Life Is Peculiar Quotes & Sayings

He'll come back. We all come back, kate. These private little revolutions always die. The compromise is always made. In a peculiar way. Frank is right
every man does have a star. The star of one's honesty. And you spend your life groping for it, but once it's out it never lights again. I don't think he went very far. He probably just wanted to be alone to watch his star go out. — Arthur Miller

I've got a peculiar weakness for criminals and artists. Neither takes life as it is. Any tragic story has to be in conflict with things as they are. — Stanley Kubrick

My homicidal maniac is of a peculiar kind. I shall have to invent a new classification for him, and call him a zoophagous (life-eating) maniac; what he desires is to absorb as many lives as he can, and he has laid himself out to achieve it in a cumulative way.. — Bram Stoker

Peculiar or not, it is my idea of pleasure. Why, why else do you lead this life you don't enjoy it? Don't talk of duty to me; you men always have some high-sounding excuse for indulging yourselves. You go gallivanting over the earth, climbing mountains, looking for the sources of the Nile; and expect women to sit dully at home embroidering. I embroider very badly. I think I would excavate rather well. — Elizabeth Peters

The peculiar, withdrawn attitude of the philosopher, world denying, hostile to life, suspicious of the senses, freed from sensuality, which has been maintained down to the most modern times and has become virtually the philosopher's pose par excellence - is above all a result of the emergency conditions under which philosophy arose and survived at all; for the longest time, philosophy would not have been possible at all on earth without ascetic wraps and cloaks, without an ascetic self-misunderstanding. To put it vividly: the ascetic priest provided until the most modern times the repulsive and gloomy caterpillar form in which alone the philosopher could live and creep about. — Friedrich Nietzsche

We must look back over our lives and look at some of the accidents and curiosities and oddities and troubles and sicknesses and begin to see more in those things than we saw before. It raises questions, so that when peculiar little accidents happen, you ask whether there is something else at work in your life. — James Hillman

It is generally allowed, that no man ever found the happiness of possession proportionate to that expectation which incited his desire, and invigorated his pursuit; nor has any man found the evils of life so formidable in reality, as they were described to him by his own imagination; every species of distress brings with it some peculiar supports, some unforeseen means of resisting, or powers of enduring. — Samuel Johnson

Literature, after all, from Homer onwards, is littered with the recounting of deaths and with the fascination for death, and in this it only expresses what we all repeatedly dwell on but do not necessarily or readily voice. So far as death goes, I don't claim any oddity. There is only one sea: I'm in the same boat as everyone else. And that seems, more generally, to be the position that every novelist, unless they are possessed of a peculiar arrogance, should take: I am mortal too, I am human too. I too, like you, share life's joys, pains, confusions. We're all in the same boat. — Graham Swift

Are physical forces alone at work there, or has evolution begotten something more complex, something not akin to what we know on Earth as life? It is in this that lies the peculiar interest of Mars. — Percival Lowell

Three tendencies can be observed in the estimation of dreams. Many philosophers have given currency to one of these tendencies, one which at the same time preserves something of the dream's former over-valuation. The foundation of dream life is for them a peculiar state of psychical activity, which they even celebrate as elevation to some higher state. Schubert, for instance, claims: "The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter." Not all go so far as this, but many maintain that dreams have their origin in real spiritual excitations, and are the outward manifestations of spiritual powers whose free movements have been hampered during the day ("Dream Phantasies," Scherner, Volkelt). A large number of observers acknowledge that dream life is capable of extraordinary achievements - at any rate, in certain fields ("Memory"). — Sigmund Freud

Everything is sort of built in a way that to me suggests intelligent design. But at the same time there's a lot of things in life where you say to yourself, well, if this is God's plan, it's very peculiar. And you have to wonder about that guy's personality, the big guy's personality. — Stephen King

The most probable of all my theorems, is that life is ordered by the principles of some religion so peculiar and obscure it has no followers, and none may fathom it, nor know the rituals by which to court its favour. — Alan Moore

It is one of the peculiar truths of life that people often say things that they know full well are ridiculous. — Lemony Snicket

You'll always meet someone new, encounter something odd. That's the peculiar thing about life. Everything will make sense after it happens in the end. Everything will be clear, fresh, as if looking through glass. Crazy, isn't it? — Serena Winter

