Half A Life Quotes & Sayings

I think there's always interest in how the other half live - I see myself as a down-to-earth Essex mum who just happens to be living this very glamorous life in Beverly Hills. — Penny Lancaster

While I looked, my inner self moved; my spirit shook its always-fettered wings half loose; I had a sudden feeling as if I, who never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste life. In that morning my soul grew as fast as Jonah's gourd. — Charlotte Bronte

Only soldiers and labouring men can appreciate how glorious it really is to lie late in bed in winter-time. When your life revolves around having to to be at work at seven o'clock in the morning you know everything about that ghastly lep up still half asleep and the rush to put your head under a tap of ice-cold water with the barbarous object of shocking yourself awake. — Maurice Chevalier

Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed jet! - that one strives, this one jettest all in vain! In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith All thy unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living things, exhaled as air, but water now. — Herman Melville

Hiro and Chuck grab the closest thing they can find to a corner table. Hiro
buttonholes a waiter and surreptitiously orders a pitcher of Pub Special, mixed
half and half with nonalcoholic beer. This way, Chuck ought to remain awake a
little longer than he would otherwise.
It doesn't take much to make him open up. He's like one of these old guys from
a disgraced presidential administration, forced out by scandal, who devotes the
rest of his life to finding people who will listen to him. — Neal Stephenson

People in the metros are busy making ends meet, but through my films, I like to give the reality of life a skip, and choose concepts which will give audiences a stress-free two-and-a-half hours. — Rohit Shetty

Zoe readied her arrows. Grover lifted his pipes. Thalia raised her shield and I noticed a tear running down her cheek. Suddenly it occurred to me: this had happened to her before.She had been cornered on Half-
Blood Hill. She'd willingly given her life for her friends. But
this time she couldn't save us. — Rick Riordan

But this is what ... people are so often and disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment ...
And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half broken things that they would like to call their happiness, and their futures?
And so each of them loses himself to the other for the sake of the other person, and loses the other. And loses the vast possibilities ... in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come, nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment and poverty. — Rainer Maria Rilke

I had loved Kitty -I would always love Kitty. But I had lived with her a kind of queer half-life, hiding from my own true self. Since then I had refused to love at all, had become - or so I thought - a creature beyond passion, driving others to their secret, humiliating confessions of lust; but never offering my own. — Sarah Waters

Sometimes life is intensely interesting and meaningful, and this meaning seems to be an objective fact, like sunlight. At other times it's as meaningless and futile as the wind. We accept this eclipse of meaning as we accept changes in the weather. If I wake up with a bad cold or a headache, I seem to be deaf to meaning. Now if I woke up physically deaf or half-blind, I'd feel there was something wrong and consult a doctor. But when I'm deaf to meaning, I accept it as something natural. Esmond didn't accept it as natural. And he also noticed that every time we're sexually stimulated, meaning returns. We can hear again. So he pursued sex as a way of recovering meaning. — Colin Wilson

It is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees. — Oscar Wilde

You are the strangest girl I've ever met," he said, like he thought I was joking. He picked up his water bottle and gave me a sideways glance. "Have you ever kissed anybody?" he asked, and took a sip.
I smirked. "There aren't a whole lot of opportunities in the digital world. I did practice on my hand once. It didn't do anything for me."
Justin coughed on the water he was swallowing and I slapped my hand over my mouth.
"Did I just say that out loud?" I mumbled.
He was half coughing, half laughing. "Yes, you did," he managed to say.
"Delete, delete, delete," I said, and pushed an imaginary button in the air. "I really miss that feature."
"No, that's the good stuff. People always want to delete the good stuff." His eyes lit up. "That's a cool idea, though. What would you say, right now, if you could immediately delete it, so no one read it? — Katie Kacvinsky

Prusis told me that the fluke's raging in Moscow, and there's nothing to bury people in. All the material's been used up. So I decided to come out and set things straight.'
Ostap, who had been listening curiously to the entire conversation, stepped in. 'Listen, pops. It's Paris where the flu is raging.'
'In Paris?'
'Well, yes. So go to Paris. You'll rake it in there! It's true that you'll have a few difficulties with the visa, but don't get down about it, pops. If Briand takes a shine to you, your life won't be half-bad: you'll be set up as personal coffin-maker to the municipality of Paris. — Ilya Ilf

