My Life Isn't A Game Quotes & Sayings

When did your childhood end? How badly did you get hurt, when you did, when you were this little wee little hurtable thing, nothing but big eyes, a heart, a few hundred words? Isn't it wonderful how we never recover? Injuries and wounds, ladies and gents. Slights and abuses, oh, what a paradise. Living in fear, suiting the hurt to our need. What a happy life. What a good game. Who can stand the most, the most life, and still smile, still grin into the coming night and say more, more, encore, encore, you fuckers, you fates, just give me more of the bloody bloody same. — Will Eno

After a great blow, or crisis, after the first shock and then after the nerves have stopped screaming and twitching, you settle down to the new condition of things and feel that all possibility of change has been used up. You adjust yourself, and are sure that the new equilibrium is for eternity ... But if anything is certain it is that no story is ever over, for the story which we think is over is only a chapter in a story which will not be over, and it isn't the game that is over, it is just an inning, and that game has a lot more than nine innings. When the game stops it will be called on account of darkness. But it is a long day. — Robert Penn Warren

Very few people mate for life with the people they fall for at twelve. Doesn't mean is isn't real, doesn't mean it doesn't hurt, doesn't mean it doesn't matter, but basically, we're talking a practice swing in the big game of love. — Jennifer Crusie

If You Can Stand It, Play the Long Game ...
What I mean here is that you have to remain committed to the ultimate goal, which isn't to win the immediate approval of the online world, or dazzle a workshop, but to improve your storytelling day by day.
Finding the right balance of feedback - encouragement versus vigorous criticism - will help immeasurably.
But your own commitment has to be to the process of improvement, not to the anticipated reward.
If it's any consolation, I'm still working on this final lesson. — Steve Almond

Baseball isn't just a game. It's the smell of popcorn drifting in the air, the sight of bugs buzzing near the stadium lights,the roughness of the dirt beneath your cleats. It's the anticipation building in your chest as the anthem plays, the adrenaline rush when your bat cracks against the ball, and the surge of blood when the umpire shouts strike after you pitch. It's a team full of guys backing your every move, a bleacher full of people cheering you on. It's ... life — Katie McGarry

You may not see every single piece of the puzzle that creates your life
you may not see every move the grand chess player makes
but know, He is in complete control of the game board. Sometimes certain pieces are moved or knocked over to make room for new ones. Other times, things happen because of the world we live in. But everything in the end, will always turn out for good. It's a nice promise, isn't it? To know there's a reason for it all? — Rachel Van Dyken

Life isn't always like Chess. But sometimes it is. In a really difficult game, queen leaves board at the end. The difference is, you call it sacrifice in Chess. — Heshan Udunuwara

Softball isn't just a game it's away of life. — Kevin Kelly

Life's not a video game, Felix- there aren't a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn't actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over. — Zadie Smith

This is the only leadership life I get, my one and only shot at following God the way I feel him prompting me to do so. This isn't some pre-game warm-up. It's the game, and the clock is ticking! — Bill Hybels

Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it's a big part, and sometimes it isn't, but either way, it's part of the big puzzle, the deep music, the great game. Pain does two things: it teaches you, tells you that you're alive. Then it passes away and leaves you changed. It leaves you wiser, sometimes. Sometimes it leaves you stronger. Either way, pain leaves its mark, and everything important that will ever happen to you in life is going to involve it to one degree or another.
(Harry Dresden's internal monologue in White Knight) — Jim Butcher

Where's Shelley?" I ask, scanning the room.
"Playing checkers, as usual," Georgia says, pointing to the corner. Shelley isn't facing me, but I recognize the back of her head and her wheelchair.
She's squealing, a hint that she won the game.
As I get closer to her, I catch a glimpse of who's playing against her. The dark hair should have been a clue that my life is about to be turned upside down, but it doesn't fully register. I freeze.
It can't be. My imagination must be going berserk.
But when he turns around and those familiar dark eyes pierce mine, reality zings up my spine like a lightning bolt.
Alex is here. Ten steps away from me. Oh, God, every feeling I've ever had for him comes rushing back like a tidal wave. I don't know what to do or say. I turn back to Georgia, wondering if she knew Alex was here. One look at her hopeful face tells me she did. — Simone Elkeles

We are all blind thinking that life consists of possessing material goods, holding onto this, then that, getting to know one thing, then another, then trying desperately to ignore the fact that the whole process inevitably amounts to absolutely nothing. Life isn't a game where you have to possess and know as many things as possible. Rather, it is about reducing yourself to zero, living in a new and more authentic way. — Jean Sulivan

