Quotes & Sayings About Layers Of Life

A man must be prepared to give 100% to his purpose, fulfill his karma or dissolve it, and then let go of that specific form of living. He must be capable of not knowing what to do with his life, entering a period of unknowingness and waiting for a vision or a new form of purpose to emerge. These cycles of strong specific action followed by periods of not knowing what the hell is going on are natural for a man who is shedding layers of karma in his relaxation into truth. — Deida David

there are between life partners sliding layers of history, tectonic plates of it shifting over the decades together. — Helen Simpson

I am yet to find one reliable friend in this crowd of shifting strangers. I have no true friends only mimicries, users and loopers. People popping in and out, keeping tabs on my life, not adding much credence to my existence yet not abandoning my life entirely because they know that greatness lies beyond the layers of this muck. It is up to me to discover those who are worth taking on this journey towards my destiny and the ones who will only get in my way. — Crystal Evans

Bad things bring out the real you; the person hidden beneath all those layers of comfort. — Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

That family glaze of common references, jokes, events, calamities-that sense of a family being like a kitchen midden: layer upon layer of the things daily life is made of. The edifice that lovers build is by comparison delicate and one-dimensional. — Laurie Colwin

The telling and the hearing of a story is not a simple act. The one who tells must reach down into deeper layers of the self, reviving old feelings, reviewing the past. Whatever is retrieved is reworked into a new form, one that narrates events and gives the listener a path through these events that leads to some fragment of wisdom. The one who hears takes the story in, even to a place not visible or conscious to the mind, yet there. In this inner place a story from another life suffers a subtle change. As it enters the memory of the listener it is augmented by reflection, by other memories, and even the body hearing and responding in the moment of the telling. By such transmissions, consciousness is woven. — Susan Griffin

Sounds of a San Juan night, drifting across the city through layers of humid air; sounds of life and movement, people getting ready and people giving up, the sound of hope and the sound of hanging on, and behind them all, the quiet, deadly ticking of a thousand hungry clocks, the lonely sound of time passing in the long Caribbean night. — Hunter S. Thompson

Having been pondering while slowly walking along, he now stopped as these thoughts caught hold of him, and right away another thought sprang forth from these, a new thought, which was: That I know nothing about myself, that Siddhartha has remained thus alien and unknown to me, stems from one cause, a single cause: I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing from myself! I searched Atman, I searched Brahman, I was willing to to dissect my self and peel off all of its layers, to find the core of all peels in its unknown interior, the Atman, life, the divine part, the ultimate part. But I have lost myself in the process. — Hermann Hesse

... have poets write about you as if you are alive. Scientifically, it is absolutely true, you are alive. You have a pulse, the waves, and a metabolism, the food chain. A personality, a character, a consciousness, and a sense of purpose ... try this- turn into spray, spin rainbows ... wear down entire mountains and dump them in layers ... gently surround marina sea grass twice a day, protecting and feeding thousands of crabs, ducks, and geese ... fill human eyes with warm salt brine at least once a month ...
Becoming Water — Susan Zwinger

He wondered ... if the journey of a life with pain was simply finding more ad more layers of acceptance, that at best the most constant tether would be that he would never really find the bottom, that the bottom had different levels, and that no matter how good he tried to be, sometimes he would sink into a hole. — Heidi Cullinan

Brain ablaze. Feel like we are unearthing something and finding ourselves, knowing ourselves, stripping odd layers of our upbringing like old paint. Can't write about it fully yet. Don't understand it. I only know that when F leaves and B and I talk I feel like I am saying - and hearing - the first wholly honest words of my life. — Lily King

All his life there was only one thing Lec was allowed to believe. It had surrounded him, cocooned him, constricted him with the same stifling softness as the layers of insulation around him now. For the first time in his life, Lev feels those bounds around his soul begin to loosen. — Neal Shusterman

Perfection is no different. If you seek your perfection in the Hands of the one who made you, He'll put you on a perfect path for you. Perfection isn't living a mistake free life, it's learning from those mistakes, those layers, to create the best you, a perfect you. — Trent Shelton

