Life Bearable Quotes & Sayings

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. — Kurt Vonnegut

Sadness and boredom were more bearable than the effort of living a normal life. Perhaps the idea of death began to hover over her during that period, as a kind of higher order of lassitude in which she would not have to move the blood in her veins or the air in her lungs; her repose would be absolute- not to think, not to feel, not to be. — Isabel Allende

The old adage--humor is the best way to make the unbearable bearable--may be true. — Mary Ann Shaffer

If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something. — Kurt Vonnegut

Could you imagine how horrible things would be if we always told others how we felt? Life would be intolerably bearable. — R. K. Milholland

Let him tell them the truth. Before the Gospel is a word, it is silence. It is the silence of their own lives and of his life. It is life with the sound turned off so that for a moment or two you can experience it not in terms of the words you make it bearable by but for the unutterable mystery that it is. Let him say, "Be silent and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:10). Be silent and know that even by my silence and absence I am known. Be silent and listen to the stones cry out.
Out of the silence let the only real news comes, which is sad news before it is glad news and that is fairy tale last of all. — Frederick Buechner

Vonnegut had seen the worst of human conduct and refused to lie about the sort of trouble we were in, but who had not allowed his doubt to curdle into cynicism, who, for all his dark prognostication, was a figure of tremendous hope. The evidence was in his books, which performed the greatest feat of alchemy known to man: the conversion of grief into laughter by means of courageous imagination. Like any decent parent, he had made the astonishing sorrow of the examined life bearable. — Steve Almond

The key element in beginning to learn to embody the love of God is not heroic faith and determination. It has to do with whether or not we can take hold of the love of God as a power that includes us within it. The difference is between seeing life from the inside of God versus seeing it from within my own sensibilities and capacities. From inside the love of God, suffering becomes not only bearable, but a privilege of participating with Christ in his love for the world. This cannot be rationally explained or justified, but it is the fruit of a life trustingly lived in and for God who is all love. — Shane Claiborne

She knew Paul D was adding something to her life - something she wanted to count on but was scared to ... His waiting eyes and awful human power. The mind of him that knew her own. Her story was bearable because it was his as well - to tell, to refine and tell again. The things neither knew about the other - the things neither had word-shapes for - well, it would come in time. — Toni Morrison

Nothing is fair. Life is shit and it doesn't get any better. But there are things in life that will make it bearable; tolerable. There are things that will make all of the BS worth it. You've just gotta open yourself up to it. It's not always easy, and the scars will never go away ... but maybe, just maybe, you can learn to live with them. — Crystal D. Budy

If one has a purpose, life is bearable enough, do you not think so? — Deanna Raybourn

Enclose your heart in times of need with the steel of your determination and your strength. In doing this, all things will be bearable. — Lora Leigh

A world without poetry and art would be too much like one without birds or flowers: bearable but a lot less enjoyable. — Aberjhani

All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need ... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little - "
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET - Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME ... SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point - "
MY POINT EXACTLY. — Terry Pratchett

Dear Juliet. I could relate to her pain. Black misery painted on a blood red heart. Death would be more bearable than life without Romeo. — Marilyn Grey

Life can seem awful and unfixable until the universe shifts a little and the observation point is altered, and then suddenly, everything seems more bearable. — Jasmine Warga

Life becomes bearable only when one comes to terms with who one is, both in one's own eyes and in the eyes of the world. — Sandor Marai

Moments like this, with Colton? They make it all bearable. He doesn't fix me, doesn't heal me. He just makes life worthwhile. He helps me remember to breathe. — Jasinda Wilder

Life is not easy for anyone here. Loss and fear, failure and disappointment, pain and ill-health, doubt and death-even those who have escaped from poverty have no escape from these. What makes life bearable is love-to love, to be loved, and-even after death or parting-to know that you have loved and been loved. — Vikram Seth

Belonging is one of the things that makes life bearable, and it can be tough to look at a binary world and choose against both sides. — Andrew Solomon

