Quotes & Sayings About Coming A Long Way In Life

It's so weird how life is so full of moving around
people coming and going, people passing by each other all day long. You never know which person's going to steal your heart. You never know which is going to settle your soul. All you can do is look. And hope. And believe. — Natalie Lloyd

Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration: - reports of very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer coming down on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat's wings and spurts of phosphorescence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to reflect life in a diseased dream. But these kinds of inspirations Lydgate regarded as rather vulgar and vinous compared with the imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of Energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space. — George Eliot

Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else
an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood
or it may be easier to blame the map you were given
folded too many times, out-of-date, tiny print
but mostly, if you are honest, you will only be able to blame yourself.
One day I'll tell my daughter a story about a dark time, the dark days before she was born, and how her coming was a ray of light. We got lost for a while, the story will begin, but then we found our way. — Nick Flynn

We are not alone in the universe. They have been coming here for a long time ... — Edgar Mitchell

Not only to myself or before the mirror or at the hour of my death, which I hope will be long in coming, but in the presence of my children and my wife and in the face of the peaceful life I'm building, I must acknowledge: (1) That under Stalin I wouldn't have wasted my youth in the gulag or ended up with a bullet in the back of my head. (2) That in the McCarthy era I wouldn't have lost my job or had to pump gas at a gas station. (3) That under Hitler, however, I would have been one of those who chose the path of exile, and that under Franco I wouldn't have composed sonnets to the caudillo or the Holy Virgin like so many lifelong democrats. One thing is as true as the other. My bravery has its limits, certainly, but so does what I'm willing to swallow. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragicomedy. — Roberto Bolano

I don't know what I was thinking, coming out here. There are no silver bullets in life, there's just the long, messy climb out of the pit you've dug youself. — Jodi Picoult

But for a long time, and probably far too long, I had a secret wish: the adolescently romantic idea that there was someone out there for me; someone I hadn't met yet who would ask me on a date and make sense of my life. I harbored the hope, I'm now embarrassed to admit, that like a girl in a Lifetime movie, I would look into someone's eyes and find a reflection of my inner life. But sometime between my teenage years and the first years in New York, that idea had pretty well evaporated. I'd grown up. — Diane Meier

Sometimes life isn't magical, you see. Sometimes life is everyday. Its a trip to the keycutters in a rushed lunch break. It's the light, high rattle of a lightbulb's broken filament. It's your neighbour coming round to tell you you've left your car lights on.
Yes rarely its something outer. Maybe it's the glance of a girl on Charlotte street, for example. But how long before a glance runs out? How long can you keep coasting on a look? — Danny Wallace

The time I spend in the morning - praying, sipping coffee, and coming up with my list - is a ritual I relish. I have done it for so long now that I subconsciously measure whether or not the things I'm doing match with what I should be doing, what I want to be doing, and the life I want to live. — Kristin Armstrong

If we lived for ever, what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love death - not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. . . . Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him. Behind the coffins and the skeletons that stay the vulgar mind lies something so immense that all that is great in us responds to it. Men of the world may recoil from the charnel-house that they will one day enter, but Love knows better. Death is his foe, but his peer, and in their age-long struggle the thews of Love have been strengthened, and his vision cleared, until there is no one who can stand against him. — E. M. Forster

I hope progressive ways of thinking will permeate the "mainstream" more and more in the coming years. Goddess knows we have endured a very long spell (thirty plus years) of regressive thinking and hyper conservativism dominating our culture and national discourse. It necessitates risk taking and rule breaking by people in all walks of life to swing that pendulum back though. — Ani DiFranco

Have you ever thought about those last moments of your life? Nobody wants a long, lingering illness; nobody wants just that; but it would be nice if you could have a day or two where you know it's coming. — Kidd Kraddick