The reason why I do not know anything about myself, the reason why Siddhartha has remained alien and unknown to myself is due to one thing, to one single thing
I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing from myself. I was seeking Atman, I was seeking Brahman, I was determined to dismember myself and tear away its layers of husk in order to find in its unknown innermost recess the kernel at the heart of those layers, the Atman, life, the divine principle, the ultimate. But in so doing, I was losing myself. — Hermann Hesse

For a billion years the patient earth amassed documents and inscribed them with signs and pictures which lay unnoticed and unused. Today, at last, they are waking up, because man has come to rouse them. Stones have begun to speak, because an ear is there to hear them. Layers become history and, released from the enchanted sleep of eternity, life's motley, never-ending dance rises out of the black depths of the past into the light of the present. — Hans Cloos

Guys who are larger than life and theatrical and deliciously unpredictable - they're far more interesting than the good guys most of the time. They have these psychological layers that an audience can really cling on to, become fascinated with, much more so than these true-blue, one-dimensional, square-jawed good guys. — Ron Perlman

A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her dreaming private life - the nation, the city, the neighborhood, the house where the family lives - as an actual project under way, a project living people willed, and made well or failed, and are still making, herself among them. I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers. — Annie Dillard

To bury something, it is often considered, either means the end of something or the passing on into the realm of the earth or the sky, only the dead could ever know. But it is not only the dead that we bury. We bury objects, memories, thoughts and emotions among other things. Contrary to popular belief burying something is not the end of it because even though it is suppressed beneath layers of earth or self control, the dead and buried don't always remain that way and that is where the stories come from, the stories that haunt us for the rest of our no longer carefree lives. — Shitij Sharma

I believe one of the important differences between creating literature and just telling a story around the campfire is that in literature you're recreating the experience of life, not just relaying a 'this happened, then that happened' kind of narrative. The specific details and layers of depth that make the world of the story - and what the character is experiencing in that world - as real as possible are elements I love as a reader and, consequently, elements I strive to use effectively as a writer. — Lara Campbell McGehee

Vermeer's skill was in combining few colors, mixing little and using layers of lakes and varnishes to build up the illusion of life — Frank Wynne

One of the layers was old hurts. How had he managed to bury that? She knew a lot about old hurts, and just how hard they were to keep down in the cellar of things. He didn't wear his wounds as a point of pride, and many did. He might brood over them from time to time, and she appreciated a good brood herself. But he didn't appear to let those old wounds, those old scars run his life. On — Nora Roberts

I begin to realize that my memory is a great catacomb, and that below my actual standing-ground there is layer after layer of historical ashes.
Is the life of mind something like that of great trees of immemorial growth? Is the living layer of consciousness super-imposed upon hundreds of dead layers? Dead? No doubt this is too much to say, but still, when memory is slack the past becomes almost as though it had never been. To remember that we did know once is not a sign of possession but a sign of loss; it is like the number of an engraving which is no longer on its nail, the title of a volume no longer to be found on its shelf. My mind is the empty frame of a thousand vanished images. — Henri Frederic Amiel

I believe that when a loved one has dementia, you experience many layers of grief.

The first wave of grief comes with the diagnosis. The realisation that the person who has supported you all your life, will no longer be able to do so, no matter how hard they try.

Grief the first time they struggle to remember your name or your relationship to each other.

Grief when you have to accept that you can no longer keep them at home.

Grief as they lose the ability to communicate, as another piece of the jigsaw is lost.

Grief every time they are afraid, agitated or confused. So much grief you don't think you can cope with anymore.

