Quotes about life

'...Did the stars visit him upon me in caprice? To teach me that a lifetime can be vast as a hundred years or sudden as a few breaths? Enjoy this one you have left. It all passes so fast. In the time it takes to draw a breath.' (p116)

Death had won my three friends; Death had almost won me. But now I was the one who was going to win and I was going to win by outwitting Death over and over again ... To compete with Death, as I had discovered in the mountains, was to know one was alive.

“Then all this,” Chromis said, gesturing at the vista before them, “everything we’ve lived for and made, everything we’ve dreamed into existence—you firmly believe it won’t always be here?”

“It’d be egocentric to think otherwise. Almost every sentient being who ever lived belonged to a society that doesn’t exist any more. Why should we be any different?”

“But our deeds will remain.”

“If we’re lucky. There’s every chance they won’t survive either.”

“That’s so bleak, Rudd.”

“Bracing, I prefer to think.”

“But if nothing we do here has any guarantee of lasting, if even the best gestures have only a slim chance of outliving us—is there any reason not to just give up?”

“Every reason in the world,” Rudd said. “We’re here and we’re alive. It’s a beautiful evening, on the last perfect day of summer.” He turned and nodded at the waiting cauls. “Now let’s go down there and make the most of it, while it lasts.”

A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination.

My life may not be great to others, but to me it has been one of steady progression, never dull, often exciting, often hungry, tired, and lonely, but always learning. Somewhere back down the years I decided, or my nature decided for me, that I would be a teller of stories.

Decisions had to be made and there was nobody but me to make them. My course altered a number of times but never deviated from the destination I had decided upon. Whether this was altogether a matter of choice I do not know. Perhaps my early reading and the storytelling at home had preconditioned me for the role I adopted.

Somewhere along the line I had fallen in love with learning, and it became a lifelong romance. Early on I discovered it was fun to follow along the byways of history to find those treasures that await any searcher. It may be that all later decisions followed naturally from that first one.

One thing has always been true: That book or that person who can give me an idea or a new slant on an old idea is my friend.

Here I am only trying to describe the enormous emotions which cannot be described. And the strongest emotion was that life was as precious as it was puzzling. It was an ecstacy because it was an adventure; it was an adventure because it was an opportunity. The goodness of the fairy tale was not affected by the fact that there might be more dragons than princesses; it was good to be in a fairy tale.

Life can only be understood backward; the trouble is, it has to be lived forward.

Life is dangerous. That's what makes it interesting.

There is within each of us a "life-instinct," which is forever working toward health, happiness, and all that makes for more life for the individual.

Life is much shorter than I imagined it to be.

Life is a dream a little less inconstant.

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?

The only thing that mattered was that the quarter century or so he had remaining would be his life, to live out as he chose and in his own best interests. Nothing took precedence over that: not work, not friendships, not relationships with women. Those were all components of his life, and valuable ones, but they did not define it or control it. That was up to him, and him alone.

The possibilities, Jeff knew, were endless.