...inner life is inadequately recognised or honoured by many conservative leaders and spokesmen, in word or in work. In effect the theology of conservatism has been sacrificed to the new gods and the new morality of modernity. The discipline of spiritual conservatism has been manifestly lessened by its own peculiar form of liberation theology, as it were, and by the purely quantitative point of view prevailing in the marketplace of ideas. — George A. Panichas

A policing of sex: that is, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses. A few examples will suffice. One of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the emergence of "population" as an economic and political problem: population as wealth, population as manpower or labor capacity, population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded. Governments perceived that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a "people," but with a "population," with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation. — Michel Foucault

It may be said, in broad-brush terms, that the primary purpose of life is the continuation of life. A deep program for survival and reproduction underwrites the complex cycles of life, in which death is the grand equalizer. There is, however, a peculiar novelty: human awareness of the cycle of life and a capacity to anticipate our own, individual death. — Richard J. Borden

There was about all the Romans a heroic tone peculiar to ancient life. Their virtues were great and noble, and these virtues madethem great and noble. They possessed a natural majesty that was not put on and taken off at pleasure, as was that of certain eastern monarchs when they put on or took off their garments of Tyrian dye. It is hoped that this is not wholly lost from the world, although the sense of earthly vanity inculcated by Christianity may have swallowed it up in humility. — Herman Melville

Every period of life has its peculiar temptations and dangers. But youth is the time when we are most likely to be ensnared. This, pre-eminently, is the forming, fixing period, the spring season of disposition and habit; and it is during this season, more than any other, that the character assumes its permanent shape and color, and the young are wont to take their course for time and for eternity. — Josiah Johnson Hawes

And they will pause just for an instant, and give a sigh to me, and think, "Poor girl!" believing they do great justice to my memory by this. But they will never, never realize that it was my single opportunity of existence, as well as of doing my duty, which they are regarding; they will not feel that what to them is but a thought, easily held in those two words of pity, "Poor girl!" was a whole life to me, as full of hours, minutes, and peculiar minutes, of hopes and dreads, smiles, whisperings, tears, as theirs: that it was my world, what is to them their world, and that in that life of mine, however much I cared for them, only as the thought I seem to them to be. Nobody can enter into another's nature truly, that's what is so grievous. — Thomas Hardy

It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things as: birth, becoming, death, and ressurection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death, followed by the rebirth of the lunar type ("light coming out of darkness"); weaving, the symbol of the "thread of life," fate, temporality, and death; and yet others. In general most of the ideas of cycle, dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of reconciliation of contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, were either discovered or clarified by virtue of lunar symbolism. We may even speak of a metaphysics of the moon, in the sense of a consistent system of "truths" relating to the mode of being peculiar to living creatures, to everything in the cosmos that shares in life, that is, in becoming, growth and waning, death and ressurrection. — Mircea Eliade

An artist, in my experience, is a man or woman of unusual talent and peculiar, highly individual sensibility, with an independent and probably contrary mind, driven by mysterious passions for which another word is neurosis. In getting from point A to point B, the neurotic goes via point Q. It's in that roundabout that people are either completely crippled and hopeless in life, or highly creative. — Peter Schjeldahl

This lost country composers do not actually remember, but each of them remains all his life somehow attuned to it; he is wild with joy when he is singing the airs of his native land, betrays it at times in his thirst for fame, but then, in seeking fame, turns his back upon it, and it is only when he despises it that he finds it when he utters, whatever the subject with which he is dealing, that peculiar strain the monotony of which - for whatever its subject it remains identical in itself - proves the permanence of the elements that compose his soul. — Marcel Proust

Other relaxations are peculiar to certain times, places and stages of life, but the study of letters is the nourishment of our youth, and the joy of our old age. They throw an additional splendor on prosperity, and are the resource and consolation of adversity; they delight at home, and are no embarrassment abroad; in short, they are company to us at night, our fellow travelers on a journey, and attendants in our rural recesses. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Next, we shall ask our opponent how, in reference to any of the pursuits or arts of civic life, the nature of a woman differs from that of a man? That will be quite fair. And perhaps he, like yourself, will reply that to give a sufficient answer on the instant is not easy; but after a little reflection there is no difficulty. Yes, perhaps. Suppose then that we invite him to accompany us in the argument, and then we may hope to show him that there is nothing peculiar in the constitution of women which would affect them in the administration of the State. By all means. Let — Plato

