Irrevocable Life Quotes & Sayings

When women hear those words, an old, old memory is stirred and brought back to life. The memory is of our absolute, undeniable, and irrevocable kinship with the wild feminine, a relationship which may have become ghostly from neglect, buried by over-domestication, outlawed by the surrounding culture, or no longer understood anymore. We may have forgotten her names, we may not answer when she calls ours, but in our bones we know her, we yearn toward her, we know she belongs to us and we to her. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Every man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims, and feels with his whole being that he can at any moment perform or not perform this or that action; but, so soon as he has done it, that action accomplished at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance. There are two sides to the life of every man: there is his individual existence which is free in proportion as his interests are abstract; and his elemental life as a unit in the human swarm, in which he must inevitably obey the laws laid down for him. — Leo Tolstoy

Mr. Cope ... ' Povy began.
Jem narrowed his eyes.
'The lad has a remarkably innocent face.'
'Innocence is a time of life, not an irrevocable blot. — Eloisa James

There are two aspects to the life of every man: the personal life, which is free in proportion as its interests are abstract, and the elemental life of the swarm, in which a man must inevitably follow the laws laid down for him.
Consciously a man lives on his own account in freedom of will, but he serves as an unconscious instrument in bringing about the historical ends of humanity. An act he has once committed is irrevocable, and that act of his, coinciding in time with millions of acts of others, has an historical value. The higher a man's place in the social scale, the more connections has with others, and the more power he has over them, the more conspicuous is the inevitability and predestination of every act he commits. "The hearts of kings are in the hand of God." The king is the slave of history. — Leo Tolstoy

He broke me down past the flesh, past the muscle, past the bone, down to my soul and in a loud provocation, he asked, "What are you made of?"
After I gathered the broken bits and pieces of my life together, I shouted at the top of my lungs, "HOPE! Unbreakable, undeniable, irrevocable hope! — Jay Grewal

In a recluse, the most irrevocable, lifelong rejection of the world often has as its basis an uncontrolled passion for the crowd, of such force that, finding when he does go out that he cannot win the admiration of a concierge, passers-by or even the coachman halted at the corner, he prefers to spend his life out of their sight, and gives up all activities which would make it necessary for him to leave the house. — Marcel Proust

I keep having this fantasy about some wide river or channel I'm on the bank of. I can look up, and on the far side is another, better self, holding hands with Mercer - that's his name, my ex - and both of them are watching me flail over here, watching me from the life I'm supposed to have had. When did it become impossible to get there from here? When did that bridge get burned? — Garth Risk Hallberg

On that golden summer day, the young woman had just finished her morning run. She had sprinted the last half mile, then stopped abruptly to catch her breath. She was bent at the waist, hands on her knees, eyes on the ground, her mind a world away, perhaps in Barcelona or Tuscany or Rome, exulting in the enchanting sights she would soon see, the splendid life she would have.

It was then that the train hit her.

Unaware, unthinking, oblivious to everything but the beguiling visions in her head, she had ended her run on the railroad tracks that wound through the center of her small Oregon town, one moment in the fullest expectancy of her glorious youth, adrenaline and endorphins coursing through her body, sugarplum visions dancing in her head, the next moment gone, the transition instantaneous, irrevocable, complete.

If I'd had to die young, hers is the death I would have chosen. — Lionel Fisher

To this husband of hers she made the last concession of married life, which is more complete, more irrevocable, than the first - she listened to him. She told herself that the years had brought her tolerance - actually they had slain what measure she had ever possessed of moral courage. She — F Scott Fitzgerald

He had come to a decision about the next step in his life. This decision was irrevocable unless he changed his mind. — Vikram Seth

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children. — Iris Murdoch

Confidence, once lost or betrayed, can never be restored again to the same measure; and we learn too late in life that our acts of deception are irrevocable - they may be forgiven, but they cannot be forgotten by their victims. — Sydney J. Harris

Take the adventure, heed the call, now ere the irrevocable moment passes! 'Tis but a banging of the door behind you, a blithesome step forward, and you are out of your old life and into the new! — Kenneth Grahame

Fifteen years of yes's had beaten Mrs. Gilbert. Fifteen further years of that incessant unaffirmative affirmative, accompanied by the perpetual flicking of ash-mushrooms from thirty-two thousand cigars, had broken her. To this husband of hers she made the last concession of married life, which is more complete, more irrevocable, than the first - she listened to him. She told herself that the years had brought her tolerance - actually they had slain what measure she had ever possessed of moral courage. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Life's unfairness is not irrevocable; we can help balance the scales for others, if not always for ourselves. — Hubert H. Humphrey

I have no idea whether parents can be of help, and I do not blame mine. It was my own affair to come to terms with myself and to find my own way, and like most well-brought-up children, I managed it badly.
Everyone goes through this crisis. For the average person this is the point when the demands of his own life come into the sharpest conflict with his environment, when the way forward has to be sought with the bitterest means at his command. Many people experience the dying and rebirth - which is our fate - only this once during their entire life. Their childhood becomes hollow and gradually collapses, everything they love abandons them and they suddenly feel surrounded by the loneliness and mortal cold of the universe. Very many are caught forever in this impasse, and for the rest of their lives cling painfully to an irrevocable past, the dream of the lost paradise - which is the worst and most ruthless of dreams. — Hermann Hesse