And then the overwhelming tidal wave of grief when they pass, when you would give anything to go back to the first wave of grief. — Emma Haslegrave

You can't memorize poetry and stay a fake. Sooner or later, you start to understand what these poets are saying, and it makes you feel life has something quite special, with certain layers of meaning to it. — Donald Miller

If you peel back the layers of your life-the frenzy, the noise-stillness is waiting. That stillness is you. — Oprah Winfrey

This is the definition of clutter: things that exist in your outer life to distract you from the inner things that you're avoiding. If you avoid something, it grows.... The great thing is, the reverse is also true: when you honestly look at something, it shrinks. When you see the situation for what it is, bypassing the emotional layers that coloured it and made it into a clutter monster, it becomes simple. That's how peaceful clutter busting is. You're honestly looking at each layer of distraction, questioning the thing, letting it go, and realizing what's underneath. Looking directly at something has the power of a magnifying glass in the sun. The sun is you; the glass, your attention — Brooks Palmer

Life was taking its vengeance on me, and that vengeance consisted merely in coming back, nothing more. Every case of madness involves something coming back. People who are possessed are not possessed by something that just comes but instead by something that comes back. Sometimes life comes back. If in me everything crumbled before that power, it is not because that power was itself necessarily an overwhelming one: it in fact had only to come, since it had already become too full-flowing a force to be controlled or contained - when it appeared it overran everything. And then, like after a flood, there floated a wardrobe, a person, a loose window, three suitcases. And that seemed like Hell to me, that destruction of layers and layers of human archaeology. — Clarice Lispector

One always, sooner or later, comes upon a city which is an image of one's inner cities. Fez is an image of my inner self ... The layers of the city of Fez are like the layers and secrecies of the inner life. One needs a guide ... There were in Fez, as in my life, streets which led nowhere, impasses which remained a mystery. — Anais Nin

The idea that 'preaching the Gospel' has nothing to do with sex and that 'preaching about sex' has nothing to do with the Gospel betrays layers and layers of seriously misguided thinking. When we divorce God's love from sexual love, as Pope Benedict says, 'the essence of Christianity' becomes 'decisively cut off from the complex fabric of human life.' — Christopher West

If we fail, the planet will grow sterile and your people will die in hunger, thirst and waves of plagues. Our people and the thrm's will die more slowly because the poisons here will render us unable to conceive. The skies will cease to be blue, the land will lose its verdure and the seas, well, the seas will be the first to go. Anything that does survive will be broken, mutant, discontinuous from us and mutually exclusive. It will be the new life of a shattered world, a world for chitinous, crawly things, not one for soft and tender emotion. I hope, child, I have answered your question.
Meg said nothing. None of it made sense, but she still felt an urge to deny it, deny it, even though Ekaterina's strange, rolling words carried a ring of truth. Suddenly, the autumn chill cut through all her layers of bundling wraps. She could not stop shivering. — Robert Stikmanz

From beautiful do-overs on a long stretch of highway in Mexico, to many layers of life peeled away, filled with bottle caps and another car seat in the back of a minivan, time had tick-tocked its way to where it belonged. — Gail McHugh

Being around her, he found even every day experiences were deeper, nuanced. Satisfaction and awareness slipped in between the layers of life like love notes hidden in the pages of a textbook. — Erica Bauermeister

I think happiness is a choice. I believe luck is your attitude. It sounds like a really annoying bumper sticker. But there is such a great truth in that. You choose how you want to feel about what happens to you. I could have been a miserable failure. I haven't had anybody looking over me, and I've found my own way through optimistic exploration and fire-burning mistakes. I am a very happy person with an extraordinary life, so I must be doing a lot of things right. I really believe when you peel away the layers, the worlds is a beautiful place filled with beautiful people. — Drew Barrymore

For me, wigs and hairpieces are an everyday part of my life. One day I can wear what I like to call my 'Back to you, Barbara' look - professional and full of layers - and the next day you may see me in my 'Bubblin' Brown Sugar' look - curly, fun and bubbly. — Sherri Shepherd

Life isn't much more than a big dig through layers of doubt and fear into new levels of power and potential. — Robin Sharma

It gets a lot easier to deal with life's curveballs when you're not hiding under layers of fat. — Ali Vincent

Children lose their innocence piece by piece. The layers are carved away until our hearts have been exposed and polished into an unnatural gloss. We spend the rest of our lives trying to remember why we ever loved so passionately and how we dreamed so simply, before life chiseled us down to the core. — Deborah Smith