Only those with guts could bear a great life. — Toba Beta

I'm pretty sure Mom and Dad didn't see me coming, either: the kid with the black moods, the kid whose mind was always elsewhere, flinching from real life as from a bruise. Who wanted to lay a fiction-filter on top of everything and pretend it was something else just to keep the sheer disappointment of it all bearable: this limited, empirical experience of ours, trapped inside a decaying shell of meat, mainly able to perceive that nothing lasts, even in our most pleasurable moments. — Gemma Files

The arts..are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The imaginative young vagabond quickly loses the social instincts that help to make life bearable for other men. Always he hears voices calling in the night from far-away places where blue waters lap strange shores. He hears birds singing and crickets chirping a luring roundelay. He sees the moon, yellow ghost of a dead planet, haunting the earth. — Jim Tully

Ferbin's father had had the same robustly pragmatic view of religion as he'd had of everything else. In his opinion, only the very poor and downtrodden really needed religion, to make their laborious lives more bearable. People craved self-importance; they longed to be told they mattered as individuals, not just as part of a mass of people or some historical process. They needed the reassurance that while their life might be hard, bitter and thankless, some reward would be theirs after death. Happily for the governing class, a well-formed faith also kept people from seeking their recompense in the here and now, through riot, insurrection or revolution. — Iain M. Banks

Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember. — Emil Cioran

Life wasn't for the timid. It was harsh and it was biting.
But the one thing that made it bearable was the people you cared for. It was finding that light in the darkness. That peace in hell. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

To choose to live, to make that choice to fight for life every day, had to be a choice to accept all the sorrows of all of my tomorrows. But if that choice to live was to be bearable at all, I needed to let loose my embrace of the pain, both yesterday's and tomorrow's. — Bobby Adair

When I'm with him, I feel like a completely different person. I like the way this person feels. And then I wonder - is this the person I really am?
How can you know for certain what parts of yourself are authentic and what parts you've invented to make life bearable? — Lisa Wingate

By degrees, however, he fashioned for himself out of this tendency a philosophy that was actually serviceable to life. He gained strength through familiarity with the thought that the emergency exit stood always open, and became curious, too, to taste his suffering to the dregs. If it went too badly with him he could feel sometimes with a grim malicious pleasure: I am curious to see all the same just how much a man can endure. If the limit of what is bearable is reached, I have only to open the door to escape. — Hermann Hesse

There's no magical healing in this. I won't wake up tomorrow fixed and joyful. I'll still hurt and grieve. But moments like this, with Colton? They make it all bearable. He doesn't fix me, doesn't heal me. He just makes life worthwhile. He helps me remember to breathe, shows me how to smile again. He kisses me, and I can forget pain, forget the urges I still have to cut for the pain that erases the emotions. — Jasinda Wilder

There are those sweet moments in your life where you realize that tings could be infinitely worse; that though you feel it's the end of the world, it is in fact simply a set back and you're being melodramatic. Usually, these moments are painfully pointed out by your best friends: those two funny women who make your day brighter simply because they exist in your world. Those women, who despite all of your many, many, flaws love you regardless and who know way too much about your stupidity when it comes to men and never once have said, "I told you so"...at least to your face. Those women are what make this world bearable when it is too cold to shoulder alone and it is because of them I was able to get up and carry on after something we will from henceforth refer to as "the event. — Sarah Damron

Love has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest. — Kay Redfield Jamison

When life has meaning, you can bear almost anything; without it, nothing is bearable. — Rick Warren

According to His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, when you're happy everything in life is bearable and grief and stress are just passing emotions. Happiness is not something that you feel after something good happens. It is a state of living that is present whether good things are happening or not, whether you're suffering or not. — J. Thomas

I lay down on the bed clasping the pictures and buried my face in the pillow in a vain attempt at silencing my sobs. But it was as if all my life's accumulated grief had finally found an outlet and was allowed to take its course. I screamed, I cried, until the grief became bearable. (174) — Linda Olsson

Vice goes along way towards making life bearable. A little vice now and then is relished by the best of men. — Finley Peter Dunne