Even though my songs may sound very personal, to me most of them are fiction. It is a great way for me to be able to live a fantasy life as a writer because I get to be someone else, someplace else for three and a half minutes, just like the listener. — Nanci Griffith

A steamer is like an inhaler, so you can inhale this oil or frankincense or eucalyptus. Before I go onstage, I spend half an hour taking in that steam, and it saves my life! — Rita Ora

By this point Viviane Lavender had loved Jack Griffith for twelve years, which was far more than half of her life. If she thought of her love as a commodity and were to, say, eat it, it would fill 4,745 cherry pies. If she were to preserve it, she would need 23,725 glass jars and labels and a basement spanning the length of Pinnacle Lane.
If she were to drink it, she'd drown. — Leslye Walton

With a modest amount of looks and talent and more than a modicum of serendipity, I've managed to stretch my 15 minutes of fame into more than half a century of good fortune. — Robert Vaughn

Later, when his desires had been satisfied, he slept in an odorous whorehouse, snoring lustily next to an insomniac tart, and dreamed. He could dream in seven languages: Italian, Spanic, Arabic, Persian, Russian, English and Portughese. He had picked up languages the way most sailors picked up diseases; languages were his gonorrhea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague,his plague. As soon as he fell asleep half the world started babbling in his brain, telling wondrous travelers' tales. In this half-discovered world every day brought news of fresh enchantments. The visionary, revelatory dream-poetry of the quotidian had not yet been crushed by blinkered, prosy fact. Himself a teller of tales, he had been driven out of his door by stories of wonder, and by one in particular, a story which could make his fortune or else cost him his life. — Salman Rushdie

I remember this scene because it was embarrassing to live through it, and because remembering it is a way of knowing that I am half-true to my beliefs when the time comes. I sit silently defending them and I don't sell them out, but I put on a face that lets people think I'm on the winning team, that I'm laughing along with them instead of just standing among them. I save the best parts for myself and savor them in silence. Number three, power of flight. Number four, marauder. Enough vision to really see something. A stack of gold coins and a ledger. People want all kinds of things out of life, I knew early on. — John Darnielle

We run for an hour and a half?"
"Five miles."
"Every morning?"
"Every morning."
"Even Saturdays and Sunday."
"Yes, but you don't have to do the obstacle course on the weekend."
Obstacle course? Sterling didn't say anything about an obstacle course did he? I'd never run five miles in my entire life and now i was going to have to do it every day? And with obstacles on most of those days? I am going to die, I thought, I am literally going to have a heart attack and die the very first day.
Well, that's one way to get out of being a mandate." — Christine Manzari

There is a time when every person who encounters Jesus, who believes Jesus is the Son of God, decides that they will spend their life following Him. Some people, like the Apostle Paul, make this decision the minute they meet Him, the minute they become a Christian. Others, like the Apostle Peter, endure years of half-hearted commitment and spiritual confusion before leaping in with all their passion. Still others may enjoy some benefits of God's love and grace without entering into the true joy of a marriage with their maker. — Donald Miller

Instead of facing a crisis as I approached middle age, I discovered that a new and better life lay before me. I called the process of discovery 'halftime,' and the outcome led to my second half. — Bob Buford

I want to encourage people to make healthy life choices, whether it's training for a half-marathon, or eating more vegetables. — Kina Grannis

Or even a really good hug! Jesus, your arms around another person, someone's arms round you, tight, so tight. Cause it's impossible to be happy all the time, to have a happy whole life, but you can be happy in bursts: with a really good hug you could be happy for...for half an hour maybe, and then that would be the best way, not to waste your time trying to get permanently happy, but just the next half-hour you are happy for, well immediately after, just fucking kill yourself. — Duncan McLean

It's easy to feel happy when things are going your way. The trick is to remain inspired in difficult situations. That's where life stops being a game of chance and becomes one of skill. That's when, if you can stay serene in the face of adversity, you get back on track in half the time it might otherwise take. — Jonathan Cainer

There were no good bands in my town. You know, there's like this magic town where every kid started a band in high school, and half of them were good and have careers based on relationships built at that time? That wasn't what my life was like at all. — Autre Ne Veut