I believe
in love at first sight
but I will always believe
that the people
we love
we have loved before.
Many, many, many times before
and when we stumble
through grace and circumstance
and that brilliant illusion of choice
to finally meet them again,
we feel it faster
each time through.
The one glance
that set life alight
is two sets of two eyes
staring through the layers
of lifetimes and stolen glances
and first kisses and hands held;
the brace against the weight
and unrelenting tide
of waiting.
I believe
in love at first sight
but am not burdened with the misconception
that it's a first sight
at all. — Tyler Knott Gregson

I look into Julie's face. Not just at it, but into it. Every pore, every freckle, every faint gossamer hair. And then the layers beneath them. The flesh and bones, the blood and brain, all the way down to the unknowable energy that swirls in her core, the life force, the soul, the fiery will that makes her more than meat, coursing through every cell and binding them together in millions to form her. Who is she, this girl? What is she? She is everything. Her body contains the history of life, remembered in chemicals. Her mind contains the history of the universe, remembered in pain, in joy and sadness, hate and hope and bad habits, every thought of God, past-present-future, remembered, felt, and hoped for all at once. — Isaac Marion

A tree is a vast thing full of heavy mass. But that mass is mostly inert. The real life of the tree happens in three very thin layers - the phloem, xylem, and cambium. These thin layers are just beneath the bark and they are the envelope of life around the heartwood at the center of the tree. — Ned Hayes

Life strove mightily to exile orthodoxy, hospitalize heresy, and trap humanity into stupidity. It was an accumulation of used bandages soiled with layers of blood and pus. Life was the daily changing of the bandages of the heart that made the incurably sick, young and old alike, cry out in pain. — Yukio Mishima

On an impulse he went into the room and stood before the window, pushing aside the sheer curtain to watch the snow, now nearly eight inches high on the lampposts and the fences and the roofs. It was the sort of storm that rarely happened in Lexington, and the steady white flakes, the silence, filled him with a sense of excitement and peace. It was a moment when all the disparate shards of his life seemed to knit themselves together, every past sadness and disappointment, every anxious secret and uncertainty hidden now beneath the soft white layers. Tomorrow would be quiet, the world subdued and fragile, until the neighborhood children came out to break the stillness with their tracks and shouts and joy. He remembered such days from his own childhood in the mountains, rare moments of escape when he went into the woods, his breathing amplified and his voice somehow muffled by the heavy snow that bent branches low, drifted over paths. The world, for a few short hours, transformed. — Kim Edwards

That day, in the warm sun, surrounded by the solid proof of an ancient realm, I let go of forming theories. I only know that, given enough time, this wound would scar over. The layers of my life will slowly cover and fill the gulf cleft through my heart. But deep in the bedrock of who I am is a record of these things I will carry with me, a new map whose boundaries have forever altered the way I view the world. — Aaron Hartzler

Here is an example of Confucius sayings: "It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop." In a few words, Confucius teaches us about patience, perseverance, discipline, and hard work. But if you probe further, you will see more layers. Confucius' philosophies have significantly influenced spiritual and social thought. His views bear insight and depth of wisdom. You can apply his teachings in every sphere of life. Confucius' profound teachings are based on humanism. — Confucius

As in a Russian doll, however, the outer layers always contain an inner core. Instead of evolution having replaced simpler forms of empathy with more advanced ones, the latter are merely elaborations on the former and remain dependent on them. This also means that empathy comes naturally to us. It is not something we only learn later in life, or that is culturally constructed. — Frans De Waal

I don't understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode. — Lauren Oliver

I didn't sleep all night, thinking. I thought about you, about those puppy eyes you give me, when you fake your sadness to make me smile-- and that upper lip of yours that brings life to all of my senses. I thought about your laughter when you get tickled, and that soft mellow place near your arm pit that I wish could be knit into a pillow for me to hug all night long. I thought about your stomach, your soft and sensitive stomach, scared like a baby kitten under the pouring rain. And I remembered the feeling of protection that comes washing over me when I get a glimpse of it, the feeling of covering it with the layers of my very own skin. I remembered your head when it rests on my heart, a rock sheltering itself on the verdure of infinity. I remembered your silky black hair, and how I never imagined that hair curls so thin could twirl, in the way they do, the rigid core of my existence. — Malak El Halabi

Grace had so many complexities, so many layers and feelings, and thoughts ... he would happily spend his life trying to unwrap her.
Thinking about it, he tore a strip off the hem of her gown.
'What on earth are you going to do with that?'
Without answering, he put a knee forward onto the bed, making certain he knew precisely where she was. The last thing he wanted was to land on her like a felled tree. — Eloisa James

Her question was clear-
"Father, where does the Loss reside?"
In the sighs?
Cheeks with tears wiped?
A lost appetite?
Owning a room confined?
Or in the smiles all falsified?