No one can lead a happy life, or even one that is bearable, without the pursuit of wisdom, and that the perfection of wisdom is what makes the happy life, although even the beginnings of wisdom make life bearable. Yet this conviction, clear as it is, needs to be strengthened and given deeper roots through daily reflection; making noble resolutions is not a important as keeping the resolutions you have made already. — Seneca The Younger

It was one of those rare times of shared happiness, of perfect contentment. We had a feeling of expectation, that what was already wonderful would only get better and better as time went on. These moments are one of the rarest, most fragile things in the world. You have to seize the day; you have to recall all the rotten, dirty things you endured to earn this peace. You have to remember to enjoy each minute, each hour, because although you may feel like it's going to last forever, the world plans otherwise. You want to be grateful for every precious second, but you simply can't do it. It's not in human nature to live life to the fullest. Haven't your ever noticed that equal amounts of pain and joy are not, in fact, equal in duration? Pain drags on until you wonder if life will ever be bearable again; pleasure, though, once it's reached its peak, fades faster than a trodden gardenia, and your memory searches in vain for the sweet scent. — George Alec Effinger

Dive from a high platform, walk a country lane, watch your computer freeze, cross a finish line, hear your morning alarm, look for a parking space, toast on your anniversary, embrace a friend after a funeral. As you live your life, what do you feel? Terror, serenity, frustration, relief, groaning reluctance, patient endurance, pride, satisfaction, or a grief made bearable because somehow life will go on. We experience life as feelings. — Donald Maass

Disappointment tears the bearable film of life. — Elizabeth Bowen

In fact, my mother always says that emotions are what the gods gave us to distract us from the pain of life. They are what make life bearable and what keeps us going no matter how hard it gets. (Alix) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

I always knew one thing, that life is made bearable and possible and liveable by the relations of one human being to another, the individual love and gentleness between persons, or in any case, the unbreakable bond that grows and fastens lives together in all sorts of mysterious ways ... — Katherine Anne Porter

Friends are people one pretends to like in order to make life bearable. — Joe Abercrombie

Poetry has never let me down. Without poetry, I would have found life less comprehensible, less bearable and infinitely less enjoyable. — Josephine Hart

Memories beautify life, but the capacity to forget makes it bearable. — Honore De Balzac

I know that life is busy and hard and that there's crushing pressure to just settle down and get a real job and khaki pants and a haircut. But don't. Please don't. Please keep believing that life can be better, brighter, broader because of the art that you make. Please keep demonstrating the courage that it takes to swim upstream in a world that prefers putting away for retirement to putting pen to paper, that chooses practicality over poetry, that values you more for going to the gym than going to the deepest places in your soul. Please keep making your art for people like me, people who need the magic and imagination and honesty of great art to make the day-to-day world a little more bearable. — Shauna Niequist

There's no life without humour. It can make the wonderful moments of life truly glorious, and it can make tragic moments bearable. — Rufus Wainwright

Life to be bearable must be lived intensely. Through it a continuous stream of emotion passes. Though that emotion is ever changing as flowing water changes, it at least bears us along on a current that gives the illusion of continuity and permanence. But analyze life, tear its trappings off, lay it bare with thought, with logic, with philosophy, and its emptiness is revealed as a bottomless pit; its nothingness frankly confesses to nothingness, and Despair comes to perch in the soul. — Giovanni Papini

In it {a film Peter saw} a sadistic sergeant broke the spirit of soldier in a military prison by beating him up at systematically random intervals, from more than a day down to a quarter of an hour, so that the victim never knew when the next attack was coming, never felt safe. Life with Muriel, it seemed to Peter, had over the last seven or eight years turned into a decreasingly bearable version of that. — Kingsley Amis

Politicians are like dogs ... Their life expectancy is too short for a commitment to be bearable — Henry Kissinger

Robyn: [narrating] Animal lovers, especially female ones, are often accused of being neurotic and unable to relate to other human beings. More often than not, those pointing the finger have never had a pet. It seems to me the universe gave us three things to make life bearable: hope, jokes, and dogs. But the greatest of these gifts was dogs. — Robin Davidson