It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times
the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie
seem attractive by comparison. — Christopher Lasch

For each, God has a different response. With every man He has a secret - the secret of a new name. In every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter. I say not it is the innermost chamber. — George MacDonald

Truth is more peculiar than fiction. Life is really a startling place. — Mira Nair

It is very difficult to be a hero without an audience, although, in a sense, we are each the hero of a peculiar, half-ruined film called our life. — Sebastian Barry

The advertising agency, as it stands today, is a peculiar manifestation of American business life of the twentieth century - glossy, brash, and insecure. — Ilka Chase

Why does a man spend fifty years of his life in an occupation that is often painful? I once told a class I was teaching that writing is an intellectual contact sport, similar in some respects to football. The effort required can be exhausting, the goal unreached, and you are hurt on almost every play; but that doesn't deprive a man or a boy from getting peculiar pleasures from the game. — Irwin Shaw

Happy domestic life is like a beautiful summer's evening; the heart is filled with peace; and everything around derives a peculiar glory. — Hans Christian Andersen

Life is really very fantastic, and one has to have a peculiar sense of humour to see the fun of it.
[Virtue] — W. Somerset Maugham

The life of the cenobite is a human problem. When we speak of convents, those seats of error but innocence, of mistaken views but good intentions, of ignorance but devotion, of torment but martyrdom, we must nearly always say yes or no ... The monastery is a renunciation. Self-sacrifice, even when misdirected, is still self-sacrifice. To assume as duty a strict error has its peculiar grandeur. — Victor Hugo

It is a peculiar thing in life that the people you most particularly want to edge away from always seem to cluster round like a poultice. — P.G. Wodehouse

To learn that his treasures had been lost months ago, and so far away, was no different from learning of the death, similarly distant in time and geography, of a beloved person. Such a death bears a peculiar imprint of doubt. To be told one day that someone has gone off to the other side of the world, and with whom you expect momentarily to be reunited, has actually been dead for many months, during which you have been going on with your life, unaware of this subtraction that has taken place, makes a mockery of the finality of death. Death is reduced to news. And news is always a little unreal - which is why we bear to take in so much of it. — Susan Sontag

It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening. — Sue Monk Kidd

The growth of a passion is a very peculiar thing. In highly
organized intellectual and artistic types it is so often apt to
begin with keen appreciation of certain qualities, modified by
many, many mental reservations. The egoist, the intellectual,
gives but little of himself and asks much. Nevertheless, the
lover of life, male or female, finding himself or herself in
sympathetic accord with such a nature, is apt to gain much. — Theodore Dreiser

Discipline brings us effort, sacrifice and suffering. Later it brings us something of an inestimable value: something of which those who live only for pleasure, profit or amusement will always be deprived. This peculiar indefinable joy which one must have felt oneself to understand is the sign with which life marks its moment of triumph. — Alexis Carrel

Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it in, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route. — Tom Robbins

It is painful to witness the death of the smallest of God's created beings, much more, one in which life is so vigorously maintained as the Whale! And when I saw this, the largest and most terrible of all created animals bleeding, quivering, dying a victim to the cunning of man, my feelings were indeed peculiar! — Nathaniel Philbrick

We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods, and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with Nature. He has glances of starry recognition to which our saloons are strangers. The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles. — Henry David Thoreau

And loneliness is something we share with him. "The whole conviction of my life," wrote Thomas Wolfe, "now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon peculiar to myself and a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence." To be missed, or misunderstood. To be judged unfairly. To be wanted for what you can do, rather than who you are. To go on for years unappreciated, even unknown by those closest to you. — John Eldredge

...The happy Warrior... is he... whose powers shed round him in the common strife, or mild concerns of ordinary life, a constant influence, a peculiar grace; but who, if he be called upon to face some awful moment to which Heaven has joined great issues, good or bad for human kind, is happy as a lover; and attired with sudden brightness, like a man inspired; and, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law in calmness made, and sees what he foresaw; or if an unexpected call succeed, come when it will, is equal to the need: he who, though thus endued as with a sense and faculty for storm and turbulence, is yet a soul whose master-bias leans to homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes; sweet images! which, wheresoe'er he be, are at his heart; and such fidelity it is his darling passion to approve; more brave for this, that he hath much to love:- — William Wordsworth