Thus, the Father decide,
It is no matter to hide, he replied-
"I think its deep inside,
Probably,
In the layers of your soul,
Where the body provides it,
Ample food to be-
Magnified, multiplied, intensified.
But once you clarify,
That its not to be occupied inside,
It starves of supplies,
And dies.

So child, when there is loss,
Make sure you refuse to invite it inward,
And absolutely never make it your lifelong parasite. — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

When the time is right, you will find your space in universal design. That space is the reality of our consciousness; rest is layers upon layers of memories, desires, and insecurities of mind. — Shashi

Like dust brushed from an old painting, as we journey beneath the surface layers of life, another landscape is revealed. — Atalina Wright

Above them, in ten successive layers of dormitory, the little boys and girls who were still young enough to need an afternoon sleep were as busy as every one else, though they did not know it, listening unconsciously to hypnopaedic lessons in hygiene and sociability, in class-consciousness and the toddler's love-life. — Aldous Huxley

Fear is strange. It settles on chests and seeps through skin, through layers of tissue, muscle, and bone and collects in a soul-sized black hole, sucking the joy out of life, the pleasure, the beauty. But not the hope. Somehow, the hope is the only thing resistant to the fear, and it is that hope that makes the next breath possible, the next step, the next tiny act of rebellion, even if that rebellion is simply staying alive. — Amy Harmon

It is always now. This might sound trite, but it is the truth. It's not quite true as a matter of neurology, because our minds are built upon layers of inputs whose timing we know must be different.11 But it is true as a matter of conscious experience. The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in this world. But we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth - overlooking it, fleeing it, repudiating it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain - and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running. — Sam Harris

Even someone like Mrs. Bonnaventura, who had lived a mostly blameless life, when ushered into the awesome presence of the Creator of the infinite universe and also of the butterfly, would discover ten thousand fearsome new layers of meaning in the word humility. — Dean Koontz

And wasn't life full of layers and nuances, colored all kinds of shades of gray, and the way you felt about something when you were twenty or thirty or forty was not how you would feel about something when you were fifty or sixty or seventy
if only he could explain to her that regret can come at any time in your life, when you least expect it, and then you are stuck with it forever. — Jami Attenberg

We've got to simplify, pull back all these layers of supposed complexity , and get down to the essentials. If we want people to engage with government, we should use the same tools that are getting them engages with companies and institutions in private life. If we want people to care about political issues, we should give them a way to understand and get involved in them. — Gavin Newsom

It's funny how people think that they have "a right to life". Now isn't that the biggest load you ever heard? You don't have a right to shit your pants on Sunday. Let's take it back to the jungle. Where the fuck are your rights there? No layers in the jungle. Civilization has allowed the weak to survive. You can sit back and be an overweight, apathetic piece of shit, smoke your dope and still survive because you have a right to life. — Henry Rollins

I used to think that people are were supposed to be more strange, and dirty, and full of all sorts of emotions, pity and nobility, with infinite layers of complications. — Banana Yoshimoto

We were not born whole; we were born new, and each life experience coated us with another layer. These layers protected us like armor, but they also covered us to the point where we no longer could feel. That was the balance: to open up to the experiences, to strategically place the layers, but to leave the heart open. The heart had to be sent into the front lines every day, naked, unarmed, willing to take fire. That was the only way to live. With risk. On the cusp of dying. — Jennifer Handford

