Life Reverse Quotes & Sayings

Life is like a game of limbo in reverse. The bar keeps rising higher and we need to keep rising to the occasion. — Ryan Lilly

If people perceive themselves as having very little opportunities to be fulfilled, then it cheapens their life and outlook. The solution is to reverse it; make sure they know opportunities abound. — Michael Lee-Chin

I think maybe Gladstone had it right. I think my father did. They understood that the meaning of life is connected, inextricably, to the meaning of death; that mourning is a romance in reverse, and if you love, you grieve and there are no exceptions---only those who do it well and those who don't. — Thomas Lynch

If I'm in the car after a bad game, I may think about ways I need to improve. But the second I reach home, the game's over. Work doesn't come inside with me. Same thing in reverse - I don't bring my personal life into the ballpark. Learning to keep it all separate has made life easier. — Matt Kemp

But I am pro-life and will intend, if I'm president of the United States, to encourage pro-life policies. [ ... ] And I hope to appoint justices to the Supreme Court that will follow the law and the constitution. And it would be my preference that they reverse Roe v. Wade and therefore they return to the people and their elected representatives the decisions with regards to this important issue. — Mitt Romney

Baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple. Within the baselines anything can happen. Tides can reverse; oceans can open. That's why they say, "the game is never over until the last man is out." Colors can change, lives can alter, anything is possible in this gentle, flawless, loving game. — W.P. Kinsella

The more passive one's life in the field, the greater the need to reverse the situation when one returns home, which is why the arcane and authoratative character of academic writing may be seen, to some extent, as a vengeful reaction to the inertia, uneventfulness, and waiting one had to endure as a guest at someone else's banquet. A way of redressing an existental imbalance, as it were reclaiming authorial will by superimposing one's own meaning on theirs ... — Michael Jackson

If I had one singular galvanizing ambition in life, I would try to reverse engineer toward it, but I don't. — Chelsea Clinton

[The] Japanese were a people in a profound, inverse, reverse, or if I preferred it, even perverse sense, more in love with death than living. — Sir Laurens Van Der Post

Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards. — Susan Sontag

It's not life in the present moment that is intolerable; the pain we are avoiding has already happened. We are living in reverse. — Geneen Roth

The type of the Inevitable is death. I remember well that in my youth I believed that I was certainly exempt from its operation. First when my daughter died, next when you were wounded, I knew that I was mortal; and now I regard those years as wasted, as unproductive, in which I was not aware that my death was certain, nay, momently possible. I can now appraise at a glance those who have not yet foreseen their death. I know them for the children they are. They think that by evading its contemplation they are enhancing the savor of life. The reverse is true: only those who have grasped their non-being are capable of praising the sunlight. — Thornton Wilder

There is a basic truth to shifting your life out of reverse and into a forward gear, and it is this: no matter what your circumstances are or what you have done in the past, God loves you with an everlasting love, and He will make your life count for something wonderful, if you will place your trust in Him. — Charles F. Stanley

A woman desires to be a man's last romance, her baby's first love and a person who can live with dignity all her life. As a girl matures to be a woman, her fairy tale imagination gets superseded by her struggle to be a good wife, a good mother and most importantly, a woman of virtue. As victor or vanquished, a woman keeps fighting the sequence of odds and evens throughout her life. Since nature had made women strong, society has very wisely done the reverse to maintain the balance. — Purba Chakraborty

far as the reputations of young women are concerned, the less fucking the better. The reverse is true for young men of course. Hardly fair, but then life is unfair in so many ways, this one hardly seems worth commenting on." "Huh. — Joe Abercrombie

One can never change the past, only the hold it has on you, and while nothing in your life is reversible, you can reverse it nevertheless. — Merle Shain

One would have thought that in the days of peace the progress of women to an ever larger share in the life and work and guidance of the community would have grown, and that, under the violences of war, it would be cast back. The reverse is true. War is the teacher, a hard, stern, efficient teacher. War has taught us to make these vast strides forward towards a far more complete equalisation of the parts to be played by men and women in society. — William Manchester

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

In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill and he creates very 'gifted' improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action. — Malcolm Gladwell