Simplicity is the character of the spring of life, costliness becomes its autumn; but a neatness and purity, like that of the snow-drop or lily of the valley, is the peculiar fascination of beauty, to which it lends enchantment, and gives what amiability is to the mind. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar. — Grace Paley

He is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. But it may be that the way of life that he has chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and sweetness of his character may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow men so that, long after his death perhaps, it may be realized that there lived in this age a very remarkable creature. — W. Somerset Maugham

To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life ... organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet. — Theodor Adorno

This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real. — Philip Gourevitch

If a Martian (who, we'll imagine, never dies except by accident) came to Earth and saw this peculiar race of creatures - these humans who live about seventy or eighty years, knowing that death is going to come - it would look to him like a terrible problem of psychology to live under those circumstances, knowing that life is only temporary. Well, we humans somehow figure out how to live despite this problem: we laugh, we joke, we live. — Richard Feynman

So if you find out how you prevent yourself from growing, from using your potential, you have away of increasing this, making life richer, making you more and more capable of mobilizing yourself. And our potential is based upon a very peculiar attitude: to live and review every fresh second — Frederick Salomon Perls

Once upon a time there was a girl who discovered that if she played a certain tune on a jade flute, she could summon up jade gnomes, a peculiar, harmless, but rather creepy looking spirit of the underground. The fact is that many of us have talents like this, but generally never discover them due to lack of opportunity, since one can go one's entire life without playing a jade flute, or discovering that one can speak the language of ground sloths, or turning fruitcake into solid tungsten by singing Sinatra tunes to it under a quarter moon. — Ursula Vernon

Thus, his ambition led him not to relieve his patients' madness, but to exasperate it - to let it breathe with a life of its own. And this he did in certain ways that wholly eradicated what human attributes remained in these people. But sometimes that peculiar magic he saw in their eyes would seem to fade, and then he would institute his 'proper treatment,' which consisted of putting them through a battery of hellish ordeals intended to loosen their attachment to the world of humanity and to project them further into the realm of the 'silent, staring universe' where the insanity of the infinite might work a rather paradoxical cure. The result was something as pathetic as a puppet and as exalted as the stars, something at once dead and never dying, a thing utterly without destiny and thus imperishable, forever consigned to that abysmal vacuity which is the essence of all that is immortal. — Thomas Ligotti

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.
He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gently tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.
He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back. — Robert Lowell

It is a peculiar thing to believe that you know someone intimately only to find that you really do not. It is like finishing a book only to discover that you have missed several key chapters.
THE LETTER Chapter 9 page 104 — Richard Paul Evans

It is the peculiar nature of the forest, that life and death may ever be found within its bounds, in immediate presence of each other; both with ceaseless, noiseless advances, aiming at the mastery; and if the influences of the first be most general, those of the last are the most striking. — Susan Fenimore Cooper

In every dispute between parent and child, both cannot be right, but they may be, and usually are, both wrong. It is this situation which gives family life its peculiar hysterical charm. — Isaac Rosenfeld

God has set apart His people from before the foundation of the world to be His chosen and peculiar inheritance. We are sanctified in Christ Jesus by the Holy Spirit when he subdues our corruptions, imparts to us grace, and leads us onward in the divine walk and life of faith. Christian men are not to be used for anything but God. They are a set-apart people; they are vessels of mercy, they are not for the devil's use, not for their own use, not for the world's use, but for their Master's use. He has made them on purpose to be used entirely, solely and wholly for Him. O Christian people, be holy, for Christ is holy. Do not pollute that holy Name wherewith you are named. Let your family life, your personal life, your business life, be as holy as Christ your Lord would have it to be. Shall saints be shams when sinners are so real? — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Reality is infinitely diverse. It resists classification, inward life. Peculiar to us ... not simply the official existence. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life. — Henry David Thoreau

The forest is a peculiar organism of unlimited kindness and benevolence that makes no demands for its sustenance and extends generously the products of its life activity; it affords protection to all beings, offering shade even to the axe-man who destroys it. — Gautama Buddha

For she was suffering that misery peculiar to the young, that they are going to be cheated by circumstances out of the full life every nerve and instinct is clamouring for. — Doris Lessing

What part of life isn't peculiar? Seriously? At what point, really, do you stop and say, well, THIS is really strange? THIS part. Not THAT part. But THIS part. — Robin Black

