When Life Takes You Down Quotes & Sayings

One nice thing about the Third World, you don't have to fasten your seat belt. (Or stop smoking. Or cut down on saturated fats.) It takes a lot off your mind when average life expectancy is forty-five minutes. — P. J. O'Rourke

Tick's strategy for dealing with lying adults is to say nothing and watch thee lies swell and constrict in their throats. when this happens, the lie takes on a physical life of its own and must be either expelled or swallowed. Most adults prefer to expel untruths with little burplike coughs behind their hands, while others chuckle or snort or make barking sounds. When Mr. Meyer's Adam's apple bobs once, Tick sees that he's a swallower, and that this particular lie has gone south down his esophagus and into his stomach. According to her father, the man suffers from bleeding ulcers. Tick can see why. She imagines all the lies a man in his position would have to tell, how they must just churn away down there in his intestines like chunks of indigestible food awaiting elimination. By the Tick suspects, lies seek open air. they don't like being confined in dark, cramped places. — Richard Russo

I had lived my entire life up until I began working at Westwind relatively corpse-free. Now I had access to scores of them - stacked in the crematory freezer. They forced me to face my own death and the deaths of those I loved. No matter how much technology may become our master, it takes only a human corpse to toss the anchor off that boat and pull us back down to the firm knowledge that we are glorified animals that eat and shit and are doomed to die. We are all just future corpses. — Caitlin Doughty

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

When you take the sires of the cage apart, you do not hurt the bird, but you help it. You let it out of its prison. How do you you know that death does not help me when it takes the wires of my cage down?-that it does not release me, and put me into some better place and better condition of life? — Randolph Sinks Foster

I could take the greatest deal-makers of all time and they've always had something that didn't quite work out. You never want to put yourself in the position where something not working out is bigger than what you are and therefore takes you down. It's got to be in smaller chunks. In all cases, I want to learn something from things that didn't quite work out and learn, so that it doesn't happen again or so that in the future, you make great decisions. You don't want to make the same mistake twice and you have to learn that early on in your life. — Donald Trump

Do whatever it takes to increase your sensitivity to the little things in life you wouldn't otherwise notice, much less savor, if your autopilot setting is hurry. You've got to power down frequently enough to enjoy the effects of intentional living. — Tsh Oxenreider

That is what the taste of blood does. It takes away the gap between thought and action.To think is to do. There is no unlived life inside you as the air speeds past your body, as you look down at the dreary villages and market towns ... — Matt Haig

Butterflies prove that God gives second chances. Because a butterfly spends most of its life as a caterpillar, scooting along on the ground, barely getting by. When a caterpillar sees a butterfly he thinks how wonderful it would be to fly. And then one day he gets tired. Very tired. He builds a little room, curls up inside, and takes a nap. Deep in his heart he wonders if maybe that's all. Maybe life is over. But one day the caterpillar wakes up, and God has done an amazing thing. The caterpillar hakes off the little room and feels something on his back. This time when he goes a bit down the tree branch he doesn't scoot like before. He flies! — Karen Kingsbury

I go out on the porch and gaze up at the stars twinkling above, the random scattering of millions of stars. Even in a planetarium you wouldn't find as many. Some of them really look big and distinct, like if you reached your hand out intently you could touch them. The whole thing is breathtaking. Not just beautiful though
the stars like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me. What I've done up till now, what I'm going to do
they know it all. Nothing gets past their watchful eyes. As I sit there under the shining night sky, again a violent fear takes hold of me. My heart's pounding a mile a minute, and I can barely breathe. All these millions of stars looking down on me, and I've never given them more than a passing thought before. Bot just stars
how many other things haven't I noticed in the world, things I know nothing about? I suddenly feel helpless, completely powerless. And I know I'll never outrun that awful feeling. (135) — Haruki Murakami

Life's journey does not take place down an easy roadway, as some might imagine. It takes place inside a giant house with a million doorways. Every day of our lives we are faced with decisions to make, doorways to walk through. It can be confusing at times, like walking through a carnival maze. Some decisions we make are big, some small, but they all have consequences.. — K. Martin Beckner