A life lived in fear is a life half lived. — Carrie Hope Fletcher

Real life is all beginnings. Days, weeks, children, journeys, marriages, inventions. Even a murder is the beginning of a criminal. Perhaps even a spree. Everything is prologue. Every story has a stutter. It just keeps starting and starting until you decide to shut the camera off. Half the time you don't even realise that what you're choosing for breakfast is the beginning of a story that won't pan out till you're sixty and staring at the pastry that made you a widower. No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story. Or never even get one so much as half-begun. — Catherynne M Valente

It's as though not even that most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance. A century of destruction unlike any other in its extremity befalls and blights the human race - scores of millions of ordinary people condemned to suffer deprivation upon deprivation, atrocity upon atrocity, evil upon evil, half the world or more subjected to pathological sadism as social policy, whole societies organized and fettered by the fear of violent persecution, the degradation of individual life engineered on a scale unknown throughout human history, nations broken and enslaved by ideological criminals who rob them of everything, entire populations so demoralized as to be unable to get out of bed in the morning with the minutest desire to face the day ... all the terrible touchstones presented by this century, and here they are up in arms about Faunia Farley. — Philip Roth

He faces the burdens of belittlement a third time as he grows older, and settles into an existence that he has embraced, or that has been forced upon him. A carapace of routine, of compromise, of silent surrenders, of half-term solutions, and of diminished consciousness begins to form around him. He turns himself over to the rigidified version of the self: the character. He begins to die small deaths, many times over. He fails to die only once, which is what he would desire if he were able fully to recognize the value of life. This third encounter with belittlement reveals belittlement for what it in fact is: death by installments. — Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out,
swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing ...
And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes.
And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still
red, his eyes not yet extinguished.
Behind me, I heard the same man asking:
"For God's sake, where is God?"
And from within me, I heard a voice answer:
"Where He is? This is where
hanging here from this gallows ... "
That night, the soup tasted of corpses. — Elie Wiesel

I've had an absolutely charmed life in every aspect of it. I do for my job what I would do for a hobby if it wasn't my job. Half the secret of happiness, I'm ecstatically happily married with three great kids, you know. It's been a blessed life. — Graeme Base

I swear I've spent half my life hiding behind a couch and the other half wondering why no one was paying attention to me. On — Sarah Hepola

Everybody's got skeletons in the closets. Every once in a while, you've got to open up the closet and the let the skeletons breathe. Half the time, the very thing you think is gonna destroy you or ruin you is the very thing that nobody cares about. My advice to people with skeletons is to dust them off every now and then
as long as your closet's aint full of them. It's not good to have more than two or three. — Tyler Perry

Richard Rohr says the skills that take you through the first half of your life are entirely unhelpful for the second half. To press the point a little bit: those skills I developed that supposedly served me well for the first half, as I inspect them a little more closely, didn't actually serve me at all. They made me responsible and capable and really, really tired. They made me productive and practical, and inch by inch, year by year, they moved me further and further from the warm, whimsical person I used to be . . . and I missed her. The — Shauna Niequist

A half roll of Life Savers fused to the pockets,
And in yet another, a lone unwrapped mint
Had bundled itself in a stole of gray lint. — David Rakoff

Men, to exist, to become complete and mature, need to feel the joy of fatherhood. When a man does not have this desire, something is missing in this man, it is like an incomplete life: a life that stops half way. The grace of fatherhood; of giving life to others, of pastoral paternity, of spiritual paternity is a gift from God. — Pope Francis

One of the lessons I have learned in my own life is that if you don't act on life, life has a habit of acting on you. The days slip into weeks, the weeks slip into months and the months slip into years. Pretty soon it's all over and you are left with nothing more than a heart filled with regret over a life half lived. — Robin S. Sharma

It was one of the most sublimely exhilarating moments of my life. I was half a step in front of the real, an inch or two beyond the confines of my body, and when the thing happened just as I thought it would, I felt my skin had become transparent. I wasn't occupying space anymore so much as melting into it. What was around me was also inside me, and I had only to look into myself in order to see the world. — Paul Auster

A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other dishevelled, bespectacled writers. He says very 'deep' things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published. — Paulo Coelho