The shaman is a very peculiar figure. He is critical to the functioning of the psychological and social life of his community, but in a way he is always peripheral to it. He lives at the edge of the village. He is only called upon in matters of great social crisis. He is feared and respected. And this might be a description of these hallucinogenic substances. — Terence McKenna

To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combinations of atoms is like saying that Shakespeare's Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters. — Ernst F. Schumacher

Ultimately, we are all products of the experiences we have and the decisions we make as children, and it remains a peculiar detail of human condition that something as precious as the future is entrusted to us when we possess so little foresight. Perhaps that's what makes hindsight so intriguing. When you're young the future is a blank canvas, but looking back you are always able to see the big picture. — Simon Pegg

We may insist as often as we like that man's intellect is powerless in comparison to his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it will not rest until it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds. — Sigmund Freud

I want to find my golden joy," I said.
The baron laughed loudly. "Splendid," he said. "But what does that mean to you
your golden joy?"
"The golden joy," I replied, "is when a peculiar flight of free thought makes it possible to see the beauty of life. Am I making myself clear? — Victor Pelevin

Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an event happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design. — Ellen Glasgow

This body is the boat which will carry us to the other shore of the ocean of life. It must be taken care of. Unhealthy persons cannot be Yogis. Mental laziness makes us lose all lively interest in the subject, without which there will neither be the will nor the energy to practise. Doubts will arise in the mind about the truth of the science, however strong one's intellectual conviction may be, until certain peculiar psychic experiences come, as hearing or seeing at a distance, etc. These glimpses strengthen the mind and make the student persevere. Falling away ... when obtained. Some days or weeks when you are practicing, the mind will be calm and easily concentrated, and you will find yourself progressing fast. All of a sudden the progress will stop one day, and you will find yourself, as it were, stranded. Persevere. All progress proceeds by such rise and fall. — Swami Vivekananda

He that would travel for the entertainment of others, should remember that the great object of remark is human life. Every nation has something peculiar in its manufactures, its works of genius, its medicines, its agriculture, its customs, and its policy. He only is a useful traveller, who brings home something by which his country might be benefitted; who procures some supply of want, or some mitigation of evil, which may enable his readers to compare their condition with that of others, to improve it whenever it is worse, and whenever it is better to enjoy it. — Samuel Johnson

It does seem that a fantasy, working out in its own terms, stretching you beyond the normal concerns of your own life, gains you a peculiar charge of energy which inexplicably enriches you. At least, this is my ideal of a fantasy, and I am always trying to write it. — Diana Wynne Jones

The summer I turned eleven, I found out that ghosts are real.
Guess it's hard to rest nice and easy in your coffin if you got stuff on your mind. Your soul stays chained to earth instead of zipping up to heaven to sing in one of the angel choirs.
Sometimes ghosts show up in the msot peculiar places.
Sometimes ghosts fool you.
Then you are those ghosts that hang around because we have unfinished business. Business that sinks like old crawfish left in a bucket for a week. That's some nasty smell let me tell you.
But the most important thing I learned is that ghosts can help you spill your guts before guilt eats you up and leaves a hole that can't ever be fixed no matter how many patches you try to steam iron across it. — Kimberley Griffiths Little

May 20, '95 - Mississippi calls. She says, "All my working life I have done things to help black people. I can drive into the black part of town where no white person would dare to go. I have nothing to fear. They say, 'Hi there, Mizz Mississippi.' I still call them niggers, but only because of the way they act. I'd have an affair with Johnnie Cochran in a minute." Once she said to me, "I don't see why I should have to feel guilty about the Holocaust. It's not my fault." I hadn't been talking or thinking about the Holocaust, and hadn't told anyone to feel guilty. Her remark came out of nowhere. We were in a diner, about to have a sandwich and suddenly the moment was explosive. Simply being a Jew arouses a peculiar expectation mixed with resentment, even in a highly intelligent woman. Amazing to me is that she doesn't do much but watch television, drink beer, and smoke Marlboros, and yet seethes with dark thoughts and tumultuous feeling. — Leonard Michaels

TV acting is so extremely intimate, because of the peculiar involvement of the viewer with the completion or "closing" of the TV image, that the actor must achieve a great degree of spontaneous casualness that would be irrelevant in movie and lost on the stage. For the audience participates in the inner life of the TV actor as fully as in the outer life of the movie star. Technically, TV tends to be a close-up medium. The close-up that in the movie is used for shock is, on TV, a quite casual thing. — Marshall McLuhan