And then I realized how powerless I was to revoke my own joke when throughout my life as a whole I was involved in a joke much more vast (all-embracing for me) and utterly irrevocable. — Milan Kundera

I think it is impossible for human minds to think of Death as a final, irrevocable end to life. — Isabelle Eberhardt

It's always so early in here, before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. Thank you for this life! Still I miss the alternatives. The sketches, all of them, want to become real. — Tomas Transtromer

The irrevocable events of our lives happen in seconds, sometimes fractions of seconds. — Greg Iles

A life once spent is irrevocable. It will remain to be contemplated through eternity. If it be marked with sins, the marks will be indelible. If it has been a useless life, it can never be improved. Such it will stand forever and ever. The same may be said of each day. — Adoniram Judson

Making mistakes is part of learning to choose well. No way around it. Choices are thrust upon us, and we don't always get things right. Even postponing or avoiding a decision can become a choice that carries heavy consequences. Mistakes can be painful-sometimes they cause irrevocable harm-but welcome to Earth. Poor choices are part of growing up, and part of life. You will make bad choices, and you will be affected by the poor choices of others. We must rise above such things. — Brandon Mull

A person's license to create is irrevocable, and it opens to every corner of daily life. But it is always hard to see that doubt, fear, and indirectness are eternal aspects of the creative path. — Shaun McNiff

It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn't have to know. That is was enough to trust that what I'd done was true. To understand its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was, like all those lines from The Dream of a Common Language that had run through my nights and days. To believe that I didn't need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life - like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.
How wild it was, to let it be. — Cheryl Strayed

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

Great joys,why do they bring us sadness? Because there remains from these excesses only a feeling of irrevocable loss and desertion which reaches a high degree of negative intensity. At such moments, instead of a gain, one keenly feels loss. sadness accompanies all those events in which life expends itself. its intensity is equal to its loss. Thus death causes the greatest sadness. — Emil Cioran

A spiritual process is not a divorce from life. It is an irrevocable love affair with life. — Jaggi Vasudev

And one day, very soon in fact, Adi would be an adolescent. An adolescent son of a clerk. A miserable thing to be in this country. He would have to forget all his dreams and tell himself that what he wanted to do was engineering. It's the only hope, everyone would tell him. Engineering, Adi would realize, is every mother's advice to her son, a father's irrevocable decision, a boy's first foreboding of life. — Manu Joseph

What I want from you," he said, and Finley braced herself, "is your trust. Irrevocable and unshakable. I want you to put your life in my hands, and I want to be able to do the same without hesitation."
Disturbed to her very soul, Finley could only shake her head. "You ask too much." Put his life in her hands? He was deranged! A bedlamite for certain. A crooked grin curved his mouth.
"Too much? You strange and wonderful girl, that is the least I'll ask of you. — Kady Cross

For the real movements of a life are gradual, then sudden; they resist becoming anecdotes, they pulse like quasars from long-dead stars to reach the vivid planet of the present, they drift like fog over the ship until the spread sails are merely panels of gray in grayer air and surround becomes object, as in those perceptual tests where figure and ground reverse, the kissing couple in profile turn into the outlines of the mortuary urn that holds their own ashes. Time wears down resolve
then suddenly violence, something irrevocable flashes out of nowhere, there are thrashing fins and roiled, blood-streaked water, death floats up on its side, eyes bulging. — Edmund White

The results of the irrevocable decisions in her life, the commitments she had leaped into without thought, with only the sure and perfect knowledge that it mattered not where her feet landed because her heart was certain.
p 186 — Erica Bauermeister

First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. — Virginia Woolf

Just as the wheel rests on the ground only at one point, so, strictly speaking, we live only for one thought-moment. We are always in the present, and that present is ever slipping into the irrevocable past. Each momentary consciousness of this ever-changing life-process, on passing away, transmits its whole energy, all the indelibly recorded impressions on it, to its successor. Every fresh consciousness, therefore, consists of the potentialities of its predecessors together with something more. At death, the consciousness perishes, as in truth it perishes every moment, only to give birth to another in a rebirth. This renewed consciousness inherits all past experiences. As all impressions are indelibly recorded in the ever-changing palimpsest-like mind, and all potentialities are transmitted from life to life, irrespective of temporary disintegration, thus there may be reminiscence of past births or past incidents. Whereas — Narada Maha Thera

Life is both a particle and a wave, Lacey taught me, and also it's neither. But only when no one is watching. Once you measure it, it has to choose. It was the act of witnessing that turned nothing into something, collapsed possibility clouds into concrete and irrevocable truth. I'd only pretended to understand before, but I understood now: When no one was watching, I was a cloud. I was all possibilities. — Robin Wasserman

Oh, God, Judd." She squeezed his hand. "I felt the ... shadow of that, an echo. If what I felt was diluted, how are you still conscious?"
"Why did you feel it?" Protective instincts roared to life. "We aren't mated."
Her shattered eyes went wide. "Are you sure?"
His heart actually stopped for a second, he wanted so much for her to belong to him on the most irrevocable level. "I guess we'll find out. — Nalini Singh