Love is not enough. It takes courage to grab my father's demon, my own, or - God help me - my child's and strap it down and stop its mad jig; to sit in a row of white rooms filled with pills and clubbed dreamers and shout: stop smiling, shut up; shut up and stop laughing; you're sitting in hell. Stop preaching; stop weeping. You are a manic-depressive, always. your life is larger than most, unimaginable. You're blessed; just admit it and take the damn pill. — David Lovelace

And then you discover what you should have known all along: that it takes only one bad day to turn your life upside down. That there's nothing you can have, nothing you've earned, nothing you've paid for with blood and loss and suffering ... that the world can't take away from you. — Simon R. Green

In order to be released from that agony, it doesn't matter what it takes even if it means using your friend's life, right? And then after you've gobbled him down you'd be left alone to regret it while covered in blood and guts. That's the hunger of a 'Ghoul'. — Sui Ishida

Prusis told me that the fluke's raging in Moscow, and there's nothing to bury people in. All the material's been used up. So I decided to come out and set things straight.'
Ostap, who had been listening curiously to the entire conversation, stepped in. 'Listen, pops. It's Paris where the flu is raging.'
'In Paris?'
'Well, yes. So go to Paris. You'll rake it in there! It's true that you'll have a few difficulties with the visa, but don't get down about it, pops. If Briand takes a shine to you, your life won't be half-bad: you'll be set up as personal coffin-maker to the municipality of Paris. — Ilya Ilf

Nature offers us a thousand simple pleasers- Plays of light and color, fragrance in the air, the sun's warmth on skin and muscle, the audible rhythm of life's stir and push- for the price of merely paying attention. What joy! But how unwilling or unable many of us are to pay this price in an age when manufactured sources of stimulation and pleasure are everywhere at hand. For me, enjoying nature's pleasures takes conscious choice, a choice to slow down to seed time or rock time, to still the clamoring ego, to set aside plans and busyness, and to simply to be present in my body, to offer myself up.
Respond to the above quote. Pay special attention to each of your five senses as you describe your surroundings. Also, you need to incorporate at least one metaphor and smile in your descriptions. — Lorraine Anderson

Getting stress out of your life takes more than prayer alone. You must take action to make changes and stop doing whatever is causing the stress. You can learn to calm down in the way you handle things. — Joyce Meyer

There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. Tigers above, tigers below. This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and death. Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry we'll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life. — Pema Chodron

Our way was to share a fire until it burned down, ayi? To speak to each other until every person was satisfied. Younger men listened to older men. Now the Beelezi tell us the vote of a young, careless man counts the same as the vote of an elder.' In the hazy heat Tata Ndu paused to take off his hat, turn it carefully in his hands, then replace it above the high dome of his forehead. No one breathed. 'White men tell us: Vote, bantu! They tell us: You do not all have to agree, ce n'est pas necessaire! If two men vote yes and one says no, the matter is finished. A bu, even a child can see how that will end. It takes three stones in the fire to hold up the pot. Take one away, leave the other two, and what? The pot will spill into the fire. — Barbara Kingsolver

Life sometimes takes us down a path where our desires are attained, and some passions are left untouched, hidden but not forgotten. — Penelope Dianne Williams

I know people who are embarrassed to be American. They don't like showing their passports. It's becoming a scary place. It takes someone very brave not to be quiet, someone who doesn't mind death threats, their life being turned upside down, news cameras outside their door. There is no freedom of speech in America anymore. They are not living up to the constitution. There's so much fear in America and control. — Gillian Anderson

Fear about what, exactly?'
'Everything,' I said. 'But mostly just the realization that all it takes is one moment for your entire world to turn upside down. One wrong decision, and it's over. — Kristina McBride

Why? Because the Master won't ever walk out and fail to return. If he works severely, he also works tenderly. His stockpiles of loyal love are immense. He takes no pleasure in making life hard, in throwing roadblocks in the way: 34-36 Stomping down hard on luckless prisoners, Refusing justice to victims in the court of High God, Tampering with evidence - the Master does not approve of such things. — Eugene H. Peterson

Meaning was not a pitch but an interval. It sprang from the depth of disjunction, the distance between one circuit's center and the edge of another. Representation caught the sign napping, with its semantic pants down. Sense lay in metaphor's embarrassment at having two takes on the same thing. For the first time, I understand Emerson's saying about the use of life being to learn metonymy. Life *was* metonymy, or at least stood for it. — Richard Powers