The other Miller was different. Quieter. Sad, maybe, but at peace. He'd read a poem many years before called "The Death-Self," and he hadn't understood the term until now. A knot at the middle of his psyche was untying. All the energy he'd put into holding things together - Ceres, his marriage, his career, himself - was coming free. He'd shot and killed more men in the past day than in his whole career as a cop. He'd started - only started - to realize that he'd actually fallen in love with the object of his search after he knew for certain that he'd lost her. He'd seen unequivocally that the chaos he'd dedicated his life to holding at bay was stronger and wider and more powerful than he would ever be. No compromise he could make would be enough. His death-self was unfolding in him, and the dark blooming took no effort. It was a relief, a relaxation, a long, slow exhale after decades of holding it in. — James S.A. Corey

Jaron stood on top of a hill, staring blankly into the distance and taking in every detail of the scene unfolding below him. To his back the sun was setting, casting its last rays over the field below and painting the sky around him in a vast array of red and gold. He shuddered slightly as a cool breeze blew gently through the tall grass of the field, nipping sharply at his cheeks which had gone numb from standing exposed to the elements for too long. It was a seemingly perfect fall day, and he couldn't help but feel that it was somewhat ironic that it was on this day life as he knew it was coming to an end. — K.R. Fajardo

He'd never forget what Naasir had said to him when Dmitri yelled that he didn't intend to bury another child and that Naasir needed to have a care for his life.
"Am I a person, Dmitri? Will you be sad if I die?"
Hardened and cruel though he'd become, the innocent question had shaken him. "Yes," he'd said, as honest in his answer as Naasir had been in his question. "You are a person. You are Naasir. I'll lose a piece of me if you die and it's a piece I'll never get back."
Naasir had stared at him for a long time before coming over to hug him. "Okay, Dmitri. I'm sorry. I didn't know I was a person before. — Nalini Singh

It's been two of the most miserable fucking weeks of my life, stuck here without you. When I start kissing you hello, I'm not coming up for air for a good long while. So ... we're talking first. — Linda Kage

They mock Him by denying His very existence, but instead of feeling free, they just feel angry because suddenly life doesn't make sense anymore. They want to be rid of God, and they want life to have meaning anyway, and it just doesn't work and it makes them angry. And anger kills. I've lived long enough to know, and I can see it coming. Anger is going to be right at the heart of the demise of this country. America is going to fall, and when we do, we're not getting back up again. — Ann Tatlock

The word absurdity is coming to life under my pen; a little while ago, in the garden, I couldn't find it,
but neither was I looking for it, I didn't need it: I thought without words, on things, with things.
Absurdity was not an idea in my head, or the sound of a voice, only this long serpent dead at my feet,
this wooden serpent. Serpent or claw or root or vulture's talon, what difference does it make. And
without formulating anything clearly, I understood that I had found the key to Existence, the key to my
Nauseas, to my own life. In fact, all that I could grasp beyond that returns to this fundamental
absurdity. — Jean-Paul Sartre

She was breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the weight of beings, the insane or static life, the long anguish of living or dying. After so many years running from fear, fleeing crazily, uselessly, she was finally coming to a halt. At the same time she seemed to be recovering her roots, and the sap rose anew in her body, which was no longer trembling. Pressing her whole belly against the parapet, leaning toward the wheeling sky, she was only waiting for her pounding heart to settle down, and for the silence to form in her. The last constellations of stars fell in bunches a little lower on the horizon of the desert, and stood motionless. Then, with an unbearable sweetness, the waters of the night began to fill her, submerging the cold, rising gradually to the center of her being, and overflowing wave upon wave to her moaning mouth. A moment later, the whole sky stretched out above her as she lay with her back against the cold earth. — Albert Camus

Long ago, when an early galaxy began to pour light out into the surrounding darkness, no witness could have known that billions of years later some remote clumps of rock and metal, ice and organic molecules would fall together to make place called Earth; or that life would arise and thinking beings evolve who would one day capture a little of that galactic light, and try to puzzle out what had sent it on its way. And after the earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it's burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being
and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth. — Carl Sagan