I go back to it, if only to remind myself that life isn't always a butcher's game. Sometimes the prizes are real. Sometimes they're precious. — Stephen King

About winning and losing: It isn't important, what really counts is how you play the game. About playing the game: PLAY TO WIN! — Robert Fulghum

Life is amazing, isn't it? You can't ever tell what will happen. Nobody knows until they go ahead and play the game. — Gennifer Choldenko

he doesn't play the game ... He refuses to lie. Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler. But Meursault, contrary to appearances, doesn't want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened. — Albert Camus

The point isn't to win the game. The point is to play a beautiful game. (paraphrased) — Patrick Rothfuss

It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play - the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life - its facility, its use. — William H Gass

It isn't the big troubles in life that require character. Anybody can rise to a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh - I really think that requires spirit.
It's the kind of character that I am going to develop. I am going to pretend that all life is just a game which I must play as skillfully and fairly as I can. If I lose, I am going to shrug my shoulders and laugh - also if I win. — Jean Webster

This isn't fair, he would think in those moments. This isn't friendship. It's something, but it's not friendship. He felt he had been hustled into a game of complicity, one he never intended to play. — Hanya Yanagihara

I certainly didn't want to fight with him. I did, however, want to shout, "Listen, you son of a bitch, life isn't all a goddam football game! You won't always get the girl! Life is rejection and pain and loss" -- all those things I so cherishly cuddled in my slef-pitying bosom. I didn't, of course, say any such thing — Frederick Exley

I hate it that they even count errors,' Ethan said ... 'What kind of game is that? No other sport do they do that, Dad. There's no other sport where they put the errors on the freaking scoreboard for everybody to look at. They don't even have errors in other sports. They have fouls. They have penalties. Those are things that players could get on purpose, you know. But in baseball they keep track of how many accidents you have.'
* * *
Errors ... Well, they are a part of life, Ethan,' he tried to explain. 'Fouls and penalties, generally speaking, are not. That's why baseball is more like life than other games. Sometimes I feel like that's all I do in life, keep track of my errors.'
But Dad, you're a grown-up,' Ethan reminded him. 'A kid's life isn't supposed to be that way. — Michael Chabon

I know better than anyone else that my time is near. I've had a good life, and you don't stop and complain at this stage of the game. I've made some mistakes, and I'd like to stay around a little longer and overcome them, but there isn't time. I'll miss baseball. That I know. — Joe Tinker

Life is a game. In order to have a game, something has to be more important than something else. If what already is, is more important than what isn't, the game is over. So, life is a game in which what isn't, is more important than what is. Let the good times roll. — Werner Erhard

I don't like to lose, and that isn't so much because it is just a football game, but because defeat means the failure to reach your objective. I don't want a football player who doesn't take defeat to heart, who laughs it off with the thought, "Oh, well, there's another Saturday." The trouble in American life today, in business as well as in sports, is that too many people are afraid of competition. The result is that in some circles people have come to sneer at success if it costs hard work and training and sacrifice. — Knute Rockne

The Creator puts life into motion, and doesn't just sit around all day moving each and every piece this way and that on his whims. If life was just one gigantic board game, God isn't the banker or the leader, or even a collection of all the players. God is just the one who invented the game. You can be pissed all you want when something awful or even evil happens during the game, but you have no right to go and sue Milton Bradley. — Sean Patrick Brennan

I don't think it's fair to 12-, 13- and 14-year-olds to say 'Show us you're a winner right now!' Winning isn't everything. I'll never buy that thing that if a boy loses a football game, he's a loser in life. — Joe Paterno

Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn't be more simple, nor the stakes higher. — Yann Martel

Life isn't fair, so you have to play the best game you can with the cards you're dealt. — Marta Acosta

I simply state that I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation-with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones. I've thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. One thing I know. If living isn't seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game. — F Scott Fitzgerald

You? Really now, Mr. McGee. You are spectacularly huge, and a tan that deep is almost vulgar, and you have a kind of leathery fading boyish charm, but this is not and never was a game for dilettantes, for jolly boys, for the favor-for-an-old-buddy routine. No gray-eyed wonder with a big white grin can solve anything or retrieve anything by blundering around in my life. Thanks for the gesture. But this isn't television. I don't need a big brother. So why don't you just go on back to your fun and games? — John D. MacDonald

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn't us. Don't be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life. — Wayne Dyer