In the midst of this scoured landscape, on a suburban street, I saw the church steeple, and Lucille slowed down and pointed, and waved me on. As I passed her to enter the parking lot, I thanked her, and she gave me a wonderful smile, and just before she drove on she said, "Be blessed." That seemed to be the theme in the Deep South: kindness, generosity, a welcome. I had found it often in my traveling life in the wider world, but I found so much more of it here that I kept going, because the good will was like an embrace. Yes, there is a haunted substratum of darkness in Southern life, and though it pulses through many interactions, it takes a long while to perceive it, and even longer to understand. — Paul Theroux

When we withdraw from life, we become a closed system. Our expression turns in on itself, often in anger and self-criticism, which wears us down further. Fire takes fuel to burn, and in a closed system, the fuel eventually burns up. Only in a dynamic state of interaction with the world can we keep up the movement and contact that feeds our fire and zest for life. — Anodea Judith

As long as we're young, we manage to find excuses for the stoniest indifference, the most blatant caddishness, we put them down to emotional eccentricity or some sort of romantic inexperience. But later on, when life shows us how much cunning, cruelty, and malice are required just to keep the body at ninety-eight point six, we catch on, we know the scene, we begin to understand how much swinishness it takes to make up a past. Just take a close look at yourself and the degree of rottenness you've come to. There's no mystery about it, no more room for fairy tales; if you've lived this long, it's because you've squashed any poetry you had in you. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Maybe freedom really is nothing left to lose. You had it once in childhood, when it was okay to climb a tree, to paint a crazy picture and wipe out on your bike, to get hurt. The spirit of risk gradually takes its leave. It follows the wild cries of joy and pain down the wind, through the hedgerow, growing ever fainter. What was that sound? A dog barking far off? That was our life calling to us, the one that was vigorous and undefended and curious. — Peter Heller

If Hank and I - Hank. She glanced down the long, low-ceilinged livingroom at the double row of women, women she had merely known all her life, and she could not talk to them five minutes without drying up stone dead. I can't think of anything to say to them. They talk incessantly about the things they do, and I don't know how to do the things they do. If we married - if I married anybody from this town - these would be my friends, and I couldn't think of a thing to say to them. I would be Jean Louise the Silent. I couldn't possibly bring off one of these affairs by myself, and there's Aunty having the time of her life. I'd be churched to death, bridge-partied to death, called upon to give book reviews at the Amanuensis Club, expected to become a part of the community. It takes a lot of what I don't have to be a member of this wedding. — Harper Lee

Wearing my scarlet dress and high heels, I walk down the street a proud woman. A woman flawed, but still, a woman who takes chances, a woman who has loved and been loved. To go out on a limb (or twenty -or forty or sixty, for that matter) is what life is about. It's about trying until you get it right. I'm okay with where I'm at right now. I still don't have a job, a loft, a husband, or kids - but I have me. My grandpa is right. I can maybe maybe myself to death or make peace with the past, with any mistakes I might have made, remember the good times and move forward. — Karyn Bosnak

In the horrible places, the battle for control escalates until you get tied down or locked into your Geri-chair or chemically subdued with psychotropic medications. In the nice ones, a staff member cracks a joke, wags an affectionate finger, and takes your brownie stash away. In almost none does anyone sit down with you and try to figure out what living a life really means to you under the circumstances, let alone help you make a home where that life becomes possible. This is the consequence of a society that faces the final phase of the human life cycle by trying not to think about it. We end up with institutions that address any number of societal goals - from freeing up hospital beds to taking burdens off families' hands to coping with poverty among the elderly - but never the goal that matters to the people who reside in them: how to make life worth living when we're weak and frail and can't fend for ourselves anymore. — Atul Gawande

Normal life is nuts. It's a downhill deterioration to death no matter how you spice it along the way, and there's nothing you can do about it. Now, a sane person, when faced when that, would just plunk his ass down at the starting line, or wherever along the way this realization finally came to him, and say, "Are you kidding? I quit. I'll slide the rest of the way or sit here and smoke." It takes a true lunatic, or someone functioning with the critical apparatus of a worker bee, to keep scrabbling up that hill when he knows his destiny is dust. But that us what is required. Go on. — Norah Vincent