You have a very peculiar expression on your face,' he commented drowsily.
'I was just thinking.'
'About what?'
'About how we know what's real. How we wake out of a timeless place and recognize time. How you know me here, now, even when nothing or anyone else in this place is familiar. I might have been wandering through your dream, but you knew immediately which of me will bring you paper.'
He was silent for so long, still clasping her wrist, that she thought he must have fallen asleep without knowing it. He said finally, 'Say that again.'
'I can't,' she answered helplessly. 'It was just a thought. I gave it to you.'
'Something about dreams coming to life--'
'That's not what I said. — Patricia A. McKillip

She held out her hand and we sat there together like grade-school kids on a field trip. "Line up in twos and no talking." Life itself is a peculiar outing. Sometimes I still feel like I need a note from my mother. — Sue Grafton

The Greeks believe the Fates are three sisters: one is Order, who spins out the linear thread of a life from the beginning; another is Irony, who gently cocks up the thread, marking it with some peculiar sense of balance, like justice, only blind drunk with a scale that's been bunged into the street so it never quite settles; and the third, Inevitability, simply sits in the corner taking notes and criticizing the other two for being shameless slags until she cuts life's thread, leaving everyone miffed at the timing. — Christopher Moore

Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation - but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped? — Friedrich Nietzsche

If Christ be a fraud, he was among the most peculiar yet brilliant of frauds in saying that only he was the way, the truth, and the life. This is the importance of grace - some people think that simply being nice and not harming others is morality; others think that following rules and tithing are morality. But without Christ, all moral beliefs ultimately boil down to the one sin which perpetually rails against the concept of grace: man's lawful, religious, and futile attempt at establishing his own righteousness. — Criss Jami

So overall, though my life is far from perfect, I'm contented with it. And in a peculiar way, I'm grateful for the troubling emotions I experienced. The obstacles we face in life can provide powerful incentives for change. — Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

At the center of the religious life is a peculiar kind of joy, the prospect of a happy ending that blossoms from necessarily painful ordeals, the promise of human difficulties embraced and overcome. — Huston Smith

If talent is a natural aptitude for creation with an outlook on life peculiar to oneself, then genius is to have an outlook on life, peculiar to oneself, which yet appeals to everybody. Talent is for oneself and a few others, but genius is universal. — D.E. Stevenson

In an interesting inversion of status, the reigning breed in the dog park these days is the really-oddball-unidentifiable-mixed-breed-mutt-found-wandering-the-street or its equivalent. The stranger the mutt the better; the more peculiar the circumstance of it coming into your life, the better. — Susan Orlean

One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it. — Djuna Barnes

Eternal life is not a peculiar feeling inside! It is not your ultimate destination, to which you will go when you are dead. If you are born again, eternal life is that quality of life that you possess right now. — W. Ian Thomas

I recently discovered that a friend who was re-reading Bleak House had done no other Dickens apart from Barnaby Ridge. That's just weird. I shamed and nagged him into picking up Great Expectations instead. But when I tried to recall anything about it other than its excellence, I failed. Maybe there was something about a peculiar stepfather? Or was that This Boy's Life? And I realized that, as this is true of just about every book I consumed between the ages of, say fifteen to forty, I havent even read the books I think I've read. I can't tell you how depressing this is. What's the fucking point? — Nick Hornby

There is something charming and peculiar about a beginning. You feel it, like the change of seasons, from winter to spring, from spring to summer. You feel it; the new blood pumping inside your veins. You feel it; a thousand butterflies fluttering around your fingers to help you fly. You feel it; on your lips, when you smile at the absurdities of life that suddenly make perfect sense.
You smile... Because in every beginning, there is a rebirth. Because in every beginning, there is a layer of you that you just discovered. A layer you forgot was buried in you all this time. You smile because you are reminded of the immensity of fate. You smile because suddenly you feel so small and you like it.
So let's begin my dear. This life is beautiful. — Malak El Halabi

The cell, this elementary keystone of living nature, is far from being a peculiar chemical giant molecule or even a living protein and as such is not likely to fall prey to the field of an advanced chemistry. The cell is itself an organism, constituted of many small units of life. — Oscar Hertwig