This isn't a game to me, Fable. This is my life. And I want you to be a part of it ... I want you and you only. I'm not sharing you with anyone else. — Monica Murphy

All I can say is what you already know: some days are treasure. Not many, but I think in almost every life there are a few. That was one of mine, and when I'm blue
when life comes down on me and everything looks tawdry and cheap, the way Joyland Avenue did on a rainy day
I go back to it, if only to remind myself that life isn't always a butcher's game. Sometimes the prizes are real. Sometimes they are precious. — Stephen King

Domination and critique have always formed an apparatus covertly against a common hostis: the conspirator, who works under cover, who used everything THEY give him and everything THEY attribute to him as a mask. The conspirator is everywhere hated, although THEY will never hate him as much as he enjoys playing his game. No doubt a certain amount of what one usually calls "perversion" accounts for the pleasure, since what he enjoys, among other things, is his opacity. But that isn't the reason THEY continue to push the conspirator to make himself a critic, to subjectivate himself as critic, nor the reason for the hate THEY so commonly express. The reason is quite simply the danger he represents. The danger, for Empire, is war machines: that one person, that people transform themselves into war machines, ORGANICALLY JOIN THEIR TASTE FOR LIFE AND THEIR TASTE FOR DESTRUCTION. — Tiqqun

Golf isn't a game, it's a choice that one makes with one's life. — Charles Rosin

Baseball isn't just a game. It's life being played out on a field - a field of dreams - on diamonds of green, where players pursuing their dreams try to be the best they can be on the grandest stage of all - where men become boys and boys become men, all speaking one universal language without uttering a single word. — Tom Tatum

To think about fairness, think of economic life as a game - a serious game. All ideas about fairness can be divided into two broad groups. They are:
- It isn't fair if the result isn't fair.
- It isn't fair if the rules aren't fair. — Robert S. Pindyck

It's so much easier to point a finger than to take responsibility yourself, isn't it? Maybe it isn't so simple as this person's fault or that one. Maybe we make up the dance together, as we go along, and no one knows what the result will be. — Claire Cross

But the game isn't like that, because life isn't like that. Gods don't come down in life to mete out justice. The powerful do it. That's what they are teaching us, not only the pain in gaining power, but the desperation that comes from not having it, the desperation that comes when you are not a Gold. — Pierce Brown

I rolled my eyes at Jeremy. Guys and their egos are completely insufferable. "What do you want me to say Jeremy? You're hot, and you're a good kisser. But I'm in love with Bryn. End of story."
A smile spread across his face, the gold flecks in his eyes dancing. "So I'm still in the game."
I threw my hands up in the air in exasperation. "This isn't a game-it's my life! — D.T. Dyllin

Is life worth living? Like everybody else, I have many times asked that question, usually deciding negatively, because I am most likely to ask myself whether life is worth living, at times when I am convinced it isn't. One day, in one of my frequent, and probably incurable, scientific moments, it occurred to me to find out. For a month, at the end of each day, I set down a plus sign, or a minus sign, indicating that, in my opinion, life had, or had not, been worth living, that day. At the end of the month, I totted up, and I can't say that I was altogether pleased to learn that the pluses had won the game. It is not dignified to be optimistic. — Charles Fort

A good game gives us meaningful accomplishment - clear achievement that we don't necessarily get from real life. In a game, you've beaten level four, the boss monster is dead, you have a badge, and now you have a super laser sword. Real life isn't like that, right? — Jesse Schell

This isn't a game anymore. This is our life, our future, and there is no way in hell I'm letting her go. — B.J. Harvey

It's important for someone who could play the game - and win - to say: 'the game isn't worth shit. — Gloria Steinem

Nobody likes to fail but failure is an essential part of life and of learning. If your uniform isn't dirty, you haven't been in the game. — Ben Bernanke

Good tennis players are those who beat other tennis players, and a good shot during play is one the opponent can't return. But that's not a truth about life or excellence -- it's a truth about tennis. We've created an artificial structure in which one person can't succeed without doing so at someone else's expense, and then we accuse anyone who prefers other kinds of activities of being naive because "there can be only one best -- you're it or you're not," as the teacher who delivered that much-admired you're-not-special commencement speech declared. You see the sleight of hand here? The question isn't whether everyone playing a competitive game can win or whether every student can be above average. Of course they can't. The question that we're discouraged from asking is why our games are competitive -- or our students are compulsively ranked against one another -- in the first place. — Alfie Kohn