I lost the ability to fear and panic. Instead I felt practical and causal. I had never known time to pass so acutely before. I sat out through the night with the patrol, watching the bitter glow of stars overhead, listening as the season exhaled and the layers of vegetation shrugged and compressed, like the ashes of burnt wood. On the hills I was aware of every corporeal moment, every cycle of light. I felt every fibre of myself conveying energy, and I understood that it was finite, that the chances I had in life would not come again. — Sarah Hall

We were fortunate his brief psychic vision distracted him from what his fingertips could have told him about my face.
Of course we were aware that temporary clairvoyance was a lame and unlikely explanation. The ordering of this world, however is so abstruce, so deep and complex, most explanations that people to make sense of moments of strange experience are inadequate. Our very existence as thinking creatures is an astonishment that cant be solved. Every human cell, with its thousands of protein chains, is more complex than a 747 or the largest cruise ship, in fact more complex than the two combined. All life on earth, in its extravagant variety, offers itself for study, but though we probe to ever deeper layers of its structure, the meaning eludes us.
There is no end of wonders and mysteries: fireflies and music boxes, the stars that outnumber all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. — Dean Koontz

Even where love has run thin the child's soul musters strength ... the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole. — Adrienne Rich

Any one episode, or even moment, in a person's life is so complex, with so many layers of past and present, desire and indifference, drift and drive, consciousness and unconsciousness, that language is the best means we've found of approaching that kind of complexity. — Ben Fountain

Blessed is He in whose hand is dominion, and He is over all things competent.
[He] who created death and life to test you [as to] which of you is best in deed - and He is the Exalted in Might, the Forgiving .
And] who created seven heavens in layers. You do not see in the creation of the Most Merciful any inconsistency. So return [your] vision [to the sky]; do you see any breaks?
Then return [your] vision twice again. [Your] vision will return to you humbled while it is fatigued."
( A translation of holy Quran, 67:1-4) — Qur'an

...in Israel no trauma was ever really forgotten, only displaced by new trauma so that the country's emotional life resembled one of its archaeological sites, an accumulation of disrupted layers. — Yossi Klein Halevi

A life path may change because of important decisions or events. Those were what drove my current path.
But sometimes the smallest event can also drive a turn. In the case of Eli Vanto, that force was a single, overheard word.
Chiss. Where had Cadet Vanto heard that name? What did it mean to him? He had already spoken one reason, but there might well be others. Indeed, the full truth might have several layers. But what were they?
On a ship as large as this, there was only one practical way to find out.
Thus did my path take yet another turn. As, certainly, did his. — Timothy Zahn

Seven Cities was an ancient civilization, steeped in the power of antiquity, where Ascendants once walked on every trader track, every footpath, every lost road between forgotten places. It was said the sands hoarded power within their sussurating currents, that every stone had soaked up sorcery like blood, and that beneath every city lay the ruins of countless other cities, older cities, cities that went back to the First Empire itself. It was said each city rose on the backs of ghosts, the substance of spirits thick like layers of crushed bone; that each city forever wept beneath the streets, forever laughed, shouted, hawked wares and bartered and prayed and drew first breaths that brought life and the last breaths that announced death. Beneath the streets there were dreams, wisdom, foolishness, fears, rage, grief, lust and love and bitter hatred. — Steven Erikson

Love is a possession; it's something that you own from the layers of people in your life. But if my life were a cake it would be un-layered, unbaked, missing ingredients. I isolated myself too soundly to own anyone's love. — Tarryn Fisher

There's so much more you can do with the dynamics of songs when they're simple ... I think it was what I needed in my life - there was a lot going on, a lot of layers. — Sarah Blasko

Though she was ungifted, she could clearly feel the power of the magic the sword now possessed. It was power unlike anything she ever imagined. It churned the way the storm had. It held more power than the storm had. It was fury and rage and love and life all folded together over and over, blending them into the finest layers of something new, something remarkable. This was now a weapon unlike any other, more than any other. — Terry Goodkind

Holston lifted an old boot to an old step, pressed down, and did it again. He lost himself in what the untold years had done, the ablation of molecules and lives, layers and layers ground to fine dust. And he thought, not for the first time, that neither life nor staircase had been meant for such an existence. The tight confines of that long spiral, threading — Hugh Howey

Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ... each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition
all such distortions within our own egos
condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That's how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other's naked hearts. — Tennessee Williams

Everyone is guilty of something, and everyone still harbors a memory of childhood innocence, no matter how many layers of life wrap around it. Humanity is innocent; humanity is guilty, and both states are undeniably true. — Neal Shusterman

However, the balloon, lightened of heavy articles, such as ammunition, arms, and provisions, had risen into the higher layers of the atmosphere, to a height of 4,500 feet. The voyagers, after having discovered that the sea extended beneath them, and thinking the dangers above less dreadful than those below, did not hesitate to throw overboard even their most useful articles, while they endeavored to lose no more of that fluid, the life of their enterprise, which sustained them above the abyss. — Jules Verne

We can have everything we want as long as what we want is a life spent searching for exhausting work that doesn't pay enough, shopping for things we don't need and sticking to a set of social and sexual rules that turn out, once you plough through the layers of trash and adverts, to be as rigid as ever. — Laurie Penny

We must keep in mind that only a part of memory can be translated into the language-based packets of information people use to tell their life stories to others. Learning to be open to many layers of communication is a fundamental part of getting to know another person's life. — Daniel J. Siegel

Life is one long struggle to disinter oneself, to keep one's head above the accumulations, the ever deepening layers of objects ... which attempt to cover one over, steadily, almost irresistibly, like falling snow. — Rose Macaulay

Sometimes life has its way with you. It peels back the layers of your existence like the skin of an onion until the real you glows underneath, raw and painful to the touch. It's in those moments, in that hour, you look to those that give you strength - for me, — Addison Moore

The songs came from a more solitary place and I hadn't played them with many people before recording. So I just added the layers of people who are in my life, and built up the songs. — Aoife O'Donovan

As she recited the names and facts, she was recovering not only her memory but also her personality, her desires, her way of seeing life. The idea of suicide, which that morning seemed to be buried beneath several layers of sedatives, resurfaced. — Paulo Coelho

Sifting through these layers of belongings while Ira stood mute behind her, Maggie had a sudden view of her life as circular. It forever repeated itself, and it was entirely lacking in hope. — Anne Tyler

Deep down, underneath all his layers of stupidity, he's a really good man. He may act out far too many selfish thoughts, says all the wrong things at all the wrong times, but behind closed doors he's a best friend. I understand that he has idiotic tendencies and I can still love him for it. He may not be someone that you feel comfortable sitting next to at a dinner party but for me, he's someone that I feel comfortable sharing my life with. — Cecelia Ahern

I wanted to be her north star. I wanted to be her map. I wanted to drink coffee with her in the cafes in the morning and do things, as you do, as she did, instead of just philosophizing about them and deconstructing their endless Russian-doll layers of meaning. I was alone before I met her. I wanted to disappear with her, and fold her into my life. I wanted to be her compass. I wanted to be her last speaker, her interpreter, her language. I wanted to be her translator, Zed, but none of the languages we knew were the same. — Emily St. John Mandel

So much of life is invisible, inscrutable: layers of thoughts, feelings, outward events entwined with secrecies, ambiguities, ambivalences, obscurities, darknesses strongly present even to the one who's lived it- maybe especially to the one who's lived it. I didn't seek to find her, wandered instead within and among her fragments of language-notebooks, drafts, journals, fictions, letters, essays, and found there whole worlds like spinning planets, lived in their cold light and burning light, wondering where I was, where they might take me. Curious, I heard a monster's voice and followed- — Laurie Sheck

Being put in a box in the ground was bad enough, but being entombed like this, with layers of stone between you and the world? Kell would never understand the way these Grey-worlders sealed away their dead, trapping the discarded shells in gold and wood and stone as if some remnant of who they'd been in life remained. And if it did? What a cruel punishment. — V.E Schwab

The "dangerous class," the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue. — Friedrich Engels

Every human cell, with its thousands of protein chains, is more complex than a 747 or the largest cruise ship, in fact more complex than the two combined. All life on Earth, in its extravagant variety, offers itself for study, but though we probe to ever deeper layers of its structure, the meaning eludes us. — Dean Koontz

