What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live or damn it for allowing the rest?
I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Just make sure
nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all - every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the
inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes
an artist unless they have to.
Believe that life is worth living and your belief will create the fact.
You and I want our lives to matter. We want our lives to make a real difference - to be
of genuine consequence in the world. We know that there is no satisfaction in merely going
through the motions, even if those motions make us successful, or even if we have arranged to
make those motions pleasant. We want to know we have made some impact on the world. In fact,
you and I want to contribute to the quality of life. We want to make the world work.
It was enormously beautiful, a sensibility I'd never encountered anywhere, a relaxed
luxury. I could feel my mother's contemptuous gaze falling on the clutteres surfaces, but I was
tired of three white flowers in a glass vase. There was more to life than that.
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between
so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even
if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.
Night clerks in hotels, cabdrivers on graveyard, waitresses in all-night coffee shops. They
knew the world, how precious it was when a person remembered your name, the comfort of a rhetorical
question, "How's it going, how's the kids?" They knew how long the night was. They knew the sound
life made as it left. It rattled, like a slamming screen door in the wind. Night workers lived
without illusions, they wiped dreams off counters, they loaded freight. They headed back to the
airport for one last fare.
Talking to my older say, "Life is what you make it, and if you make it death then rest your
soul."
I'm alive, yet fail to live. Is that so bad?
Life is at its best when it's shaken and stirred.
Today, well lived, makes yesterday a dream of happiness, and tomorrow a vision of hope.
Enjoy life today, yesterday is gone, and tomorrow may never come.
We cannot put of living until we are ready. Life is fired at us point blank.
For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life
as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable granduer of this life.
Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a
spirit with any honour is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom
is not overeager to live at all.
Some go through life getting free rides; others pay full fare and something extra to take
care of the free riders. Some of the free riders are those who make an art of "knowing the angles,"
others are rascals, others lazy; but some really need help and could not ride unless they rode free.
The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself;
indeed, we should be fully born when we die - although it the tragic fate of most individuals to
die before they are born.
We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed.
Brother, I have watched men; their insect cares and giant projects - their god-like plans
and their mouse-like employments - their eager race after happiness. . . this checkered lottery
of life, on which so many stake their innocence and Heaven to snatch a prize, and - blanks are
all they draw; for they find, to their disappointment, that there was no prize in the wheel.
Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we owe it everything. The only true
happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.
It's a sad, sad life for most people. Don't scorn the simple things that give them pleasure.
Each day a day goes by.
No one knows the story of tomorrow's dawn.
"Give me one reason to beat this depression."
"Blackberries. Think of a handful of blackberries and how wonderful that is. To pick a
handful of blackberries, sit down with someone you love very much and eat them. Think of that
and tell me life's not worth the fight. It's family we live for - not just ourselves."
There are seasons of the heart. There are seasons in our lives, just as there are seasons
to all of nature. These seasons cannot be forced any more than one can force the coming of spring
by pulling at tender blades of grass to make them grow. It took me a while to understand.
They may say, "Those were the days. . .," but, in a way, you know for us, these are the days.
We may be willing to turn our backs on life, but we still complain like children when life
does not grant our wishes.
That was rough. . . Thing to do now is try and forget it. . . I guess I don't quite mean
that. It's not a thing you can forget. Maybe not even a thing you want to forget. . . Life's
like that sometimes. . . Now and then for no good reason a man can figure out, life will just haul
off and knock him flat, slam him agin' the ground so hard it seems like all his insides is busted.
But it's not all like that. A lot of it's mighty fine, and you can't afford to waste the good
part frettin' about the bad. That makes it all bad. . . Sure, I know - sayin' it's one thing and
feelin' it's another. But I'll tell you a trick that's sometimes a big help. When you start
lookin' around for something good to take the place of the bad, as a general rule you can find it.
When things are at their best, I wait for them to fall apart. I can't figure out if I do
it to myself, or if life does it for me.
Those who have not tasted the bitterest of life's bitters can never appreciate the
sweetest of life's sweets.