The day the roles reverse is foreign. It's a clumsy dance of love and responsibility, not wanting to cross any lines of respect. It's honoring this person who gave their life to you - not to mention literally gave you life - and taking their fragile body in your hands like a newborn, tending to their every need. — Lisa Goich

It occurs to me to wonder: do I believe in any god, or even positively not believe, as James does? I believe in systems and methods. I believe in the beauties of philosophy and poetry. I believe that the work we do and leave behind us is our afterlife; and I believe that history lies, but sometimes so well that I can't bring myself to resent it. I believe that truth is beauty, but not, I'm afraid, the reverse. It doesn't seem sufficient to sustain one in life's rigorous moments. Perhaps I shall embrace Islam. Its standards for poetry seem very high. — Emma Bull

De Grey describes his goal as "engineered negligible senescence" - stopping the body and brain from becoming more frail and disease-prone as it grows older.18 As he explains, "All the core knowledge needed to develop engineered negligible senescence is already in our possession - it mainly just needs to be pieced together."19 De Grey believes we'll demonstrate "robustly rejuvenated" mice - mice that are functionally younger than before being treated and with the life extension to prove it - within ten years, and he points out that this achievement will have a dramatic effect on public opinion. Demonstrating that we can reverse the aging process in an animal that shares 99 percent of our genes will profoundly challenge the common wisdom that aging and death are inevitable. Once robust rejuvenation is confirmed in an animal, there will be enormous competitive pressure to translate these results into human therapies, which should appear five to ten years later. — Ray Kurzweil

In psychology (okay, Twilight) they teach you about the notion of imprinting, and I think it applies here. I reverse-imprinted with athleticism. Ours is the great non-love story of my life. — Mindy Kaling

At that stage of your life, there'll be no past or future for you; until I give you my breast, you'll have no memory of contentment in the past nor expectation of relief in the future. Once you begin nursing, everything will be in reverse, and all will be right with the world. NOW is the only moment you'll perceive; you'll live in the present tense. In many ways, it's an enviable state. — Ted Chiang

What can be the dharma at one point in your life can totally reverse itself, and suddenly you might be doing something the opposite or something very new, something you never considered. — Frederick Lenz

We are not saying that final salvation is unconditional. It is not. We must meet the condition of faith, for example, in Christ in order to inherit eternal life. But faith is not a condition for election. Just the reverse. Election is a condition for faith. It is because God chose us before the foundation of the world that he purchases our redemption at the cross, and then gives us spiritual life through irresistible grace, and brings us to faith. — Christian Focus Publications

There are things that once done can't be undone, things that once said can't be unsaid. — Lisa Gardner

We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it is
good-and that is the real theater-to
transcend them in the manner of play, by
means of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair,
to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put "in
play," show up, transform and reverse
the systems which quietly order us about. — Michel Foucault

There are plenty of books that tell you how to become a writer, but not one that suggests how, if you want a normal life, you might reverse the process. — Hilary Mantel

It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare, you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare."
"And what is that nightmare, Craig?"
"Life. — Ned Vizzini

I destroyed that doll, hoping the sacrifice would somehow reverse time and bring my father back. I was a mad scientist and an angry child. — Walter Mosley

Urban reinvention is what has been called the "consumer city." The post-World War II years brought about the rise of suburbanization and the creation of the commuter city. People chose suburban life for its amenities and comforts and commuted into the city only for work and the occasional show. But Vancouver and Los Angeles are two urban areas that reversed the trend. They became consumer cities marked by a new phenomenon - the reverse commuter. Increasingly, these and other cities offer residents a quality of life they could not find elsewhere in the region - a dizzying variety of artistic, educational, cultural, and entertainment events and — Timothy Keller

Meanwhile the fact that the connection with the activity of memory in ordinary life is for the moment lost is of less importance than the reverse, namely, that this connection with the complications and fluctuations of life is necessarily still a too close one. — Hermann Ebbinghaus