But silence continued in the layers of the earth, and this density that I could feel at my shoulders continued harmonious, sustained, unaltered through eternity. I lay there pondering my situation, lost in the desert, and in danger, naked between sky and sand and stars, withdrawn by too much silence from the poles of my life. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Return to a simpler life, and you will see that behind the expensive cars, the fashionable clothes, the empty celebrities, the fancy houses and the thick layers of make-up life has real meaning. Behind all the lies there is a deep well of wisdom that we can all drink from, and grow wiser, healthier and happier. — Varg Vikernes

Deep layers of context are missed when cursorily reading for quantity at the expense of comprehension - only the vapid are impressed by those who try to squeeze as many books as possible into each passing month as if shoving one more oiled hot dog down the gullet in a food eating contest to prove accumulation superiority. — Wil Zeus

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths. — Eudora Welty

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations. — Anais Nin

Whatever you have forgotten, you can remember. Whatever you have buried you can unearth. If you are willing to look deep into your own nature, if you are willing to peel away the layers of not-self you have adopted in making your way through the tribulations of life, you will find that your true self is not as far removed as you think. — Meredith Jordan

The layers of his gleaming black hair were thick and neatly cut, and his tanned face glowed from a precise shave. He had a long, straight nose and a voluptuary's mouth.
And he had a pair of remarkable blue eyes that approximated no other shade she had ever seen. Except, perhaps, at the shop where the local chemist made batches of ink by boiling Indigofera plants and copper sulfate together for days until they formed a blue so dark and deep that it approached violet. And yet his eyes did not have the angelic quality one might associate with such a color. They were shrewd, seasoned, as if he had gazed far too often at an unsavory side of life that she herself had never seen. — Lisa Kleypas

People always think killing requires a force: a cup of poison tipped into a mouth, a knife parting flesh from bone, a fist brought down repeatedly.
Wrong.
Here's how you kill: You stay silent, you make bargains that peel the layers off your soul one by one, you build a scaffolding of flimsy excuses and live your life on them. I may have killed to save, but I killed all the same. — Roshani Chokshi

As you open yourself to living at your edge, your deepest purpose will slowly begin to make itself known. In the meantime, you will experience layer after layer of purposes, each one getting closer and closer to the fullness of your deepest purpose. It is as if your deepest purpose is at the center of your being, and it is surrounded by layers of concentric circles, each circle being a lesser purpose. Your life consists of penetrating each circle, from the outside toward the center. — David Deida

When I was no longer of the world, I would miss its extravagant beauty. I would miss the complex and charming layers of subterfuge by which the truth of the world's mysteries were withheld from us even as we were tantalized and enchanted by them. I would miss the kindness of good people who were compassionate when so many were pitiless, who made their way through so much corruption without being corrupted themselves, who eschewed envy in a world of envy, who eschewed greed in a world of greed, who valued truth and could not be drowned in a sea of lies, for they shone and, by the light they cast, they had warmed me all my life. — Dean Koontz

We are not capable of foreseeing the creative possibilities that this kind of deconstruction - the deconstruction of the old sacrificial system - produces. I think that we must examine our history and try to see whether, beneath what has already occurred, there are not additional layers of phenomena waiting to be revealed; whether some aspects of life that used to be constrained by the old sacrificial system are not going to flourish, other domains of knowledge, other ways of living. Everything that the Passion undid in the cultural sphere might well be an opening, an extraordinary source of enrichment. I am certain it is. One must also keep in mind what Jesus called the "signs of the times."4 — Rene Girard

No love is lost even though the lover turns away from us or life. Within us are the people we have loved, not as they were but as we wanted them to be. As our fresh grief softens to sorrow, we suddenly discover the lover's eyes in our mirror the lover's words on our lips, even the beloved's jokes have become ours. What reality has taken, we have taken for our own. Nothing is ever lost. Layers of our being contain all that has lived for us or that we imagined. We exude the strength of our losses and our gains glow even in the dark. — Ruth H. Jacobs