A strong woman has waited patiently while her roots grew down deep into the Word of God. Over time, she becomes unshakeable in her faith. She starts bearing fruit naturally and is full of life. People are attracted to her strength and growth, and many find rest and peace as they lean on her. And when storms and trials come, as they always do, they will not be able to take her down. A few branches may be lost or pruned away, but in their place comes new growth, new life. This is what I long to be! A strong woman who is anchored in God's promises. But it starts by setting down your roots in God's Word. It will not happen as you stand up for yourself, and demand attention, and fight for yourself. It will happen as you stand in Christ, and demand that He gets your attention, and fight for His glory. The beautiful thing is that as we pursue this, God takes His rightful place in our lives. — Francis Chan

I withdrew back into the window frame. She took a hasty gulp from her glass and looked down at her lap. "I'm saying that this is what's it's like, when every man you kiss thinks he's unearthed you, and everyone has a role for you to play, the brave little refugee, the obedient daughter, the foreign girl with loose morals ... " Her hand made a quick mechanical gesture. "You do what you can with that. You can't stop life from happening, can you? You don't get to choose what parts you get. So you take your opportunities. You use the means available to you. Your life becomes something that takes you further and further away from yourself. It sounds cynical, I know. It is cynical. — Paul Murray

No one expects the rug to be yanked out from underneath them; life-changing events usually don't announce themselves. While instinct and intuition can help provide some warning signs, they can do little to prepare you for the feeling of rootlessness that follows when fate flips your world upside down. Anger, confusion, sadness, and frustration are shaken up together inside you like a snow globe. It takes years for the emotional dust to settle as you do your best to see through the storm. — Slash

I will be the answer at the end of the line. I will be there for you. Why take the time? In the burning of uncertainty, I will be your solid ground. I, I will hold the balance if you can't look down. If it takes my whole life, I won't break. I won't bend. It will all be worth it, worth it in the end because I can only tell you what I know, that I need you in my life. When the stars have all gone out you'll still be burning so bright. — Sarah McLachlan

It is impossible to live without hardship. The hardship of daily trifles, Ashely explains, ever accumulating and impossible to ignore, is so much meaner than pain or cold or fatigue. These annoyances make one weak and petty and shallow, just as greater struggles make one brave and wise. It's the little things that bring one down. Delayed trains and burnt puddings and drafty rooms. I was never so miserably cold on a mountain as I was in a drafty room. One can rise to dire occasions, but most of the time one worries about one's burnt pudding. It takes real struggle to see what life is. Then you realize you don't give two straws if your pudding's been burnt. — Justin Go

The stewardess was none other than Brenda Vaccaro, my great friend in real life. Brenda decks me. I fall to the floor of the plane, out of commission. She's saved the day. Brenda and I took longer to do our fight scene than any of our other scenes, because we fell down laughing for three takes. The wonderful absurdity of my turning the heavy wheel to open the plane door, her hand on my shoulder, turning me to look at her cute face, then doing our rehearsed one, two, three punches and shoves, just broke us up. My legs were jelly, I was wheezing with laughter - it was the closest I'd gotten to being in a school play. Sympathy for our nervous young director pulled us together just enough to get through it. — Lee Grant

Thoughts are things. Negativity is what kills you ... It's tough to do, but you've got to work at living, you know? Most people work at dying, but anybody can die; the easiest thing on this earth is to die. But to live takes guts; it takes energy, vitality, it takes thought ... We have so many negative influences out there that are pulling us down ... You've got to be strong to overcome these adversities ... that's why I never stop. — Jack LaLanne

When we are stunned to the place beyond words, we're finally starting to get somewhere. It is so much more comfortable to think that we know what it all means, what to expect and how it all hangs together. When we are stunned to the place beyond words, when an aspect of life takes us away from being able to chip away at something until it's down to a manageable size and then to file it nicely away, when all we can say in response is "Wow," that's a prayer. — Anne Lamott

Life is compost. You think that a strange thing to say, but it's true. All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it had rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on that black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel. — Diane Setterfield