These students of mine, like the rest of their generation, were different from mine in one fundamental aspect. My generation complained of a loss, the void in our lives that was created when our past was stolen from us, making us exile in our own country. Yet we had a past to compare with the present; we had memories and images of what had been taken away. But my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin. This generation had no past. Their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they had never had. It was this lack, their sense of longing for the ordinary, taken-for-granted aspects of life, that gave their words a certain luminous quality akin to poetry. — Azar Nafisi

I might believe I had unusual talent if I did not know what good music was; I might enjoy half an hour's practice a day if I were busy and happy the rest of the time. You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed! I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning. — Jane Addams

It's a Magril - a bird that's native to Gillikin Country. It spends half its life as a beetle, and when it's an adult, it goes to sleep for a year and wakes up as this majestic creature."
"Kind of like a butterfly."
"Kind of like you," he said. — Danielle Paige

It was in his high school music class that he first became acquainted with a battered caramel-colored Stella Parlor. When Harlan raked his fingers over the six strings, his entire body vibrated. He'd never thought of himself as incomplete - one half of something he could name - but there it was, the very thing that had been missing from his young life. — Bernice L. McFadden

They made us believe that each one of us is the half of an orange, and that life only makes sense when u find that other half.
They did not tell us that we were born as whole, and that no-one in our lives deserve to carry on his back such responsibility of completing what is missing on us: we grow through life by ourselves. If we have a good company it's just more pleasant. — John Lennon

Half my life was spent trying to be a better person, but you reach a certain age and you realize you don't have a choice about who you are. All of us are slaves to ourselves. — Gareth P. Jones

Life is full of scary things," he used to tell Kat. "The trick is not to let your fears get in the way of your living. Whatever else you do, Katherine, don't settle for a life half-lived. — C.S. Harris

I don't know about some of these other people, particularly the ministers who served my uncle."
"Can't you get rid of them?"
Kaddar shook his head. "The country's already in turmoil. I need to keep a few of the same faces around, at least until I get their measure."
"It doesn't sound like much fun. I wish you luck with it."
"I'll need luck," Kaddar took her hand. "Daine, I found my uncle's papers. He was going to have me arrested and charged with conspiring against him - which means he planned to have me killed. I owe you my life. I know this will sound trite, but I mean it: whatever you want that I can give, even to half of my kingdom, all you need do is ask."
Daine gave him a skeptical look. "Your ministers wouldn't like the half-kingdom part."
He grinned. "Actually, they want to arrest you for crimes against the state. — Tamora Pierce

Eating and food are a wonderful part of our life's experience, and half of us are walking around dreading having to figure out what to put in our mouths. — Gabrielle Reece

The character we exhibit in the latter half of our life need not necessarily be, though it often is, our original character, developed further, dried up, exaggerated, or diminished. It can be its exact opposite, like a suit worn inside out. — Marcel Proust

There has to be a womp on the side of the head that defeats and undercuts this game of performance. It has to fall apart. Now unfortunately, that very often does not happen until what I call the second half of life, when there's been enough death in the family and you start experiencing your own physical deterioration. — Richard Rohr

That's how, on the second-to-last day of the job, the convict crew that tarred the plate-factory roof in 1950 ending up sitting in a row at ten o'clock on a spring morning, drinking Black Label beer supplied by the hardest screw that ever walked a turn at Shawshank Prison. That beer was piss-warm, but it was still the best I ever had in my life. We sat and drank it and felt the sun on our shoulders, and not even the expression of half-amusement, half-contempt on Hadley's face - as if he was watching apes drink beer instead of men - could spoil it. It lasted twenty minutes, that beer-break, and for those twenty minutes we felt like free men. We could have been drinking beer and tarring the roof of one of our own houses. — Stephen King

Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln's Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer's rule applies: Have the courage to write badly. — Joshua Wolf Shenk

You've got no time at all, but it seems like you've got forever. You've got nothing to do, but it seems like you've got everything.
You make coffee and smoke a few cigarettes; and the hands of the clock have gone crazy on you. They haven't moved hardly, they've hardly budged out of the place you last saw them, but they've measured off a half? two-thirds? of your life. You've got forever, but that's no time at all. — Jim Thompson

It's not a case of the glass being half full or half empty; more that we tipped a whole half-pint into an empty pint pot. I had to see how much was there, though, and now I know. — Nick Hornby

You are no longer a young girl who believes that she should be out of life what is best. Just nothing you do not. A couple of times you get lucky and drop you from the sky this or that, accidentally and undeservedly, but most of the things you have to fight it alone and you can enjoy if you get half of what you wanted. — Charlotte Link

Funny thing about life, it's so easy to view it from the outside in. We can see the exact point where our friends fuck up, do the wrong thing, are blind to what's right in front of them. As in, why the fuck won't they just listen to us and take our advice instead of bumbling all over the place? We watch horror movies and know when to shout at the dumb girl who goes in the basement to investigate that noise; we revel in her stupidity, feel superior to it. If it were us, we assure ourselves, we wouldn't be so stupid. Sure we would; we just wouldn't realize the danger. Because the truth is, we're walking deaf, dumb, and blind half of the time. And even though I can tell myself this afterward, after I fuck up, it doesn't make me feel any better. Because I'm about to do a fuck up royale. With cheese. — Kristen Callihan

I think that man was half-right. He is better off out of the game - but the game may not be better off without him. A man should not exist for himself alone. Life made an investment in him, and that investment was not paid off. — Piers Anthony

James Thompson, a twenty-six-year-old cafeteria worker, eloquently articulated the Negro dilemma in a letter he wrote to the Pittsburgh Courier: "Being an American of dark complexion," wrote Thompson, "these questions flash through my mind: 'Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?' ... 'Will colored Americans suffer still the indignities that have been heaped upon them in the past?' These and other questions need answering; I want to know, and I believed every colored American, who is thinking, wants to know. — Margot Lee Shetterly

Thus, each day we are given a choice. Do we remember that we did not come here to suffer? Do we remember that we deserve the best in our relationships, our careers, and our health, and that we have everything we need within us to claim this? Do we remember that we deserve to be treated with kindness, love, and respect both by ourselves and by others? Or, do we settle for a half-lived life? Do we compromise ourselves and abandon our soul's inner — Blake D. Bauer

There is no compensation for the woman who feels that the chief relation of her life has been no more than a mistake. She has lost her crown. The deepest secret of human blessedness has half whispered itself to her, and then forever passed her by. — George Eliot

I'll only ever worship these lips. I'll only ever worship this body." Gripping the back of her neck tighter, Gavin deepened the kiss. "When I look at you, I feel like I'm looking at the other half of myself. You've filled the empty space in my soul, and because of that, you're a goddess to me. That's the way I'm always going to treat you. For the rest of your life. I promise you that. I fucking promise. — Gail McHugh

Viola had a harrowing story about riding a bicycle west out of the burnt-out ruins of a Connecticut suburb, aged fifteen, harboring vague notions of California but set upon by passersby long before she got there, grievously harmed, joining up with other half feral teenagers in a marauding gang and then slipping away from them, walking alone for a hundred miles, whispering French to herself because all the horror in her life had transpired in English and she thought switching languages might save her, wandering into a town through which the Symphony passed five years later. — Emily St. John Mandel

With life as short as a half taken breath, don't plant anything but love. — Rumi

Murtagh was right about women. Sassenach, I risked my life for ye, committing theft, arson, assault, and murder into the bargain. In return for which ye call me names, insult my manhood, kick me in the ballocks and claw my face. Then I beat you half to death and tell ye all the most humiliating things have ever happened to me, and ye say ye love me." He laid his head on his knees and laughed some more. Finally he rose and held out a hand to me, wiping his eyes with the other.
"You're no verra sensible, Sassenach, but I like ye fine. Let's go. — Diana Gabaldon

With God's help, I've not had a drink in nine and a half years. That's my whole story right there. And because of that, I'm doing this. I'm making records, I'm touring. I was so involved in just getting brain damaged, I wasn't doing anything. I had great ideas, many notebooks filled with notes, some of them I can read and some of them I just can't read, but I really didn't do anything constructive, it was all just good ideas. Now I'm trying to lead a constructive life a day at a time. — Ringo Starr

He slouched back in his seat, looking tired, and leaned his face on his shoulder to look at me while he played with my hair. He started to hum a song, and then, after a few bars, he sang it. Quietly, sort of half-sung, half-spoken, incredibly gentle. I didn't catch all the words, but it was about his summer girl. Me. Maybe his forever girl. His yellow eyes were half-lidded as he sang, and in that golden moment, hanging taut in the middle of an icecovered landscape like a single bubble of summer nectar, I could see how my life could be stretched out in front of me. — Maggie Stiefvater