There is no agreement on the extent to which metabolism could develop independently of a genetic material. In my opinion, there is no basis in known chemistry for the belief that long sequences of reactions can organize spontaneously
and every reason to believe that they cannot. The problem of achieving sufficient specificity, whether in aqueous solution or on the surface of a mineral, is so severe that the chance of closing a cycle of reactions as complex as the reverse citric acid cycle, for example, is negligible. — Leslie Orgel

There is no door that leads to the meaning of existence, no window to enlightenment. If only we could enter life through the exit and live in reverse; then maybe we'd have a chance at understanding what the hell life is about. — Barbara Schoichet

It will be very interesting one day to follow the pattern of our life as it is spread out like a beautiful tapestry. As long as we live here we see only the reverse side of the weaving, and very often the pattern, with its threads running wildly, doesn't seem to make sense. Some day, however, we shall understand.
In looking back over the years we can discover how a red thread goes through the pattern of our life: the Will of God. — Maria Augusta Von Trapp

How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible. — Karen Thompson Walker

And now I speak of thanking God, I desire with all humility to acknowledge that I owe the mentioned happiness of my past life to His kind providence, which lead me to the means I used and gave them success. My belief of this induces me to hope, though I must not presume, that the same goodness will still be exercised toward me, in continuing that happiness, or enabling me to bear a fatal reverse, which I may experience as others have done; the complexion of my future fortune being known to Him only in whose power it is to bless to us even our afflictions. — Benjamin Franklin

If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine
why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as 'irrelevant'? — May Sarton

Those are the dangerous moments. They show us that the adjustment is only artificial, that it is not simple rest, but sharpest struggle for rest. In the outward form of our life we are hardly distinguishable from Bushmen; but whereas the latter can be so always, because they are so truly, and at best may develop further by exertion of their spiritual forces, with us it is the reverse; - our inner forces are not exerted toward regeneration, but toward degeneration. The Bushmen are primitive and naturally so, but we are primitive in an artificial sense, and by virtue of the utmost effort. And — Erich Maria Remarque

To live fully, outwardly and inwardly, not to ignore the external reality for the sake of the inner life, or the reverse, that's quite a task — Etty Hillesum

Oh, my God,' she said, between sobs. 'Oh, my God.'
Olanna reached out often to squeeze her arm. The rawness of Edna's grief made her helpless, brought the urge to stretch her hand into the past and reverse history. Finally, Edna fell asleep. Olanna gently placed a pillow beneath her head and sat thinking about how a single act could reverberate over time and space and leave stains that could never be washed off. She thought about how ephemeral life was, about not choosing misery. She would move back to Odenigbo's house. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A death in reverse is the rewinding of life. I do not die of old age,
in a bed surrounded by strangers my loved ones paid to take care of me.
I die in reverse.
I die falling back
into a younger age.
From my forty-five years to twenty-five.
To sixteen. When we were in love.
To fourteen: when we first met.
To five.
To one.
To the hospital my mother died at
from the complications of my existence.
A life for a life. — F.K. Preston

The homunculus narrator experiences everything backward - his first memory is Unverdorben's death. He has no control over Unverdorben's actions, nor access to his memories, but passively travels through life in reverse order. At first Unverdorben appears to us as a doctor, which strikes the narrator as quite a morbid occupation - patients shuffle into the emergency room, where staff suck medicines out of their bodies and rip off their bandages, sending them out into the night bleeding and screaming. But near the end of the book, we learn that Unverdorben was an assistant at Auschwitz, where he created life where none had been before - turning chemicals and electricity and corpses into living persons. Only now, thinks the narrator, does the world finally make sense. — Sean Carroll

For the first two years of a child's life, we spend every waking hour tryibg to get the child to communicate. Then we spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out how we can reverse the process. — Erma Bombeck

The future was becoming past, everything vanished into the void, and reaching back to grasp for something, one came out clutching - what? A bit of string, scraps of cloth, shadows of the golden time. If one could only reverse it, turn the past into future, and catch it on the wing, on its journey across the always shifting line of the present ... — Rohinton Mistry

