Quotes about life

Most of life was bizarre when she stopped to examine it. (twenty-eight: HOW CAN WE TELL THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE?)

We are not to retreat from life, pinning our hopes on ‘elsewhere.’ but to know that we will come to that final destination best by living full here and now, be it through joy, or pain, or a mix of both.

But I'd felt as if I'd pissed my life away in the same way that you can piss money away. I'd had a life, full of kids and wives and jobs and all the usual stuff, and I'd somehow managed to mislay it. No, you see, that's not right. I knew where my life was, just as you know where the money goes when you piss it away. I hadn't mislaid it at all. I'd spent it.

Sometimes life has a habit of flooding over you and rushing you along in its overwhelming tide. (p63)

A big lump blocked Mugo’s throat. Something heaved forth; he trembled; he was at the bottom of the pool, but up there, above the pool, ran the earth; life, struggle, even amidst pain and blood and poverty, seemed beautiful; only for a moment; how dared he believe in such a vision, an illusion?

Life had no colour. It was one endless blank sheet, so flat. There were no valleys, streams, no trees–nothing.

For life be, after all, only a waitin’ for somethin’ else than what we’re doin’; and death be all that we can rightly depend on.

Change is not merely necessary to life; it is life. By the same token, life is adaptation.

There are, however, limits on adaptability. When we alter our life style, when we make and break relationships with things, places or people, when we move restlessly through the organizational geography of society, when we learn new information and ideas, we adapt; we live. Yet there are finite boundaries; we are not infinitely resilient. Each orientation response, each adaptive reaction exacts a price, wearing down the body's machinery bit by minute bit, until perceptible tissue damage results.

Thus man remains in the end what he started as in the beginning: a biosystem with a limited capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the consequence is future shock.

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing.

We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.

After wars peace, after peace, another war. Every day men are born and others die.

It was as though some stubborn god spent their time in an immutable and absurd balancing act between life and death, prosperity and poverty.