Quotes
Quotes about Life
On the treshold of old age I find myself pretty much without roots - except, as it were, mythical or historical ones that would better do in a TV series than in real life
The biggest sin, the sin that swallows up all others, is indifference to life
I am doing nothing to promote life, even if I am not actively embracing death
But the real age, as we are always being told, is an effect of the mind. It is manifested chiefly in lack of interest in life
Life is for you. My portrait is of an empty cup, a melon-rind, a crushed yoghourt carton, a stamped-out Schimmelpennick.
Life is a wretched grey Saturday but it has to be lived through
All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be elsewhere
The scientific approach to life is not really appropriate to states of visceral anguish
A good novel ... is not merely a slice of life. It is life delicately molded into shape
A professor can spend his life unknotting the problems that Joyce probably sardonically knotted for the professor's benefit
The novelist siphons his inner life into the work he has already published; his outer life may be summed up in the image of a man at a desk
Any life will serve as a type of all lives
Mastery never comes and one serves a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer cannot retire from the battle; he dies fighting
I have had a lifelong difficulty in accepting physical laws. Aeroplanes fly, and I have read all the books which explain aerodynamics, but, flying, I have sometimes been fearful of the sudden exposure of the science of flight as untenable and, with a kind of satisfaction, of hearing the pilot announce that we were falling.
There arose those winning life between two wars, born out of one, doomed food for the other
Anthony Burgess A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults. The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
A character in Evelyn Waugh's Put Out More Flags said that the difference between prewar and postwar life was that, prewar, if one thing went wrong the day was ruined; postwar, if one thing went right the day would be made. America is a prewar country, psychologically unprepared for one thing to go wrong.
If we take away plot, character, dialogue, even characters, we shall be left with something that is common to the most traditional and avant-garde novelist - a concern with interpreting, through the imagination, the flux of ordinary life; an attempt to understand, though not with the cold deliberation of the scientist, the nature of the external world and the mind that surveys it
The flow of time means nothing in itself, and yet, in ordinary life, we are forced to travel along it
Lawrence (D.H.) accepts life not with his brain but with his loins and bowels
If Joyce is concerned with recording the highness of life, Beckett is obsessed with rendering its mysery. This is not perverseness, the deliberate grinding of the bad tooth; it is rather an attempt to discover what man is really like when he is stripped to show his essential condition, which is one of struggle against unheroic odds
Courage! Though life is feeble, life persists
Read Plato and not Playboy, cease to try to see life as a thing to quantify
Life is simple. Desperately so. Beware of making it complex
Was not the law a raw head and bloody bones haunting the living? A man could oft, through the law's mediacy, rule stronger from the grave than in life
