Quotes
I was still alive, but that was a mere detail, subject to change. (p. 13)
Every little thing you do adds up and before you know it you've created your life. And how you create your life ripples out and affects everyone and everything that crosses your path, known or unknown to you.
I could not do this, I realized, if I were immortal. This degree of love of life and of one another is granted, I saw for once and for ever, not to immortals, but to those who live briefly and always under the shadow of death and loss.
p. 665
I take account of my life and find that I have lived a lot and learned very little.
p. 503
And in that instant was born the terrible awareness that life eventually broke every man, but in different ways and at different times.
p. 196
There were these deep, serious thoughts I sometimes had to drive from my head like flocks of pesky starlings. I was too pragmatic and impatient to let such thoughts flog me into impotence, yet I sincerely needed a working philosophy on which to hang my hat. After the Halloween trip, one began to form and crystallize without my knowledge, and when I finally acknowledged its presence, it was already a part of me: simply, that life was good, but it was hard; we would prepare to meet it head on, but we would enjoy the preparation.
p. 158
He didn’t think he would understand the strangeness of life if he lived to be a hundred years old.
p. 443
Life is meant to be felt. Else why live? Valleys make the mountains.
Maybe I sound like some Victorian who felt that forty years ought to be enough for any man, but one of the marks of a live well lived has to be reaching a state of finally getting it, of not needing more, and of being able to sign off with something approaching peace of mind.
To a physicist like me, life looks to be little short of magic: all those dumb molecules conspiring to achieve such clever things!
p. 31
It goes on, terrifyingly repetitive. One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.
he reminded himself of his own personal creed, that life was neither something you defended by hiding nor surrendered calmly on other people’s terms, but something you lived bravely, out in the open, and that if you had to lose it, you should also lose it on your own terms. (p201)