But life was sometimes unkind, and didn't give second chances. Instead it gave you two choices. You could either curl up and die, or get up and try again. Getting up takes huge amounts of effort. It means bearing down and pushing through the toughest of times, even if you have to create barriers around your heart, and grow an extra layer of skin. But it also gives you a strength you probably never knew you'd possessed. An ember begins to glow. The glow eventually sparks, breathing new flame, which fuels a hope and desire to live. — Cameo Renae

I will not make you a vampire," Mr. Crepsley insisted. "You must forget about it. Go home and get on
with your life."
"No!" Steve screamed. "I won't forget!" He stumbled to his feet and pointed a shaking ringer at the tall,
ugly vampire. "I'll get you for this," he promised. "I don't care how long it takes. One day, Vur Horston,
I'll track you down and kill you for rejecting me!"
Steve jumped from the stage and ran toward the exit. "One day!" he called back over his shoulder, and I
could hear him laughing as he ran, a crazy kind of laugh. — Darren Shan

Pay close attention. Listen carefully. Let's look at what happens when fear is in charge.

With fear in charge, you can never fully relax, let your guard down, be your true self. You can't open up because you are afraid of how people will respond if they were to meet the real you. When fear is in charge, you simply cannot take that chance. Fear will not allow honesty, fear despises spontaneity, and fear refuses to believe in you. Fear may mean well, but it ruins everything by overprotecting you, insisting that you stay hidden and keep a low profile, that your time is coming....sometime later.

Fear is bold, but insists that you be timid. Take a chance and there will be hell to pay: fear will call on its dear friend, shame, to meet you on the other side of your risk taking, to tell you what you should not have done. Fear will trip you, tackle you, smother you, do whatever it takes to cause you to hesitate, to stop you. In this way fear is fearless. — Thom Rutledge

When you have kids and you're married ... you know, life takes its toll on you after a while, and then you're just not as creative, you're not as motivated ... And it takes a special person when it's time to dig down and do a record, to really go in there and pour out whatever it is you got in you to put on a record, and that's what we did. — Ginuwine

Do you remember when we went to the Black Sea and you pretended to be infatuated with Lorelei?" "Not that again." His face shut down. "I'm going to do something very dangerous and stupid. I've done some idiotic things in my life, but this takes the cake." "Tell me." "No." Gold rolled over his eyes. "What do you mean, no?" "If I tell you, you will stop me from doing it." "Now you have to tell me." I shook my head. "I'm calling in the Lorelei favor. You have to let me run with this." "Kate!" "No. — Ilona Andrews

I have found that fate has a warped tendency to let things simmer down for awhile to lead you to believe everything is all hunky dory. Content on just letting the life altering hurdles lay beneath a seemingly calm surface, luring you blindly into a new chapter of your life with the impression of smooth sailing up ahead only to have the unexpected spring up in front of you. Testing you, to see whether or not you have what it takes to roll with the waves, or sink like a stone beneath the waves. It is up to you to decide to stand back up, brush it off and continue fighting. — Stephanie Mayfield

Racing takes so much determination, guts, and sacrifice to be on top. I once craved, lived, and breathed racing. I can honestly say now, I'm ready to slow down and enjoy my life. Maybe I'll cut loose and have a cheeseburger or some pizza. Those types of indulgencies are not allowed when you constantly have to monitor your weight. — Chantal Sutherland

In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'" she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn't surprise me if she wrote it down. "So what does that really mean? In simple terms."
I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently.
"I think it means," I say, "that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms. — Haruki Murakami

You can never give up or get down on yourself. A true champion keeps his or her chin up and always takes life one race at a time. — Gail Devers

It takes a tremendous amount of strength to be a single mother. To hold down the forte of a home, a life and your child's entire happiness. — Nikki Rowe

A giant octopus living way down deep at the bottom of the ocean. It has this tremendously powerful life force, a bunch of long, undulating legs, and it's heading somewhere, moving through the darkness of the ocean ... It takes on all kinds of different shapes - sometimes it's 'the nation,' and sometimes it's 'the law,' and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that. You can try cutting off its legs, but they just keep growing back. Nobody can kill it. It's too strong, and it lives too far down in the ocean. Nobody knows where its heart is. What I felt then was a deep terror. And a kind of hopelessness, a feeling that I could never run away from this thing, no matter how far I went. And this creature, this thing doesn't give a damn that I'm me or you're you. In its presence, all human beings lose their names and their faces. We all turn into signs, into numbers. — Haruki Murakami