The Difference Between Art and Life is that Art is More Bearable — Charles Bukowski

Life is bearable even when it's unbearable: that is what's so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it. — Geoff Dyer

Can't you see? Before you knew the truth, we were happy. What's the god in ferreting out the truth all that time? It's always unpleasant."
"Is it only lies that are Pleasant?"
"Usually. That's why people tell them. To make life bearable. — Penelope Mortimer

I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy. — Emil Cioran

Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation ... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable. — Leonard Woolf

If it can be verified, we don't need faith ... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys. — Madeleine L'Engle

The Gospel is a harsh document; the Gospel is ruthless and specific in what it says; the Gospel is not meant to be re-worded, watered down and brought to the level of either our understanding or our taste. The Gospel is proclaiming something which is beyond us and which is there to stretch our mind, to widen our heart beyond the bearable at times, to recondition all our life, to give us a world view which is simply the world upside-down and this we are not keen to accept. — Metropolitan Anthony Bloom

It is clear to you, I know, Lucilius, that no one can lead a happy life, or even one that is bearable, without the pursuit of wisdom, and that the perfection of wisdom is what makes the happy life, although even the beginnings of wisdom make life bearable. — Seneca.

Only friends will tell you the truths you need to hear to make your life bearable. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

Matilda longed for her parents to be good and loving and understanding and honourable and intelligent. The fact that they were none of these things was something she had to put up with. It was not easy to do so. But the new game she had invented of punishing one or both of them each time they were beastly to her made her life more or less bearable. Being very small and very young, the only power Matilda had over anyone in her family was brain-power. For sheer cleverness she could run rings around them all. But the fact remained that any five-year-old girl in any family was always obliged to do as she was told, however asinine the orders might be. — Roald Dahl

What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first ... it's amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood. — Ron Rash

She didn't mind the sacrifice. It seemed enough for a life, to give yourself to music the way nuns give themselves to God. To vow. To surrender. Only music, after all, made life bearable. Only with music did she feel--what was it? Free? Happy? No, it was something else. Awake. — Carolina De Robertis

I only regret that everybody wants to deprive me of the journal, which is the only steadfast friend I have, the only one which makes my life bearable, because my happiness with human beings is so precarious, my confiding moods rare, and the least sign of non-interest is enough to silence me. In the journal I am at ease. — Anais Nin

We live a pleasant life shopping at the Food Shoppe ... taking the kids to the Weinery-Beanery, ... and eating bran flakes .. and then, with no warning, we wake up one morning stricken with middle age, full of loneliness, dumb, in pain. Our work is useless, our vocation is lost, and nobody cares about us at all. This is not bearable. In despair, we go do something spectacularly dumb, like run away with Amber the cocktail waitress, and suddenly all the women in our life look at us with unmitigated disgust. — Garrison Keillor

Stories have their own kind of truth," I pointed out. "And there's not much story if you don't make things up. I mean, you can't be a writer and just write about real life."
"Why not?" Luke snapped a twig.
I was amazed he even had to ask. "Because real life's only bearable if you don't have to live in it all the time. — K.M. Grant

The same big TV antenna dwarfed each roof, as though life here could only be bearable if lived elsewhere in the imagination. — Gloria Steinem

There were a thousand things she wanted from life, and since few were available at home [...], she had forcibly channeled all her wanting into the numbered days, the mayfly lifetime, that the luxury cruise would last. For months the cruise had been her mind's safe parking space, the future that made her present bearable [...]. — Jonathan Franzen

Your life will always be the perfect classroom journey for you and every experience that shows up in your journey is here to serve you. There is meaning and purpose behind everything that happens. There are no accidents which means your suffering through difficulties is never for nothing. Your life matters and everything you experience matters. Your trials are there to help you become a better person and trusting this is truth will take some of the sting out of them. Suffering becomes more bearable if it at least counts for something. — Kimberly Giles

Some things may never change but other things can be so completely different that they make the things that don't change bearable. — Donna VanLiere

