now, there's almost barely enough to stay alive. But I force a smile, knowing that my ambition far exceeded my talent. — Johnny Depp

The earth was quiet around him, but alive. He felt it through the soles of his feet when he walked. The vibrancy of the forest streamed into him, strengthening him. But there was less of it than there should be. The world had changed, and was still changing. It was being tamed, losing its feral wildness and strength. Alongside it, his power was dimming as well. He was still unmatched, but there were blind spots in his communion with the earth, and those blind spots were growing, shutting him off bit by bit, reducing him. The realms of men were expanding, scouring the earth, parsing it into meaningless plots and fields, breaking up the magic polarities of the wilderness... That which made him so powerful, his connection to the earth, was also becoming his only weakness. In a cold rage, he walked. As he passed, the trees spoke to him, but even the woodsy voices of the naiads and the dryads was dimming. Their echo was confused and broken, divided. — G. Norman Lippert

He is broken in three ways, sometimes four. I count them.
-He believes himself to be human, but is not actually. At least not anymore. This is similar to the way he believes himself to be alive.
-He has a grim affinity for drugs. This comes with no caveat and no parentheses. This is just a fact of life.
-He is doggedly unhappy and once decided to kill himself. Sadly, he has not really stopped.
-On certain occasions when these first three things have ceased to be bad enough, he loves me. The other sins are commonplace, forgivable under a big enough umbrella. This fourth is irrevocable. Unconscionable. In a word, it is utterly damning. — Brenna Yovanoff

Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes already scattered; as a broken link, a biological dead end, an eternal withdrawal from reality, a once complex object that now dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a l like a fallen speck of soot on a blank sheet of paper. — John Fowles

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

Neither man spoke, both lost in thought. Lucien was visited by the awful memory of the day when Cedric's parents died.
Lucien knew that Cedric had been watching over Audrey at the Sheridan townhouse on Curzon Street when a footman had come running. Cedric once told him that everything seemed to slow from that moment on. The footman was flushed and sputtered about a carriage accident and finally blurted out, "Dead, sir. Both Lord and Lady Sheridan are dead. Your sister suffered a broken arm, but is alive. Lord Rochester was nearby and helped in rescuing your sister."
Lucien would never forget that moment when he'd brought Horatia home after the accident. Cedric had taken two steps towards the door and his legs gave out, sinking to his knees.

-His Wicked Seduction — Lauren Smith

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

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

What happened, man? Gerry and Ginsberg are cold, and dead, in the ground. Kesey's stoned, and out of town. We've come to the end of the brotherhood song. The children brandish knives upon each other's throats, and their loaded 45's sit snug in lunch boxes nestled safely between Oreo cookies and a ham sandwich. Where are you now, oh ancient hipsters? Raggedy Beats beat down and broken wheel raggedy wheelchairs down ghostly geriatric wards. Where are you now, oh day-glow dreamers? Have you gotten off the bus and into your Mercedes? Did you get that second mortgage, and bear your fattened little babies? Where is that girl with flowers in her hair? Where is the man with revolution in his veins? We ask ourselves "where did we go wrong?" But there is no we. There is you, and then there is I. You do what you need to survive, And I do what I must to stay alive. We stand here Bleeding, slicing each other's wrists With the icy ridges of hardened jagged hearts, Cassandra's — Bearl Brooks

With Jason I thought I'd finally played my cards right, and now I'm just one more of those
broken, sad people out there, figuring out a year in advance where they can have Easter and
Christmas dinner without feeling like a burden or duty to others, cursing the quality of modern
movies because it's so hard to fill weeknights with movies when they're all crap, and waiting, just
waiting, for those three drinks a night to turn into four - and then, well, then I'll be applying my
makeup in the morning, combing my hair, washing my clothes, but it's not really for anyone. I'm
alive, but so what. — Douglas Coupland