When dealing with American politics, you try to follow the money, and that's where it leads you. It doesn't take you to the electoral college or to Princeton. It takes you down the darker alleys of American life. — Roger Morris

God can turn any negative of life into a positive. If life takes us into the minus of negative experiences, heaven sends down a vertical line to intersect it and make all things positive. Let — S. Michael Wilcox

It takes courage to live your dream and bounce back up when you have been knocked down. Your dreams give you the energy and inspiration to live a great life. — Justin Langer

And when, after fifteen years of bingeing, barfing, starving, needles and tubes and terror and rage, and medical crises and personal failure and loss after loss - when, after all this, you are in your early twenties and staring down a vastly abbreviated life expectancy, and the eating disorder still takes up half your body, half your brain, with its invisible eroding force, when you have spent the majority of your life sick, when you do not yet know what it means to be 'well,' or 'normal,' when you doubt that those words even have meaning anymore, there are still no answers. You will die young, and you have no way to make sense of that fact.
You have this: You are thin. — Marya Hornbacher

Our minds do unusual things sometimes, Tamara. When we're looking for things it takes it upon itself to go down its own route. All we can do is follow — Cecelia Ahern

How do you get the happy ending? John Irving ought to know. One of my favorite authors, Irving writes these multigenerational epics of fiction that somehow work out in the end. How does he do it? He says, 'I always begin with the last sentence ; then I work my way backwards, through the plot, to where the story should begin.' Thst sounds like a lot of work, especially compared to the fantasy that great writers sit down and just go where the story takes them. Irving lets us know that good stories and happy endings are more intentional than that.
Most 20 something's can't write the last sentence of their lives. But when pressed, they usually can identify things they want in their 30s or 40s or 60s -or things they don't want- and work backward from there. This is how you have your own multigenerational epic with a happy ending. This is how you live your life in real time. — Meg Jay

There's somethin I learned when I was homeless: Our limitation is God's opportunity. When you get all the way to the end of your rope and there ain't nothin you can do, that's when God takes over. I remember one time I was hunkered down in the hobo jungle with some folks. We was talkin 'bout life, and this fella was talkin, said, 'People think they're in control, but they ain't. The truth is, that which must befall thee must befall thee. And that which must pass the by must pass thee by. — Ron Hall

Henry James once defined life as that predicament which precedes death, and certainly nobody owes you a debt of honor or gratitude for getting him into that predicament. But a child does owe his father a debt, if Dad, having gotten him into this peck of trouble, takes off his coat and buckles down to the job of showing his son how best to crash through it. — Clarence Budington Kelland

Maybe it's just getting older. You become so palpably aware this is not a dress rehearsal. There's a big sign in blazing neon that says You Haven't Got Long. But I think it takes a beat to learn that. Life has to knock you down in order for you to realise it, because when you're a kid you think you're immortal. — Tom Hiddleston

Today, it is the scent of honeysuckle that takes me back in time and lays me down near a barn. I pick a honeysuckle blossom, touch the trumpet to my nose and inhale. With sticky filthy fingers, I pinch the base of its delicate well then lick the drop of nectar. The sweet liquid makes me thirst for more, and I reach for another and another, the same hands that reach again and again for tobacco as I string. I separate honeysuckle blossoms and taste. — Brenda Sutton Rose

Someday you'll find the place
It's the place where love takes over hate
Then you'll see all the things you do
Affect everyone around you
Then you'll see there's no fear at all
You held my hand, we took down that wall
As I looked at you with nothing to say
Now I understand why you pushed me away
I looked far and now I see
That the only one I needed was me — Hilary Duff

One of the things that cause stress and strain in human social life is that it is possible, up to a point, to become aware of rational grounds for a behaviour not prompted by natural instinct. But when such behaviour strains natural instinct too severely nature takes her revenge by producing either listlessness or destructiveness, either of which may cause a structure imposed by reason to break down. — Bertrand Russell

A man who has blown all his options can't afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can't afford to admit - no matter how often he's reminded of it - that every day of his life takes him farther and farther down a blind alley ... — Hunter S. Thompson