No woman should have as her life's mate a man who has mated with half the females in England, who brings home diseases and litters the countryside with his butter stamps. It's wrong. — Barbara Metzger

I don't think I've ever not had a dark side. But one of the wonderful reasons why you go into this business is that half your life you live in a fantasy, which is somebody else's life. It's actually a great release because you're not having to deal with the itty-bitty bits of life. — Felicity Kendal

We talked through Gillie's life from start to finish, including all her accomplishments and major life events. The woman fell asleep with a dreamy half smile still on her lips.
I remained by her bedside. Cog would be amused by my efforts to comfort an upper. No. Not amused. Proud. I liked Ella. She was a good sort, much nicer than Trella, and I hoped she managed to survive the next thirty hours. — Maria V. Snyder

You've a very important, early decision to make in your life: are you going to be alone, or are you going to be with somebody else? Are you going to be sane, or not lonely? A couple is a strange thing; it's an organism that's half as intelligent as the most intelligent member. And you both know who it is. — Dylan Moran

Shelley Jackson's 'Half Life' is the textual equivalent of an installation, a multivocal, polymorphous, dialogic, dystopian satire wrapped around a murder mystery wrapped around a bildungsroman. — Stacey D'Erasmo

Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way. — Henry David Thoreau

Joel Lane documents a life we don't quite live, in a city we can't quite find: half glimpsed and half imagined, we know it's out there somewhere. Waiting, maybe. Mixing fear with desire, reputation with regret. Touching the blood-beat of our secret hunger with the rhythms of a music that never felt alien till now. Wasted lives, with never a wasted word. It's an extraordinary achievement: vivid as neon, real as rain. Devastating. — Chaz Brenchley

Jack, who apparently always had to be moving in some way, had made up for the missing knife by grabbing a half loaf of French bread and methodically ripping it into tiny pieces.
"What," I said, narrowing my eyes. "Why don't faeries like bread?"
"Hmm?" Jack looked up, then shrugged. "I dunno."
Lend picked up a piece, crumbling it. "My dad said he thought it was because it was the staff of life for people."
"Nasty stuff tastes like mold," Jack said. "I tried a piece once a while ago when I was still trying to force myself to eat normal food so I could stay here. It was like a shock to my whole system." He shuddered at the memory. — Kiersten White

When you've spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment, it's exciting to have a real crisis on your hands. — Margaret Thatcher

I had prepared myself for the second half of my life [to be] filled with other passions that don't include being in front of the camera. And then all of a sudden I got more work and more work and more work. And I went, "Well maybe things have shifted." And I think they have. — Sandra Bullock

I did not imagine that the second half of my life would be spent on efforts to avert a mortal danger to humanity created by science. — Joseph Rotblat

This is a living planet. Look around. Mars, Venus, Jupiter. Look beyond our solar system. Where else is there a place that works, that is just right for the likes of us? It has not happened just instantly. It is vulnerable to our actions. But it's the result of four and a half billion years of evolution, of change over time. And it changes every day, all the time. It would be in our interest to try to maintain a certain level of stability that has enabled us to prosper, to not wreck the very systems that give us life. — Sylvia Earle

I blame myself without reserve for my weakness. It was merely weakness. One half-hour with Art was always more to me than a cycle with you. Nothing really at any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance to me compared with Art. But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination. — Oscar Wilde

That was the funny thing. What happened to John would pass for his classmates, but for John it was a long challenging road ahead of him. Who knew where he would be sent, maybe a juvenile detention center? He might keep in touch with a few friends if his parents let him, but he would never return to Wakefield High. His peers had no clue the journey ahead of him, that his life was changed forever.
And they had no idea what lay ahead for Lilly. No one knew she had been given a task by the Archangels to fight a war against pure evil. They had no idea that Lilly would spend most of her free time not training for a marathon, but training to kill demons. John and Lilly were not all too different. — Ellie Elisabeth

If the spread of Pakistani cuisine is the single greatest improvement in British public life over the past half-century, it is also worth noting that the bombs used for the failed London transport attacks of July 21, 2005, were made from a mix of hydrogen peroxide and chapati flour. — Christopher Caldwell

Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.
Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.
Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need.
Take only that which is given.
Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share.
Give thanks for what you have been given.
Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

The first element in a symmetrical life is work. Three-fourths of our time is probably spent in work. Of course the meaning of it is that our work should be just as religious as our worship, and unless we can work for the glory of God three-fourths of life remains unsanctified. The proof that work is religious is that most of Christ's life was spent in work. During a large part of the first thirty years of His life He worked with the hammer and the plane, making ploughs and yokes and household furniture. Christ's public ministry occupied only about two and a half years of His earthly life; the great bulk of His time was simply spent in doing common everyday tasks, and ever since then work has had a new meaning. — Henry Drummond

If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about half an hour to reach the time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get back to the beginnings of human life. But it would take you twenty years to reach the dawn of the Cambrian period. — Bill Bryson

A year earlier my parents had moved us out of the city to a split-level on Long Island, their idea of the American dream, which meant it as now an hour-and-a-half commute via the 7:06 Hicksville to Penn Station every morning. (Dark City Lights) — Jonathan Santlofer

It is thus that mutual cowardice keeps us in peace. Were one half of mankind brave and one cowards, the brave would be always beating the cowards. Were all brave, they would lead a very uneasy life; all would be continually fighting; but being all cowards, we go on very well. — Samuel Johnson

Think about a moment, a little centimeter of time you'd happily exist in forever, if time could be laid out along the spine of a ruler. Maybe it haunts you in that blue inch of half consciousness just before you're fully awake. — Kate Ellison

Cooper's tremendous love and energy and unchained freedom had captured life itself. Now, as the last shovelful covered him forever, I knew I would always carry a big piece of Cooper Half Malamute with me until I too was covered by the earth. — Peter Jenkins

I've lived in California for half of my life. It's weird, everyone thinks of me as this guy who's from the South ... I'm really a Californian. — Billy Bob Thornton

Sanity:
You can go through your whole life telling yourself that life is logical, life is prosaic, life is sane. Above all, sane. And I think it is. I've had a lot of time to think about that ...
I think; therefore I am. There are hairs on my face; therefore I shave. My wife and child have been critically injured in a car crash; therefore I pray. It's all logical, it's all sane.
... there's a Mr. Hyde for every happy Jekyll face, a dark face on the other side of the mirror ... You turn the mirror sideways and see your face reflected with a sinister left-hand twist, half mad and half sane.
... No one looks at that side unless they have to, and I can understand that.
... I'm the sane one. — Richard Bachman

He knew on some level he changed the course of his life. And you could do that, couldn't you, he thought as he put the RAZR back in his pocket. you could choose some paths and not others. Not always, of course. At times destiny just drove you to a destination and dropped your ass off and that was that. But on occasion you were able to pick the address. And if you had half a brain, no matter how hard it was or how wierd it felt, you went into the house.
And found yourself. — J.R. Ward

I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.' — Robert Fisk

Academic life is but half life it is a withdrawal from the fight to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself - one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear and mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. — Jack London

There are people who enjoy the life in England but don't pay a penny in tax, whereas my footballers pay more than half their income in tax. — Gordon Taylor

For the first half of my adult life, I was a Democrat. — Alphonso Jackson

We sat on the dusty floor like that for what felt like hours, our legs intertwined in the kneeling position. Like the demon and the angel reaching for one another on Jet's arm, I felt half of everything. Half pure, half used. Locked in a dark, beautiful embrace. One I wouldn't wish on anyone yet one I wouldn't ever reverse if given the chance.
Not when it had the power to save a life. - Skylla Warden — Rachael Wade

So that the life of a writer, whatever he might fancy to the contrary, was not so much a state of composition, as a state of warfare; and his probation in it, precisely that of any other man militant upon earth,
both depending alike, not half so much upon the degrees of his WIT
as his RESISTANCE. — Laurence Sterne

Rickie had a young man's reticence. He generally spoke of "a friend," "a person I know," "a place I was at." When the book of life is opening, our readings are secret, and we are unwilling to give chapter and verse. Mr. Pembroke, who was half way through the volume, and had skipped or forgotten the earlier pages, could not understand Rickie's hesitation, nor why with such awkwardness he should pronounce the harmless dissyllable "Ansell. — E. M. Forster