The self-satisfaction and material preoccupations of his time was independent of his point about the injustices of poverty, the Vietnam War, and racial discrimination. But he saw them as connected. To reverse these injustices, Kennedy thought it necessary to challenge the complacent way of life he saw around him. He did not hesitate to be judgmental. And yet, by invoking Americans' pride in their country, he also, at the same time, appealed to a sense of community. — Michael J. Sandel

Do not feel that you are destined not to make that final liberation in this life. This is egotism in a reverse form. Don't be concerned one way or the other. — Frederick Lenz

Adults want to talk about death way less than people my age do. Death is the Santa Claus of the adult world. Except Santa Claus in reverse. The guy who takes all the presents away. Big bag over the shoulder, climbing up the chimney carrying everything in a person's life, and taking off, eight-reindeered, from the roof. — Maria Dahvana Headley

Some people are lucky enough to find their passion and spend their life pursuing it. Whether it is photography, accounting, sports, or law enforcement, they immerse themselves in the occupation that suits them. They refine their craft and look forward to a lifetime of going to the office knowing they love what they do and there are no regrets. When a life is irreversibly altered in a way that prohibits a person from continuing along their beloved path, they may feel depressed, angry, or like the shell of the person they once were. When the life is intentionally altered by someone else, the person can be left in a purgatory of sorts, hoping in a child-like fashion that things may somehow reverse themselves and they can return to the profession they loved so much. Mario is the epitome of a man whose dream was stolen, and he hasn't quite found a way to accept or believe it. — Karen Rodwill Solomon

Only God-the One through whom "all things were made" (1:3, cf. v. 10), in whom "was life" and "light" (v. 4)-can reverse creation's death and dissipate the darkness caused by sin.
2. But since that death and darkness are within creation, within man, the Word must become flesh in order to restore it from within. The Creator must enter His own creation, groaning as it is under the burden of alienation from Him. — Sinclair B. Ferguson

I'm sort of a reverse Method actor. In my personal life, I become my characters. After 'One Tree Hill', I started dressing in Converse and ripped jeans and hoodies. On 'Awkward', it manifests in how I speak. — Ashley Rickards

She wondered then if she had ever been on the right track. She had been reticent all her life, because it turned out that her opinions were different from what others expected. 'That proves either that I am an exceptional idiot, or the reverse. — Nuruddin Farah

A dear friend best expressed, in a few words, the aim of this book. When she reflected on my recovery from Alzheimer symptoms she stated: "You came back to life." She was right. For me, losing the ability to think, talk, and feed and clothe myself would be the same as dying. If you (or someone you know) suffer these symptoms, I want to bring you back to life." "Avoiding certain foods can reverse the many conditions caused by nerve damage - including damage to the nerves of the brain. The nerves of the brain can recover from years of abuse. — William E. Walsh

I am always loath to use the world 'evil,' but if 'evil' is the reverse of 'live,' Guy de Rothschild is thoroughly evil. He stands for the opposite of life. — David Icke

I ain't got no reverse. I've learned, a little later in life, it works out pretty good to have one every once in a while. — Waylon Jennings

It would be wholly impossible for me to say whether this cloudy, silently disturbed, unraveled sky is mirrored in my soul or the reverse, whether or not I read the image of my own inner life in this sky. Sometimes everything is so completely uncertain! There are days when I am convinced that no man on earth can recognize certain moods of air and cloud, certain tones of color, certain fragrances and movements of moisture as finely, as exactly, and as truly as I can, with my old, nervous sense of poet and wanderer. And then again, as today, it can be doubtful to me whether I have seen, heard, and smelled anything after all, whether everything that I took to be true is not merely an image cast outward, the image of my inner life. — Hermann Hesse

But though I knew just how lucky I was, still it was impossible to feel happy or even grateful for my good fortune. It was as if I'd suffered a chemical change of the spirit: as if the acid balance of my psyche had shifted and leached the life out of me in aspects impossible to repair, or reverse, like a frond of living coral hardened to bone. — Donna Tartt

Unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter. — Charles Yu

Because just before I arrived, he showed up on the bus. He, meaning Damien.
He reminded me of the pain I'd felt when he died. He reminded me of what it's like to feel your heart explode in your chest cavity at the realization of living your life without the only person you've ever loved. And he reminded me of the promise I'd made to him months ago. I told him that I'd love him forever.
That I'd never let go.
But part of me wants to let go.
Deep down inside I know that I can't go on loving a ghost forever. I tell myself this every day. Then I see him and I forget about having those thoughts. Because when I do see him, he looks like the Damien I met on that humid summer day, who was smirking at me, and driving his candy apple red Cadillac in reverse. When I see him he looks so vivid.
So full of life.
Not so ... so ...
So dead. — Lauren Hammond

The compulsion to preach is so rooted in us that it emerges from depths unknown to the instinct for self-preservation. Each of us awaits his moment in order to propose something - anything. He has a voice: that is enough. It costs us dear to be neither deaf nor dumb. . .

From snobs to scavengers, all expend their criminal generosity, all hand out formulas for happiness, all try to give directions: life in common thereby becomes intolerable, and life with oneself still more so; if you fail to meddle in other people's business you are so uneasy about your, own that you convert your "self" into a religion, or, apostle in reverse, you deny it altogether; we are victims of the universal game. . . — Emil M. Cioran

All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do sowould I? — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Alexis de Tocqueville warned that as the economy and government of America got bigger, citizens could become smaller: less practiced in the forms of everyday power, more dependent on vast distant social machines, more isolated and atomized--and therefore more susceptible to despotism.

He warned that if the "habits of the heart" fed by civic clubs and active self-government evaporated, citizens would regress to pure egoism. They would stop thinking about things greater than their immediate circle. Public life would disappear. And that would only accelerate their own disempowerment.

This is painfully close to a description of the United States since Trump and Europe since Brexit. And the only way to reverse this vicious cycle of retreat and atrophy is to reverse it: to find a sense of purpose that is greater than the self, and to exercise power with others and for others in democratic life. — Eric Liu

They understood that the meaning of life is connected, inextricably, to the meaning of death; that mourning is a romance in reverse, and if you love, you grieve and there are no exceptions-- only those who do it well and those who don't. And if death is regarded as an embarrassment or an inconvenience, if the dead are regarded as a nuisance from whom we seek a hurried riddance, then life and the living are in for like treatment. — Thomas Lynch

There was something particularly American about it--blaming yourself for bad luck--that resistance to seeing your life as affected by social forces, a tendency to attribute larger problems to individual behavior. The ugly reverse of the American Dream. — Philipp Meyer

And there in the middle, high above Prechistensky Boulevard, amidst a scattering of stars on every side but catching the eye through its closeness to the earth, its pure white light and the long uplift of its tail, shone the comet, the huge, brilliant comet of 1812, that popular harbinger of untold horrors and the end of the world. But this bright comet with its long, shiny tail held no fears for Pierre. Quite the reverse: Pierre's eyes glittered with tears of rapture as he gazed up at this radiant star, which must have traced its parabola through infinite space at speeds unimaginable and now suddenly seemed to have picked its spot in the black sky and impaled itself like an arrow piercing the earth, and stuck there, with its strong upthrusting tail and its brilliant display of whiteness amidst the infinity of scintillating stars. This heavenly body seemed perfectly attuned to Pierre's newly melted heart, as it gathered reassurance and blossomed into new life. — Leo Tolstoy

Life will follow the path it began to take, and will neither reverse nor check its course. It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly. It will not lengthen itself for a king's command or a people's favour. As it started out on its first day, so it will run on, nowhere pausing or turning aside. What will be the outcome? You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that. — Seneca.

THE WAIT: It is life in slow motion,
it's the heart in reverse,
it's a hope-and-a-half:
too much and too little at once.
It's a train that suddenly
stops with no station around,
and we can hear the cricket,
and, leaning out the carriage
door, we vainly contemplate
a wind we feel that stirs
the blooming meadows, the meadows
made imaginary by this stop. — Rainer Maria Rilke

I figured I'd probably write 50 scripts in my life. Out of those 50, I figured maybe five would be produced, and that maybe one or two would be successful. So I always kind of expected I'd write at least one successful film in my life. [ ... ] The way it all came together was kind of like Murphy's law in reverse - I don't expect that kind of experience again any time soon. — Michael Arndt

As I uttered these inspiring words the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagram shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and my companion understood them perfectly. The images I saw were wonderfully sharp and clear and had the solidity of metal and stone, so much so that I told him, "See my motor here; watch me reverse it." I cannot begin to describe my emotions. Pygmalion seeing his statue come to life could not have been more deeply moved. A thousand secrets of nature which I might have stumbled upon accidentally, I would have given for that one which I had wrested from her against all odds and at the peril of my existence ... — Nikola Tesla

[ ... ] I could no longer believe even in life. Which meant that I had come to be the reverse, the opposite of a Christian. For me, now, the only reality is death. — Russell Banks

Dear Supreme Altruist-

I hope you are in a receptive mood.

Thanks very much for placing wihin me the bomb that never stops exploding. Though the benefits have been intangible and in fact I feel that this terrifying mechanism has generally made my life intolerable, I shall never ask you to reverse the situation. I feel I have done everything that may be reasonably expected of me in the way of self-abnegation. However, I now find to my dismay that my lifelong fear of death is beginning to desert me. I believe that this may mean that the bomb's continual explosions may be causing the growth of new slabs of man-bark instead of blasting the loathesome stuff away as it has been doing.

I therefore humbly request that the explosive power of the bomb be increased. Please do not make me weaker; make the bomb stronger.

Amen. — Jim Woodring

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring. — Vladimir Nabokov

Renounce and give up. What did Christ say? "He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." Again and again did he preach renunciation as the only way to perfection. There comes a time when the mind awakes from this long and dreary dream-the child gives up its play and wants to go back to its mother. Renunciation is not asceticism. Are all beggars Christ? Poverty is not a synonym for holiness; often the reverse. — Swami Vivekananda

It intruded on an inorganic wasteland and set up shop. What evolved was a global workhouse where nothing is ever at rest, where the generation and discarding of life incessantly goes on. By what virtue, then, is it entitled to receive a pardon for this original sin - a capital crime in reverse, just as reproduction makes one an accessory before the fact to an individual's death? — Anonymous

The novelist Thomas Wolfe, recalling a lifelong struggle with illness, wrote in his last letter, "I've made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I've seen the dark man very close." I had not made the journey myself, and I had only seen the darkness reflected in the eyes of others. But surely, it was the most sublime moment of my clinical life to have watched that voyage in reverse, to encounter men and women returning from the strange country - to see them so very close, clambering back. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will fee like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benatar or The Cure on the soundtrack. — Jonathan Tropper

The family only represents one aspect, however important an aspect, of a human being's functions and activities. A life is beautiful and ideal or the reverse, only when we have taken into our consideration the social as well as the family relationship. — Havelock Ellis

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

With the mistake your life goes in reverse. Now you can see exactly what you did Wrong yesterday and wrong the day before And each mistake leads back to something worse. — Alexander Pope

Tell me we're not going to be stoking up the cook fires to build palisades through the night by their light.' I stood, turning as I spoke.
Gravely, he said, 'You're not going to be stoking the cook fires and building palisades through the night by their light.'
Something was wrong with Lupus. He had never in his life made a joke, and his eyes were not laughing; quite the reverse. — M.C. Scott

He couldn't work, as such, but needed to flex himself somehow in ways that felt like work, he thought. Lacking credentials and sight he could not teach, for example. Even reading a cold-call script would be out, although he'd heard of a resourceful blind man who went to the social security office and suggested, "Give me either a job or just my damned check," and received the former, skillfully handling mediation assignments. — Edward Hoagland

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

Captain Harvile: Poor Phoebe, she would not have forgotten him so soon. It was not in her nature.
Anne Elliot: It would not be in the nature of any woman who truly loved.
Captain Harvile: Do you claim that for your sex?
Anne Elliot: We do not forget you as soon as you forget us. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You always have business of some sort or other to take you back into the world.
Captain Harvile: I won't allow it to be any more man's nature than women's to be inconstant or to forget those they love or have loved. I believe the reverse. I believe ... Let me just observe that all histories are against you, all stories, prose, and verse. I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which did not have something to say on women's fickleness.
Anne Elliot: But they were all written by men. — Jane Austen