After all God doesn't want you to be an imitation of someone else. You should be the original you were created to be. There is an anointing on your life, an empowerment. Not to be somebody else, but to be you. If you let people squeeze you into their molds and you bow down to their pressure to try to please your critics, it not only takes away your uniqueness, but it also lessens the favor on your life. — Joel Osteen

World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. Randy has worked out a set of mental blueprints for a special cereal-eating spoon that will have a tube running down the handle and a little pump for the milk, so that you can spoon dry cereal up out of a bowl, hit a button with your thumb, and squirt milk into the bowl of the spoon even as you are introducing it into your mouth. The next best thing is to work in small increments, putting only a small amount of Cap'n Crunch in your bowl at a time and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of loathsome slime, which, in the case of Cap'n Crunch, takes about thirty seconds. — Neal Stephenson

Jesus says, "No one takes My life from Me. I lay it down" (John 10:18). — Matt Chandler

This wavering paradox is a pillar of the outlaw stance. A man who has blown all his options can't afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can't afford to admit-no matter how often he's reminded of it-that every day of his life takes him farther down a blind alley. — Hunter S. Thompson

Every day, on the roads of Delhi, some chauffeur is driving an empty car with a black suitcase sitting on the backseat. Inside that suitcase is a million, two million rupees; more money than that chauffeur will see in his lifetime. If he took the money he could go to America, Australia, anywhere, and start a new life. He could go inside the five-star hotels he has dreamed about all his life and only seen from the outside. He could take his family to Goa, to England. Yet he takes that black suitcase where his master wants. He puts it down where he is meant to, and never touches a rupee. Why?
Because Indians are the world's most honest people, like the prime minister's booklet will inform you? No. It's because 99.9 percent of us are caught in the Rooster Coop just like those poor guys in the poultry market. — Aravind Adiga

In this sport, in this life, I think heart takes you a lot further than skill and technique ... Just digging down deep will take you a lot further in life. — Clay Guida

Time is the great healer. No matter how difficult the circumstances that cross our path, it takes time for our emotions, minds and spirit to process what's happened. Rushing to make choices too quickly can send us down the wrong fork in the road. It's normal and natural to feel overwhelmed, out of sorts and confused when a major change knocks on our door. While you may be forced to make some choices quickly, delay as many choices as possible until time has worked its magic. When you feel on solid ground again, you will be ready to make better choices about the future. — Don Shapiro

She has the kind of beauty that takes your breath from your lungs, tears from your eyes and speeds your heart each time you look at her.

She has the kind of beauty reserved for works of art, where men spend years of their life mastering their craft to replicate.

She is beauty, stunning, transcendent, right down through to the bone, the unfathomable depth of her heart.

She is Muse. She is wonder. She is sublime. — Kirk Diedrich

Just as apples when unripe are torn from trees, but when ripe and mellow drop down, so it is violence that takes life from young men, ripeness from old. This ripeness is so delightful to me that, as I approach nearer to death, I seem, as it were, to be sighting land, and to be coming to port at last after a long voyage. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Many of my daily preoccupations suggest that I belong more to the world than to God. A little criticism makes me angry, and a little rejection makes me depressed. A little praise raises my spirits, and a little success excites me. It takes very little to raise me up or thrust me down. Often I am like a small boat on the ocean, completely at the mercy of its waves. All the time and energy I spend in keeping some kind of balance and preventing myself from being tipped over and drowning shows that my life is mostly a struggle for survival: not a holy struggle, but an anxious struggle resulting from the mistaken idea that it is the world that defines me. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the button and wait for the print-out. Mine is more like a Japanese library of the old style, without a card file or an indexing system or any systematic shelf plan. Nobody knows where anything is except the old geezer in felt slippers who has been shuffling up and down those stacks for sixty-nine years. When you hand him a problem he doesn't come back with a cartful and dump it before you, a jackpot of instant retrieval. He finds one thing, which reminds him of another, which leads him off to the annex, which directs him to the east wing, which sends him back two tiers from where he started. Bit by bit he finds you what you want, but like his boss who seems to be under pressure to examine his life, he takes his time. — Wallace Stegner

Once you've had your life burn down, it takes time to be a Phoenix. — Sharon Stone

When hope dies, you breathe it back to life again! No matter how long it takes, or what time's required to heal the wound. Disappointment will not last a lifetime unless you lie down and give in. — Janny Wurts