Our life together wasn't easy. We had plenty of heartbreak, plenty of sorrow. But we also had each other. We'd fought to have each other ... as long as we had each other, anything was bearable. Anything was possible. — Katy Regnery

I wish that you will find love. It is the only thing in life that makes the pain of being alive bearable. — Lucinda Riley

There's nothing but what's bearable as long as a man can work," he said to himself; "the natur o' things doesn't change, though it seems as if one's own life was nothing but change. The square o' four is sixteen, and you must lengthen your lever in proportion to your weight, is as true when a man's miserable as when he's happy; and the best o' working is, it gives you a grip hold o' things outside your own lot. — George Eliot

The Fire

When a human is asked about a particular fire,
she comes close:
then it is too hot,
so she turns her face -

and that's when the forest of her bearable life appears,
always on the other side of the fire. The fire
she's been asked to tell the story of,
she has to turn from it, so the story you hear
is that of pines and twitching leaves
and how her body is like neither -

all the while there is a fire
at her back
which she feels in fine detail,
as if the flame were a dremel
and her back its etching glass.

You will not know all about the fire
simply because you asked.
When she speaks of the forest
this is what she is teaching you,

you who thought you were her master. — Katie Ford

What we want is to make something that fills utterly the sight and can't be used to make life only bearable. — Sam Francis

What frightened me most was, I could no longer believe in my own life as a story. Everyone needs a story, a part to play in order to avoid the realization that life is without significance. How else do any of us survive? It's what makes life bearable, even interesting. When it becomes neither, people say you've lost the plot. Or just lost it. — Amanda Craig

The point of the resurrection ... is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die ... What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it ... What you do in the present - by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself - will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it ... ). They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom. — N. T. Wright

I learned a lot that night - like how incredibly mind blowing ho-hos and wine coolers were together, how that you could discover the answers to life's most difficult questions by watching Buffy, but most of all, that no matter what was going on in life - a best friend could make it all seem bearable. — Peggy Martinez

But what could you do? Only keep going. People kept going; they had been doing it for thousands of years. You took the kindness offered, letting it seep as far in as it could go, and the remaining dark crevices you carried around with you, knowing that over time they might change into something almost bearable. — Elizabeth Strout

I can imagine nothing more terrifying than an Eternity filled with men who were all the same. The only thing which has made life bearable ... has been the diversity of creatures on the surface of the globe. — T.H. White

It seems to me that the good lord in his infinate wisdom gave us three things to make life bearable- hope, jokes, and dogs. But the greatest of these was dogs. — Robyn Davidson

The world, Mma Ramotswe believed, was composed of big things and small things. The big things were written large, and one could not but be aware of them
wars, oppression, the familiar theft by the rich and the strong of those simple things that the poor needed, those scraps which would make their life more bearable; this happened, and could make even the reading of a newspaper an exercise in sorrow. There were all those unkindnesses, palpable, daily, so easily avoidable; but one could not think just of those, thought Mma Ramotswe, or one would spend one's time in tears
and the unkindnesses would continue. So the small things came into their own: small acts of helping others, if one could; small ways of making one's own life better: acts of love, acts of tea, acts of laughter. — Alexander McCall Smith

We all have little tricks we play on our minds to make life bearable. — Courtney Cole

Life, at all times full of pain, is more painful in our time than in the two centuries that preceded it. The attempt to escape from pain drives men to triviality, to self-deception, to the invention of vast collective myths. But these momentary alleviations do but increase the sources of suffering in the long run. Both private and public misfortune can only be mastered by a process in which will and intelligence interact: the part of will is to refuse to shirk the evil or accept an unreal solution, while the part of intelligence is to understand it, to find a cure if it is curable, and, if not, to make it bearable by seeing it in its relations, accepting it as unavoidable, and remembering what lies outside it in other regions, other ages, and the abysses of interstellar space — Bertrand Russell