Standing over his bed, watching him sleep, Luce could see it. The way their love would have bloomed here.She could see Lucia coming in to bring Daniel his meals,him opening up to her slowly. The pair being inseparable by the time Daniel recovered. And it made her feel jealous and guilty and confused because she couldn't tell right now whether their love was a beautiful thing, or whether this was yet another instance of how very wrong it was.
If she was so young when they met, they must have had a long relationship in this life.She would have gotten to spend years with him before it happened. Before she died and was reincarnated into another life completely. She must have thought they'd spend forever together-and must not even have known how long forever meant.
But Daniel knew.He always knew. — Lauren Kate

Just as apples when unripe are torn from trees, but when ripe and mellow drop down, so it is violence that takes life from young men, ripeness from old. This ripeness is so delightful to me that, as I approach nearer to death, I seem, as it were, to be sighting land, and to be coming to port at last after a long voyage. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

It's true I've been hurt a few times after revealing myself. There are people who lie in wait for the vulnerable and pounce as a way to feel powerful. But God forgive them. I'm willing to take the occasional blow to find people I connect with. As long as you're willing to turn the other cheek with the mean ones, vulnerability can get you a wealth of friends. Can you imagine coming to the end of your life, being surrounded by people who loved you, only to realize they never fully knew you? Or having poems you never shared or injustices you said nothing about? Can you imagine realizing, then, it was too late? How can we be loved if we are always in hiding? — Donald Miller

The worst part is wondering how you'll find the strength tomorrow
to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much
too long, where you'll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it's treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

If you continue to live in your past after coming to Jesus and accepting Him as Lord and Savior, then you are still a long way from moving forward — Sunday Adelaja

If you were a person in Rockhampton who is wondering where your next job was coming from, and you had the prospect of one of Australia's largest ever coal projects with a very, very long life span being developed and reviving the regional economy. And you saw the Greens in particular doing their little best to stop it happening. — George Brandis

Today it is considered as exaggeration to proclaim constant respect for every form of life as being the serious demand of a rational ethic. But the time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race existed so long before it recognized that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with real ethics. Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility to everything that has life. — Albert Schweitzer

Yes, [I spent] two long years, traveling all over the United States, all over Europe, interviewing many, many, many people who had been thrown out of their academic jobs because they taught that there was a possibility of life coming from something other than Darwinism, who thought that possibly random selection and mutations didn't account for the universe, didn't account for gravity, didn't account for why nobody had ever seen an individual species evolve
no one's ever seen an individual species evolve! — Ben Stein

It is the property of things seen for the first time, or for the first time after long, like the flowers in spring, to reawaken in us the sharp edge of sense and that impression of mystic strangeness which otherwise passes out of life with the coming of years; but the sight of a loved face is what renews a man's character from the fountain upwards. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Exercising will builds esteem from within through action on one's own behalf; it disproves the premise that only another person can provide it. The result, long in coming and always worth the effort, is the experience of authentic agency in your own life, a sense of self that cannot be destroyed because it is not dependent on anyone else. — Jeanne Safer

In the three boats story, a man is floating alone in an ocean without a life jacket when a boat passes by. "Get in. I'll save you," the boatman says. "Oh, no, it's fine," the floating man answers, "I'm putting my faith in the Lord." In time, two more boats come along, and to each rescuer the man - usually me, in Wade's telling - says, "No, no, I'm putting my faith in the Lord." Eventually, and it isn't very long in coming, the man drowns. Yet when he stands up to meet his Maker at the fated spot where some rejoice but many more cower, his Maker looks sternly down and says, "You're a fool. You're assigned to hell forever. Go there now." To which the drowned man says, "But your honor, I put my faith in you. You promised to save me." "Save you!?" fearsome God shouts from misty marmoreal heights. "Save you? Save you?" God thunders. "I sent you three boats! — Richard Ford