Life and death are but phases of the same thing, the reverse and obverse of the same coin. Death is as necessary for man's growth as life itself. — Mahatma Gandhi

everything works out for the best and that every reverse in life carries the seeds of something better in the future. — Mary Beth Brown

You may be saying: 'I have failed in life and shall always be a failure.' That is because you are ever looking back, living in your failure and thereby bringing to you more failure. Reverse this attitude of mind; work it the other way and live in future success. — Prentice Mulford

We love someone, so we care. That love can morph into feeling responsible for them, then into we're accountable, then into we're to blame for their self-inflicted pain; then it's our fault if they crash and burn; then the fear causes us to hold on even tighter. Walk this in reverse until you get back to, "we love, we care". Now, love with wisdom. Step one in placing someone's life into His hands. — Lee Goff

One step of obedience can open your eyes. One step of obedience can reverse the curse. One step of obedience can begin a new chapter in your life! — Mark Batterson

The nobility of Teresa Leo's poems is that they are not disposed to hide from the dark-rather, they display a mind that tends toward obsession and brooding, that works against fatality like fingers at a knot. The firm, attentive mind on display and the lucid unfolding of the poems are the life instinct seeking and finding its way through again and again. Love and beauty are the argument, but they don't win easily. Bloom in Reverse works through elegy toward survival with moving persistence, both driven and compelling. — Tony Hoagland

We want to get behind the beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that reflects to us our own desire for good. It is a sphinx, an enigma, a sorrowfully irritating mystery. We want to feed on it, but it is only an object we can look on; it appears to us from a certain distance. The great sorrow of human life is knowing that to look and to eat are two different operations. Only on the other side of heaven, where God lives, are they one and the same operation. Children already experience this sorrow when they look at a cake for a long time and nearly regret eating it, but are powerless to help themselves. Maybe the vices, depravities and crimes are nearly always or even always in their essence attempts to eat beauty, to eat what one can only look at. Eve initiated this. If she lost our humanity by eating a fruit, the reverse attitude - looking at a fruit without eating it - must be what saves. — Simone Weil

We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back form the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see its like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that ... Also watch the flow of music. The melody as its expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence ... you wait till later to find out what the sentence means ... The present is always changing the past. — Alan W. Watts

When I look back on my life I come to one simple conclusion: there exists an intelligent, loving Presence in the Cosmos that will ultimately have its desire for relationship with us fulfilled; even our arrogant dismissal of its existence will not stop it in its tracks. The Enlightenment's god, the great idol of free will, lies smashed in pieces in its wake. The jealous Presence patiently draws us homeward like some gigantic electromagnetic beam. The Death Star in reverse. This divinity is, I believe, the 'Abba' of Jesus, a transcendence that will not be boxed in by religious misrepresentation... — Dylan Morrison

Men and women make their own beauty or their own ugliness. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton speaks in one of his novels of a man "who was uglier than he had any business to be;" and, if we could but read it, every human being carries his life in his face, and is good-looking or the reverse as that life has been good or evil. On our features the fine chisels of thought and emotion are eternally at work. — Alexander Smith

When God chooses you to deliver a message, to have a purpose, no one and nothing can reverse the course of His plan. — Carlos Wallace

As if when someone close to us dies, we momentarily trade places with them, in the moment right before. And as we get over it, we're really living their life in reverse, from death to life, from sickness to health. — David Levithan

It is we who move through time, not the reverse. When we walk beyond any one of life's instants, it becomes nothing more than a receding milestone. We can look back, but we cannot retrace our steps. The past remains stationary, while we are doomed to move ever onwards. To do otherwise is against nature. — Andrew Levkoff

In dreams you can become everything you're not. You can reverse the most fundamental truths of your life. You can taste death, the ultimate opposite. — Robin Wasserman

The reverse gear of time is the mind! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The United States is no longer first in the world in upward mobility. We can reverse that trend by giving our young children an equal start in life as they begin their journey to fulfill the American Dream. — Madeleine M. Kunin