There comes a moment when having everything seems to be the only way to squeeze even a little out of life. There comes a day when this job, this home, this town, this family all seem irritating and deficient beyond the bearable. There comes a period in life when I regret every major decision I've ever made. This is precisely the time when the spirituality of stability offers its greatest gift. Stability enables me to outlast the dark, cold places of life until the thaw comes and I can see new life in this uninhabitable place again. But for that to happen I must learn to wait through the winters of my life. — Joan D. Chittister

When you love people, you are curious about who they are, what they think, and how they feel. You watch them closely, wondering about their experience and what you can do to make it more enjoyable. You feel compassion for their pain and seek to make it more bearable. You are eager to learn the unique language of their existence. You want to under-stand them, inspire them, heal them. What if you could look at yourself this way? — Vironika Tugaleva

Everything's still there. It happened, it was. But you know, it's bearable somehow. It's--it's bearable."..."Do you know why it's bearable now,...?"..."It's bearable, Jean Louise, because you are your own person now."..."...You were an emotional cripple, getting answers from him, leaning on him, assuming your answers would always be his answers."..."When you happened along and saw him doing something that seemed to you to be the very antithesis of his conscience--your conscience--you literally could not stand it. It made you physically ill. Life became hell on earth for you. You had to kill yourself, or he had to kill you to get you functioning as a separate entity. — Harper Lee

Isn't it a mercy that we never get cured of being expectant? It makes life so bearable. However regularly we are disappointed and nothing whatever happens, after the first blow has fallen, after the first catch of the breath, the first gulp of misery, we turn our eyes with all their old eagerness to a point a little further along the road. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

But moments like this, with Colton? They make it all bearable. He doesn't fix me, doesn't heal me. He just makes life worthwhile. He helps me remember to breathe, shows me how to smile again. — Jasinda Wilder

Life does not stand still for families and local communities when our brave men and women are deployed, but we can make their time apart more bearable by recognizing their sacrifice and fulfilling our commitments to them. — Mark Pryor

Love did not conquer all; it only made life more bearable for a short time before it consumed its victims. — Heather Webb

Life is a dreary continuum made bearable by those moments of excitement. It's called feeling alive. — Lee Monroe

I shut myself off to make life bearable. I'm like a damn machine sometimes. Unfeeling. Uncaring. Emotionless. — Monica Murphy

with parenting there's a long game and a short game. The aim of the short game is to make your children bearable to live with. Easy to transport. Well behaved in public places. In other words, to make your own life easier. And, yes, you can achieve that with punishments, with discipline, with a clip here and there. But the aim of the long game is to produce a good human being. — Lisa Jewell

When I first thought about writing this book, I conceived of it as a book about moods, and an illness of moods, in the context of an individual life. As I have written it, however, it has somehow turned out to be very much a book about love as well: love as sustainer, as renewer, and as protector. After each seeming death within my mind or heart, love has returned to recreate hope and restore life. It has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest. It has, inexplicably and savingly, provided not only cloak but lantern for the darker seasons and grimmer weather. — Kay Redfield Jamison

As an adolescent, Vonnegut made my life bearable. — Jon Stewart

He knew how the audition was going to affect their lives for the next ten weeks as she slowly lost her mind from nerves and the strain of trying to scrounge precious practice time from an already jam-packed life. No matter how much time poor Sam gave her, it would never be quite enough, because what she actually needed was for him and the kids to just temporarily not exist. She needed to slip into another dimension where she was a single, childless person. Just between now and the audition. She needed to go to a mountain chalet (somewhere with good acoustics) and live and breathe nothing but music. Go for walks. Meditate. Eat well. Do all those positive-visualization exercises young musicians did these days. She had an awful suspicion that if she were to do this in reality, she might not even miss Sam and the children that much, or if she did miss them, it would be quite bearable. — Liane Moriarty

No stories or explanations,' Finnikin had once told him. 'When it comes to women, straight into an apology and you will find the rest of your life bearable. — Melina Marchetta

There are certain delicate illusions that make life bearable. Love, in its most pure and pathetic form, the one before we get to genuinely know the person we love, is one of them. Ignorance is bliss, and the less you know, the more you love, the less you have, the more you want.
We all miss the most the things we never had. — Cristian Mihai