A movement in the vines startled her and an opossum scurried out, looked at Clare and flopped over in fake death. She had seen this twice before in her garden back home and it was difficult not to draw certain parallels, amusing ones, though if you played dead long enough the act of coming back to life was questionable. — Jim Harrison

The prime reason the Google homepage is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. In fact, it was noted that the SUBMIT button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life. — Marissa Mayer

My new 9mm didn't fit my hand as well as my old one, but it was rapidly becoming a familiar weight. At first I'd decided it was okay to wear as long as I shot only at supernatural bad guys who were already shooting at me. Lately, I'd had to broaden that definition to anytime my life was in danger. I was currently leaning toward a slightly more comprehensive rule somewhere between proactive self-defense and the-bastards-had-it-coming, which, if I survived long enough, I intended to blame on my deranged partner rubbing off on me. — Karen Chance

What is the greatest surprise you have found about life?" a university student asked me several years ago. "The brevity of it," I replied without hesitation ... Time moves so quickly, and no matter who we are or what we have done, the time will come when our lives will be over. As Jesus said, "As long as it is day, we must do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work" (John 9:4). — Billy Graham

You'll never have to fend for yourself like that, Lincoln. You never have to be alone. Why would you want to?"
He leaned back against his bedroom wall and slunk down until he was sitting on the cast-iron radiator. "I just...," he said.
"Just?"
"I need to live my life."
"You aren't living your own life now?" she asked. "I certainly never tell you what to do."
"No, I know, it's just..."
"Just?"
"It doesn't feel like I'm living my own life."
"What?"
"It feels like, as long as I stay home, I'm still living your life. like I'm still a kid."
"That's silly," she said.
"Maybe," he said. — Rainbow Rowell

And what the white students had not expected to let themselves in for, when boarding the Freedom Train, was the realisation that the black situation in America was but one aspect of the fraudulent nature of American life. They had not expected to be forced to judge their parents, their elders, and their antecedents, so harshly, and they had not realised how cheaply, after all, the rulers of the republic held their white lives to be. Coming to the defence of the rejected and the destitute, they were confronted with the extent of their own alienation, and the unimaginable dimensions of their own poverty. They were privileged and secure only so long as they did, in effect, what they were told: but they had been raised to believe that they were free. — James Baldwin

telling him how people had thought the same thing long before he and his brother were born, that it was the hubris of each generation to think this anew, to think that their time was special, that all things would come to an end with them. His father said it was hope that made people feel this, not dread. People talked of the end coming with barely concealed smiles. Their prayer was that when they went, they wouldn't go alone. Their hope was that no one would have the good fortune to come after and live a happy life without them. Thoughts — Hugh Howey

And then, leaning slowly towards him, she did something she realised she'd been wanting to do for such a long time. She kissed him.
For a second he hesitated, before letting himself fall with her, and, pulling her close, he wrapped his arms around her, pressing her to him. Breathing her in. His lips against hers. Tongue against tongue. Eyes closed. Hearts thudding. Deep, long, hungry kisses born out of the lack of any feelings of self-consciousness or embarrassment. Just two people wanting each other. Holding each other. Kissing the life out of each other.
It had been a long time coming. — Alexandra Potter

He sank more and more into apathy; little interested him apart from dolls and other children's toys. He still spoke occasionally, but mainly to produce stock sentences in the style of a brainwashed schoolboy. Franziska made a record of some of them: 'I translated much'. 'I lived in a good place called Naumburg'. 'I swam in the Saale'. 'I was very fine because I lived in a fine house'. 'I love Bismarck'. 'I don't like Friedrich Nietzsche'. It would be a mercy to think that he experienced at least a kind of vegetative contentment, but this seems not to have been the case. He suffered from his life-long curse of insomnia, and visitors downstairs were often disturbed by groans and howls coming from the upstairs bedroom. Towards the end of Franziska recorded him uttering 'More light!' (Goethe's dying words) and 'In short, dead!' suggesting that that is what he wanted to be. — Julian Young