Quotes about life

If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction—and ultimately, without a major resolution.

''What are clouds,

But an excuse for the sky?

What is life,

But an escape from death?

Only by living at the edge of death can you understand the indescribable joy of life.

This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

[T]rifles make the sum of life.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

There was a christening party at the largest coffin-maker's, and a funeral hatchment had stopped some great improvements in the bravest mansion. Life and death went hand in hand; wealth and poverty stood side by side; repletion and starvation laid the down together.

"You have a strange way about you, Dr. Grumman. You ever spend any time among the witches?"

"Yes," said Grumman. "And among academicians, and among spirits. I found folly everywhere, but there were grains of wisdom in every stream of it. No doubt there was much more wisdom that I failed to recognize. Life is hard, Mr. Scoresby, but we cling to it all the same."

"And this journey we're on? Is that folly or wisdom?"

"The greatest wisdom I know."

"Tell me again what your purpose is. You're going to find the bearer of this subtle knife, and what then?"

"Tell him what his task is."

"And that's a task that includes protecting Lyra," the aeronaut reminded him.

"It will protect all of us."

“So,” she said, “living all this time has been to no purpose, basically.”

“True, but that hardly distinguishes me from anybody else, does it?”

“But shouldn’t it, or there’s no point?”

“No. Living either never has any point, or is always its own point; being a naturally cheery soul, I lean toward the latter. However, just having done more of it than another person doesn’t really make much difference.”

Most men—most women, too, no doubt—lived and died under the general weight of the drives and needs, expectations and demands they experienced from within and without, beaten this way and that by longings for sex, love, admiration, comfort, importance and wealth and whatever else was their particular fancy, as well as being at the same time channelled into whatever furrows were deemed appropriate for them by those on high.

In life you hoped to do what you could but mostly you did what you were told and that was the end of it.

“Tell me, suit, don’t you wonder if it’s all worth it?’

“If what’s all worth what?” it says, and I can hear that condescending tone in its voice again.

“You know; living. Is it worth all the... bother?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No, I don’t ever wonder about it.”

“Why not?” I’m keeping my questions short as we walk, conserving energy and breath.

“I don’t need to wonder about that. It’s not important.”

“Not important?”

“It’s an irrelevant question. We live; that’s enough.”

It is a queer and fantastic world. Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has got the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me.

Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are all men's lives like the lives of us good people — like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords — broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows?