|
c559e75
|
I resemble that worm which crawls through dust, Lives in the dust, eats dust Until a passerby's foot crushes it.
|
|
life
|
Philip K. Dick |
|
6b07ec6
|
Every day is a lie, he said. But you are dying. That is not a lie.
|
|
death
life
post-apocalyptic
road
|
Cormac McCarthy |
|
1f51588
|
"Alex here. (...) Ron, I really enjoy all the help you have given me and the times we spent together. I hope that you will not be too depressed by our parting. It may be a very long time before we see each other again. But providing that I get through the Alaskan Deal in one piece you will be hearing form me again in the future. I'd like to repeat the advice I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing or been to hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one piece of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. (...) Once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty. (...) Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. (...) You are wrong if you think joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living. Ron, I really hope that as soon as you can you will get out of Salton City, put a little camper on the back of your pickup, and start seeing some of the great work that God has done here in the American West. you will see things and meet people and there is much to learn from them. And you must do it economy style, no motels, do your own cooking, as a general rule spend as little as possible and you will enjoy it much more immensely. I hope that the next time I see you, you will be a new man with a vast array of new adventures and experiences behind you. Don't hesitate or allow yourself to make excuses. Just get out and do it. Just get out and do it. You will be very, very glad that you did.
|
|
changes
courage
inspirational
into-the-wild
joy
life
nature
new-experiences
|
Jon Krakauer |
|
fc9ff91
|
Life is no more than the repeated fulfilling of a permanent desire.
|
|
life
|
Alexandre Dumas |
|
09ed7d0
|
When the peasants and their song had vanished from his sight and hearing, a heavy feeling of anguish at his loneliness, his bodily idleness, his hostility to this world, came over him...It was all drowned in the sea of cheerful common labor. God had given the day, God had given the strength. Both day and strength had been devoted to labour and in that lay the reward...Levin had often admired this life, had often experienced a feeling of envy for the people who lived this life, but that day for the first time...the thought came clearly to Levin that it was up to him to change that so burdensome, idle, artificial and individual life he lived into this laborious, pure and common, lovely life.
|
|
life
meaningful-life
simple
simplicity
work
|
Leo Tolstoy |
|
9258267
|
It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false.
|
|
human-nature
inspiration
life
morality
philosophy
psychology
societal-expectations
society
|
Leo Tolstoy |
|
878ea62
|
You have to accept gifts occasionally, because there are some things you can't give yourself
|
|
life
|
Michael Marshall Smith |
|
b7e2f1c
|
But that (physical attractiveness), as the late great Irish poet and philosopher of beauty John O'Donohue helpfully distinguished, is glamour. I've taken his definition as my own, for naming beauty in all its nuance in the moment-to-moment reality of our days:
|
|
art-of-living
beautiful
beauty
enoughness
life
nature
on-being
wisdom
|
Krista Tippett |
|
d34484e
|
Shout to the top!
|
|
cheer
fun
happy
joy
life
protest
shout
voice
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
02ebe02
|
Growth is life, and life is for ever destined to make for light.
|
|
inspirational
life
moving-forward
|
Jack London |
|
8fcf453
|
These people all fling themselves at me. Because I am uneasy and sad they all fling themselves at me larger than life. But I can put my arm up to avoid the impact and they slide gently to the ground. Individualists, completely wrapped up in themselves, thank God. It's the extrovert, prancing around, dying for a bit of fun - that's the person you've got to be wary of.
|
|
extrovert
fun
individualist
life
people
sad
uneasy
wary
|
Jean Rhys |
|
ee9ace2
|
The best life you can have as you get into old age is good food, good teeth to eat it with, and few worries when you go to bed at night.
|
|
life
old-age
|
Amy Tan |
|
c7ef9e4
|
I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean. At any moment you may be strolling peacefully along, and all the time Life's waiting around the corner to fetch you one. You can't tell when you may be going to get it. It's all dashed puzzling. Here was poor old George, as well-meaning a fellow as every stepped, getting swatted all over the ring by the hand of Fate. Why? That's what I asked myself. Just Life, don't you know. That's all there was about it.
|
|
life
|
P.G. Wodehouse |
|
4fcacf7
|
Bean sighed inwardly. It never failed. Whenever he had any conversation with Ender, it turned into an argument.
|
|
bean
family
life
relationships
|
Orson Scott Card |
|
b557118
|
"I used to have pink hair," I told Seven. "I used to have a real job," he answered. "What happened?" He shrugged. "I dyed my hair pink. What happened to you?"
|
|
life
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
ef81a01
|
Alexander shifted in my arms. God, he was so small, and from the giddy looks on my father's and Ashley's faces, they already worshiped him. We all started off this way, small little bundles of joy. Me, Aires, Noah, Lila, Isaiah, and even Beth. At some point, someone held and loved us, but somewhere along the way, it all got screwed up.
|
|
life
pushing-the-limits
|
Katie McGarry |
|
371f21d
|
I wondered If things that might seem frightening could lose their hold over you. I wondered If we find the people we need when we need them. I wondered If we attract our future by some sort of invisible force, or If we are drawn to it by a similar force. I felt I was turning a corner and that change was afoot.
|
|
invisible
life
questions-in-life
unexpected
|
Sharon Creech |
|
6e9306e
|
In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
|
|
life
self-consciousness
|
John Updike |
|
9171e34
|
STONE Let my heart turn to stone. Maybe then I can sleep without nightmares. May be then I can eat without a stomachache. Maybe then I can read without fear of an unhappy ending. Take the knife out of my heart and,please, let it turn to stone.
|
|
heart
life
nightmares
poetry
stone
unhappy-endings
|
Lisa Schroeder |
|
0221c6b
|
These days every morning begins like a joke you think you have heard before, but there is no one telling it whom you can stop. One day it's about a cow who walks into a bar, then about a man with a big nose on his honeymoon, then about a kangaroo who walks into a bar. Each one takes up an entire day. The sun looks like a prank Nathanael West is pulling on the world; on the drive to work cars are swinging comically from lane to lane. The houses and lawns belong in cartoons. The hours collapse into one another's arms. The stories arc over noon and descend like slow ferris wheels into the haze of evening. You wish you could stop listening and get serious. Trouble is you cannot remember the punch line which never arrives till very late at night, just as you are reaching for the bedside lamp, just before you begin laughing in the dark.
|
|
life
life-and-living
|
Billy Collins |
|
2ddf6e0
|
"According to Melanie Klein, we develop moral responses in reaction to questions of survivability. My wager is that Klein is right about that, even as she thwarts her own insight by insisting that it is the ego's survivability that is finally at issue. Why the ego? After all, if my survivability depends on a relation to others, to a "you" or a set of "yous" without whom I cannot exist, then my existence is not mine alone, but is to be found outside myself, in this set of relations that precede and exceed the boundaries of who I am. If I have a boundary at all, or if a boundary can be said to belong to me, it is only because I have become separated from others, and it is only on condition of this separation that I can relate to them at all. So the boundary is a function of the relation, a brokering of difference, a negotiation in which I am bound to you in my separateness. If I seek to preserve your life, it is not only because I seek to preserve my own, but because who "I" am is nothing without your life, and life itself has to be rethought as this complex, passionate, antagonistic, and necessary set of relations to others. I may lose this "you" and any number of particular others, and I may well survive those losses. But that can happen only if I do not lose the possibility of any "you" at all. If I survive, it is only because my life is nothing without the life that exceeds me, that refers to some indexical you, without whom I cannot be."
|
|
boundaries
butler
dissociation
grief
klein
life
loss
morality
otherness
self-preservation
seperation
survival
|
Judith Butler |
|
0e47edd
|
She couldn't believe how quickly life could change. How could she have known when she'd woken up that morning that today was the day she'd fall in love?
|
|
life
love
|
Cecily von Ziegesar |
|
cea6e8b
|
Life...is a wonder. It is a sky laden with clouds of contradictions.
|
|
contradictions
life
|
Naguib Mahfouz |
|
c0580ff
|
Every time you try to block a thought out of your mind, you drive it deeper into your memory. By resisting it, you actually reinforce it.
|
|
inspirational
life
subconscious
|
Rick Warren |
|
bb17509
|
"Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life. Instead, "there is a life that will never have been lived," sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost. The apprehension of grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of precarious life. Grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of the living being as living, exposed to non-life from the start."
|
|
life
precariousness
war
|
Judith Butler |
|
96f3dbd
|
...some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.
|
|
life
|
Joan Didion |
|
5a0e1ef
|
Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing and you were in the best possible place in the world for it - in a beautiful place of worship, surrounded by grace. Take this time, every minute of it. Let things work themselves out here in India.
|
|
grief
life
spirituality
|
Elizabeth Gilbert |
|
b91a7ea
|
Is there life before death? That's chalked up In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain, Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup, We hug our little destiny again.
|
|
life
poetry
|
Seamus Heaney |
|
ed9d76a
|
As she made coffee in the kitchen and tried to spoon the frozen ice-cream from its carton without snapping the shaft off the spoon, Elizabeth was struck, not for the first time, by the thought that her life was entirely frivolous. It was a rush and slither of trivial crises; of uncertain cash-flow, small triumphs, occasional sex and too many cigarettes; of missed deadlines that turned out not to matter; of arguments, new clothes, bursts of altruism and sincere resolutions to address the important things. Of all these and the other experiences that made up her life, the most significant aspect was the one suggested by the words 'turned out not to matter'. Although she was happy enough with what she had become, it was this continued sense of the easy, the inessential nature of what she did, that most irritated her. She thought of Tom Brennan, who had known only life or death, then death in life. In her generation there was no intensity.
|
|
life
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
298e98a
|
"If you're a child of God, you do not just "go around once" on Earth. You don't get just one earthly life. You get another-one far better and without end. You'll inhabit the New Earth! You'll live with the God you cherish and the people you love as an undying person on an undying Earth."
|
|
god
heaven
life
new-earth
|
Randy Alcorn |
|
074a0a6
|
l tbn amlk fy lHy@ `l~ mwt nsn
|
|
hopes
life
|
Naguib Mahfouz |
|
c3f86bc
|
It isn't fair, but maybe that's the whole point. Fairness has no part in real life, and she took that lesson away from the Hotel Angeline with her.
|
|
fairness
life
life-lessons
mystery
|
Susan Wiggs |
|
2da0e11
|
Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image. He still saw himself, in his mind's eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed ... Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went.
|
|
ageing
aging
life
midlife-crisis
old
time
|
Philip K. Dick |
|
a4a6e28
|
The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.
|
|
life
what-happens-to-you
|
Elizabeth Gilbert |
|
2247d92
|
A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive - and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down.
|
|
difficult-decisions
forgiveness
life
power
powerful-women
strength
wisdom
women
women-in-power
|
Malcolm Gladwell |
|
c4191d1
|
If you life is an example of glorifying God, others won't see your good works and glorify YOU, because they'll know what you are doing is for God's glory.
|
|
glorifying-god
god
life
wake-up
|
Charles R. Swindoll |
|
08050fc
|
By the time I visited those battlefields, I knew that they had been retrofitted as the staging ground for a great deception, and this was my only security, because they could no longer insult me by lying to me. I knew--and the most important thing I knew was that, somewhere deep with them, they knew too. I like to think that knowing might have kept me from endangering you, that having understood and acknowledged the anger, I could control it. I like to think that it could have allowed me to speak the needed words to the woman and then walk away. I like to think this, but I can't promise it. The struggle is really all I have for you because it is the only portion of this world under your control.
|
|
blacks
life
race-relations
racism
struggle
whites
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
fee0a2d
|
Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that needed answering, a patch of canvas that needed painting--that blend of anxiety, curiosity and joy that is at the origin of art--and he had filled the hole, answered the question, splashed colour on the canvas, all done for himself, because he had to. Then complete strangers told him that his book had filled a hole in them, had answered a question, had brought colour to their lives. The comfort of strangers, be it a smile, a pat on the shoulder or a word of praise, is truly a comfort.
|
|
book
creativity
curiosity
inspirational
joy
life
painting
strangers
writer
writers-on-writing
writing
writing-life
|
Yann Martel |
|
1319d64
|
"But what if, either by choice or by reluctant necessity, you end up not participating in this comforting cycle of family and continuity? What if you step out? Where do you sit at the reunion? How do you mark time's passage without the fear that you've just frittered away your time on earth without being relevant? You'll need to find another purpose, another measure by which to judge whether or not you have been a successful human being. I love children, but what if I don't have any? What kind of person does that make me? Virginia Woolf wrote, "Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword." On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where "all is correct." But on the other side of that sword, if you're crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, "all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course." Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a far more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will also be more perilous."
|
|
feminism
life
tradition
virginia-woolf
woman
|
Elizabeth Gilbert |
|
0eac78e
|
I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more--the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort--to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires--and expires, too soon, too soon--before life itself.
|
|
disillusionment
life
youth
|
Joseph Conrad |
|
6759640
|
I've been alive a long time, long enough to know that the more baggage you carry in life, the more unstable you'll be, until eventually you get sick of carrying it, and then you just fall down.
|
|
baggage
fall
grief
life
mental-illness
mourn
mourning
unstable
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
0fd4aca
|
My life had gone to bits and I was so unrecognizable to myself that I probably couldn't have picked me out of a police lineup.
|
|
life
|
Elizabeth Gilbert |
|
96c9103
|
He was thankful not to have to believe in God, for then such a condition of things would be intolerable; one could reconcile oneself to existence only because it was meaningless.
|
|
life
religion
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
6f0983f
|
One must not make too much of anything in life, good or bad.
|
|
experience
good
life
wisdom
|
Joseph Conrad |
|
edd2159
|
One may deal with things without love...but you cannot deal with men without it...It cannot be otherwise, because natural love is the fundamental law of human life.
|
|
life
love
mankind
natural-laws
|
Leo Tolstoy |
|
148b164
|
This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.
|
|
life
reality
|
Philip Gourevitch |
|
367f723
|
If want a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else.
|
|
life
|
Ann Patchett |
|
e64e983
|
The eyes were certainly memorable and beautiful, moist calves' eyes heavily lashed and with the same look of troubled pain at the unpredictability of the world's terrors.
|
|
confusion
life
pain
|
P.D. James |
|
09d73de
|
He wondered at times whether he didn't belong to a class of people secretly convinced they had an arrangement with fate; in return for docility or ingenuous good will they were to be shielded from the worst brutalities in life.
|
|
brutality
fate
good-will
life
|
Saul Bellow |
|
91a958e
|
"Son, anything can happen to anyone," my father told me, "but it usually doesn't."
|
|
happenings
life
probability
|
Philip Roth |
|
d3bb3dc
|
"When I reach the end of one row, I continue straight on away from the barn and the farm and the road. I walk until I come to a pile of hay bales and plop myself down. The sun is bright and the air is sharp. In the distance I hear the lowing of cows. It's so peaceful here. "Merry Christmas, " I whisper to myself. "Merry Christmas, Nate."
|
|
cora
hope
life
loneliness
nate
peace
sadness
|
Lisa Ann Sandell |
|
60a1f9a
|
I think this is an alarming trend, Bethany, this whole 'passionate' thing. I'm guessing it started about four years ago, and it's driving me nuts. Let's be practical: Earth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about twenty million people foraging for roots and grubs. [...] My hunch is that there was some self-help bestseller a few years back that told people to follow their passion. What a sucky expression. I can usually tell when people have recently read that book because they're a bit distracted, and maybe they've done their hair a new way, and they're always trying to discuss the Big Picture of life and failing miserably. And then, when you bump into them again six months later, they appear haggard and bitter, the joy drained from them-and this means that the universe is back to normal and that they've given up searching for a passion they're doomed to never find. Want a chocolate?
|
|
life
passion
wisdom
|
Douglas Coupland |
|
d6ae115
|
It was as though she had veered, accidentally, into her own life.
|
|
life
|
Carol Shields |
|
7ed8127
|
I am living through days as happy as those God keeps for his chosen people; and whatever becomes of me, I can never say that I have not tasted the purest joys of life.
|
|
life
|
Jeffrey Eugenides |
|
96f393f
|
My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.
|
|
gender
life
|
Jeffrey Eugenides |
|
4619243
|
You learn to feel it less, child; or you learn to love other things.
|
|
life
love
selflove
|
Naomi Novik |
|
072f96a
|
...courage wasn't something you were bequeathed at birth, and it wasn't a lack of fright. It was overcoming your fear, because the ones you love mattered more.
|
|
courage
jodi-picoult
life
love
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
c65fb76
|
Even if we have grown so far apart that we don't recognize each other when we pass, we have this life, this block of time, and what do you think about that?
|
|
life
marriage
promises
sharing
vows
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
da3a710
|
It's got to be a nice life, long as you don't get caught.
|
|
life
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
4905a54
|
Under the influence of mercury, which he administered to himself daily as a salve for his syphilis, & laudanum, which he drank each evening in imprecisely measured amounts to enable him to sleep, because of all things, this brave man feared only his dreams, opiate-enhanced nightmares that gave him no respite & which always ended in flames from which he rose phoenix-like just before dawn each morning, to recommence building what was already ash.
|
|
life
|
Richard Flanagan |
|
2c65515
|
For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on. So that I was never disappointed, so to speak, whatever I did, in this domain. And these inseparable fools I indulged turn about, that they might understand their foolishness.
|
|
change-your-life
foolishness
life
|
Samuel Beckett |
|
9b8251b
|
But I know nothing; my future is a wide-open vista, leading to an unknown country - The Rest Of My Life.
|
|
inspirational
knowledge
life
|
Kate Atkinson |
|
46444c1
|
Arguably the greatest technological triumph of the century has been the public-health system, which is sophisticated preventive and investigative medicine organized around mostly low- and medium-tech equipment; ... fully half of us are alive today because of the improvements.
|
|
life
medicine
public-health
science
technology
triumph
|
Richard Rhodes |
|
0207709
|
I wasn't sure about that, but one never knows. Sometimes a neighborhood, like a culture or civilization, is strong enough to absorb and acculturate any number of newcomers. But I don't know if that's true around here any longer. The outward forms and appearances look the same - [...]- but the substance has been altered.
|
|
life
philosophy
|
Nelson DeMille |
|
71b98ee
|
while she wanted to look neither to her past nor her future, she lived exclusively in both. They had took different paths, but they had journeyed, so she realized, together.
|
|
future
life
past
present
thought-provoking
thoughts-on-life
|
Monica Ali |
|
ac1a4db
|
I've heard that when you're in a life-or-death situation, like a car accident or a gunfight, all your senses shoot up to almost superhuman level, everything slows down, and you're hyper-aware of what's happening around you. As the shuttle careens toward the earth, the exact opposite is true for me. Everything silences, even the screams and shouts from the people on the other side of the metal door, the crashes that I pray aren't bodies, the hissing of rockets, Elder's cursing, my pounding heartbeat. I feel nothing--not the seat belt biting into my flesh, not my clenching jaw, nothing. My whole body is numb. Scent and taste disappear. The only thing about my body that works is my eyes,and they are filled with the image before them. The ground seems to leap up at us as we hurtle toward it. Through the blurry image of the world below us, I see the outline of land--a continent. And at once, my heart lurches with the desire to know this world, to make it our home. My eyes drink up the image of the planet--and my stomach sinks with the knowledge that this is a coastline I've never seen before. I could spin a globe of Earth around and still be able to recognize the way Spain and Portugal reach into the Atlantic, the curve of the Gulf of Mexico, the pointy end of India. But this continent--it dips and curves in ways I don't recognize, swirls into an unknown sea, creating peninsulas in shapes I do not know, scattering out islands in a pattern I cannot connect. And it's not until I see this that I realize: this world may one day become our home,but it will never be the home I left behind.
|
|
amy-martin
beth-revis
crash
discovery
earth
elder
godspeed
home
journey
life
mission
planet
shades-of-earth
shuttle
travel
|
Beth Revis |
|
de0c5a2
|
Mom used to say that the thoughts in our heads were nothing more than electrical impulses. I remember Dad and her talking about this over dinner. It frustrated Dad that the human brain can fire electrical sparks and think, but that the electricity he'd pump into an android brain would never give it independent thought. The body isn't that different from a machine. Humans and androids both run on electricity. That lightning spark of energy I saw in the reverie. That was my mother's last thought, an echo of electricity, something that sparked when I entered her dreamscape. That spark is gone now. Her life is gone now. Everything that made her, her, is gone now. Faded into nothing.
|
|
dreams
electricity
independent
life
spark
talk
thoughts
|
Beth Revis |
|
90790a6
|
And gradually it dawned on him, if a dawning can take place in total blackness, that his life has consisted of a run of rehearsals for a play he had failed to take part in. And that what he needed to do from now on, if there was going to be a now on, was abandon his morbid quest for order and treat himself to a little chaos, on the grounds that while order was demonstrably no substitute for happiness, chaos might open the way to it.
|
|
life
order
|
John le Carré |
|
84abdf0
|
I will not stop singing the Muses who set me dancing.
|
|
creativity
dancing
euripides
happiness
inspiration
inspirational-quotes
joy
life
love
muses
poet
poetry
sing
tragedy
work
writer
|
Anne Carson |
|
56e2ece
|
Bombay is a city where gossip is treated as a commodity.
|
|
gossip
india
life
mumbay
wisdom
|
Tahir Shah |
|
2dbda2e
|
Like a small boat adrift in the fog, she caught glimpses during patches when the mist cleared of a world far away, in which everything was changing.
|
|
change
floating
life
|
Ruth Ozeki |
|
35efc6b
|
I don't really know that this story has a whole lot of things happen in it. It doesn't really. It's just a record of how things were in my life during this last winter. I guess things happened, but nothing out of the ordinary.
|
|
life
ordinary
record
story
winter
|
Markus Zusak |
|
31ef7a1
|
A last note from your narrator: I am haunted by humans.
|
|
death
life
|
Markus Zusak |
|
ebdbd99
|
Just because your life isn't as awful as someone else's that doesn't mean it doesn't suck. You can't compare how you feel to the way other people feel. It just doesn't work. What might look like the perfect life - or even an okay life - to you might not be so okay for the person living it.
|
|
comparison
depression
feel
feeling
happiness
human
life
people
perfect-life
reflection
relationship
sadness
suck
|
Michael Thomas Ford |
|
704b457
|
Repetition is the mother of character and skill.
|
|
inspirational
life
skill
|
Rick Warren |
|
499c15a
|
... sometimes you count the days, sometimes you weigh them.
|
|
life
|
Elizabeth Gilbert |
|
aca235c
|
If you really want to get to know someone, you have to divorce him.
|
|
life
love
marriage
|
Elizabeth Gilbert |
|
ee86838
|
Famously, Gloria Steinem once advised women that they should strive to become like the men they had always wanted to marry. What I've only recently realized is that I not only have to become my own husband, but I need to be my own father, too.
|
|
life
women
|
Elizabeth Gilbert |
|
4868850
|
God, He didn't write the scripts for the puny little players down here. We wrote them ourselves-with each day we lived, each word we spoke, each thought we etched on our brains. And Momma had written her script, too. And a sorry one it was.
|
|
down-here
each-day
god
life
living
mothers
players
scripts
speaking
spoke
spoken-words
thought
written
|
V.C. Andrews |
|
d7c97f1
|
In so many ways, his family's life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another. It had started with his father's train wreck, paralyzing him at first, later inspiring him to move as far as possible, to make a new life on the other side of the world. There was the disappearance of the name Gogol's great-grandmother had chosen for him, lost in the mail somewhere between Calcutta and Cambridge. This had led, in turn, to the accident of his being named Gogol, defining and distressing him for so many years. He had tried to correct that randomness, that error. And yet it had not been possible to reinvent himself fully, to break from that mismatched name. His marriage had been something of a misstep as well. And the way his father had slipped away from them, that had been the worst accident of all, as if the preparatory work of death had been done long ago, the night he was nearly killed, and all that was left for him was one day, quietly, to go. And yet these events have formed Gogol, shaped him, determined who he is. They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.
|
|
coincidence
contingence
destiny
family
life
|
Jhumpa Lahiri |
|
7bc8b10
|
And when I raised myself to look at the man who'd spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.
|
|
life
love
|
Arthur Golden |
|
db3704b
|
"Are you happy?" "I think I may be going to be happy." Remember, things do not force, forge or fashion. They fall into place"
|
|
fate
happiness
hope
life
|
Ann Beattie |
|
dfa3e37
|
He told me that I hadn't done anything yet. Hadn't lived yet. All you do is pass the time, he said.
|
|
life
lived
|
Don DeLillo |
|
efadb14
|
You don't ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It's all about survival; it's all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in, in the hope that you might be lucky, and the knife has actually been staunching the blood. You want to know the conventional medical wisdom? The conventional medical wisdom is that you keep the knife in. Really.
|
|
life
science
survival
wisdom
|
Nick Hornby (Author) |
|
2a309cf
|
"With a great effort the Don opened his eyes to see his son once more. He smelled the garden, the yellow shield of light smote his eyes, and he whispered, "Life is so beautiful."
|
|
life
the-godfather
|
Mario Puzo |
|
be01f5a
|
[mother] belonged to a realm of other creatures: smaller, lighter, more easily blown away.
|
|
humanity
life
|
Milan Kundera |
|
8641e47
|
You know, it's really very peculiar. To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.
|
|
dying
immortality
life
living
mortality
philosophy
|
Milan Kundera |
|
2650fe9
|
But what now if all the peace, the comfort, the contentment were to come to a horrible end?
|
|
happiness
life
|
Franz Kafka |
|
d68f494
|
Alle menschlichen Fehler sind Ungeduld, ein vorzeitiges Abbrechen des Methodischen, ein scheinbares Einpfahlen der scheinbaren Sache.
|
|
life
philosophy
sin
truth
|
Franz Kafka |
|
06ae49b
|
"My funeral," the Blue Man said. "Look at the mourners. Some did not even know me well, yet they came. Why? Did you ever wonder? Why people gather when others die? Why people feel they should? "It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed. "You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole. "It is why we are drawn to babies . . ." He turned to the mourners. "And to funerals."
|
|
birth
connected
cycle
death
funeral
karma
life
love
marriage
spirit
we-are-one
|
Mitch Albom |
|
383102c
|
But I was living my life sideway. I did not act on what I wanted, I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted; no matter what I was doing, I was always imagining something else.
|
|
anxiety
life
|
Curtis Sittenfeld |
|
f4b59e5
|
No one can ever amount to anything in this life without someone else to believe in him.
|
|
life
support
|
Paul Auster |
|
7b373f8
|
In a strange way, I envied the quality of Morrie's time even as I lamented its diminishing supply. Why did we bother with all the distractions we did? .. give up days and weeks of our lives, addicted to someone else's drama.
|
|
drama
dying
envy
ill
life
live
others
quality
|
Mitch Albom |
|
0e88053
|
The New Your energy goes beyond anything you'll find anywhere else. It's too much for some people and it grinds them down, but it lifts up and animates the rest of us.
|
|
human-nature
individuality
inspiration
knowledge-of-self
life
living-in-a-city
philosophy
sadness
security
|
Lawrence Block |
|
b12959e
|
The genome is as complicated and indeterminate as ordinary life, because it is ordinary life. This should come as a relief. Simple determinism, whether of the genetics or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will.
|
|
humanity
life
randomness
|
Matt Ridley |
|
5d0fd82
|
Life's always a big fucking compromise. You don't always get what you want, no matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how good you are. That's a myth. We're all hanging in the best way we can.
|
|
asian-american
hundred-secret-senses
life
|
Amy Tan |
|
4ed9830
|
You think you can get rid of things, and people too--leave them behind. You don't know yet about the habit they have, of coming back.
|
|
life
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
0264fc6
|
One afternoon, I am complaining about the confusion of my age, what is expected of me versus what I want for myself.
|
|
life
relationships
|
Mitch Albom |
|
fa6760e
|
Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon. Every pickle-jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time!
|
|
life
origins
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
fa7df4f
|
I know friends should be supportive of each other's life decisions and all that.
|
|
friendships
life
supportive
|
Sophie Kinsella |
|
c034968
|
...he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
|
|
identity
life
self
|
Gabriel García Márquez |
|
e939939
|
Power rests on the kind of knowledge one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless?
|
|
life
life-lessons
philosphy
power
thought
|
Carlos Castaneda |
|
ab24c3b
|
The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life. -William Morris.
|
|
elevate
everyday
genuine
happy
hygge
interest
life
secret
|
Louisa Thomsen Brits |
|
f4efc0e
|
From this vantage point he came to a realization that everything that had happened to him before this had been a journey upward through time, everything that occurred after it a descent. If he could not control his fate, why be born?
|
|
frustration
life
|
Irving Stone |
|
581d398
|
Life is so funny sometimes that you just have to laugh.
|
|
funny
happy
joy
laugh
life
live
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
ae181ef
|
What a huge inaccessible lumber-room of thought and experience we amounted to, I thought; how much we are, how little we transmit.
|
|
inner-life
life
thought
|
H.G. Wells |
|
df1d25c
|
One of the main tasks of adolescence is to achieve an identity--not necessarily a knowledge of who we are, but a clarification of the range of what we might become, a set of self-references by which we can make sense of our responses, and justify our decisions and goals.
|
|
decisions
goals
identity
life
respponsibilities
values
|
Terri Apter |
|
0fcdfd3
|
And what have you been up to? she asked. Oh, I don't know really, I said. Not much. Learning how to be a good loser.
|
|
life
losers
|
Miriam Toews |
|
1adb6c9
|
People never like pollution, it has become very wrong to like pollution at all. But just like there are good and bad things about people, there are good and bad things about pollution. If people were pollution we would get rid of anyone who was different, anyone who was considered an inconvenience... but we'd be getting rid of a life, a lot of lives... because we didn't like them. If pollution was a person would we still be trying to get rid of it? Would we have environmentalists still complaining and protesting and trying to get rid of all pollution?
|
|
animals
canada
dangerous
death
earth
environment
environmentalism
evil
garbage
help
hippie
hope
human
life
litter
mental-illness
people
plants
pollution
scary
smog
water
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
146da4f
|
This is life. Things get taken away. You will learn to start over many times-or you will be useless.
|
|
life
|
Mitch Albom |
|
f93063f
|
There was a heaven beyond anything he knew where there was no jet fuel, no jumping, no burning towers... but he wasn't looking beyond yet. He was still looking back.
|
|
death
heaven
life
new-york
new-york-city
september-11-attacks
september-11th
skyscrapers
terrorism
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
0b2141c
|
I might be the hazardous waste site that polluted it, but Cape Breton Island is still my home.
|
|
canada-day
cape-breton
coal
country
hazardous
home
life
living
nova-scotia
patriot
pollution
steel
sydney-tar-ponds
toxic
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
3351c48
|
But in the daytime it was all right. And when you'd had a drink you knew it was the best way to live in the world because anything might happen. I don't know how people live when they know exactly what's going to happen to them each day.
|
|
life
|
Jean Rhys |
|
10054a5
|
"I've just been thinking it would be a lot of fun to live in a defunct shopping mall! Totally abandoned, Yet still frozen in time, Bright white lights shining, Artificial turquoise fountains spewing out clear water, Eerie eighties elevator music drifting by... Dancing erratically, shouting to the top, Because it's sad to see these places die. They're a testament to the hubris of modern America, which is dying in and of itself. Let's face it. We know we can't compete with Online shopping And Made-in-China products And eBay And Amazon. Those of us who spent our High school And college days Being wage slaves to these dying malls, We'll be old and nostalgic someday, Telling our grandkids about these wonderful buildings! They housed sets of trendy clothes Which nobody was rich enough to afford Or thin enough to fit in. We'll tell them about the first time We were almost trampled in a Black Friday stampede. The first time we saw a kid Vomit in the ugly rainbow ball pit At the children's play area, Dumped by babysitters to grow up there, Spending their childhood draped in neon. The first time eating greasy pad-thai And hamburgers At the food court. The first time falling in love In the dark movie theatre That charges too much for stale popcorn. Holding hands in the sunlit rays Of the dusty projector... Totally lost in moments. What is the meaning of this voyage? Our grandkids, Who will probably have Smartphones Surgically implanted to their brains And identical glass condominiums by then, They'll gasp in shock and say, "Wow, that sounds SO cool!"
|
|
childhood
consumerism
dead-mall
eerie
life
love
mall
nostalgia
shopping
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
fdadc11
|
And tomorrow we'll do the same again. And again. Until one day you get up and find out that whatever it was didn't kill you after all.
|
|
coping-mechanism
life
teachings
|
Robin Hobb |
|
c511510
|
The truth is that people never realize their lives are about to change in unforeseen ways--that's just the nature of unforeseen ways.
|
|
life
truth
|
Will Schwalbe |
|
93c502d
|
People want us, or want us dead, because of what we are, not who we are. It's hard. ~Angel
|
|
final
james
james-patterson
lessons-of-life
life
maximum
patterson
reality
reality-sucks
ride
the
warning
|
James Patterson |
|
1a9b603
|
Ender began to eat, slowly and carefully, pretending not to notice he was the center of attention.
|
|
funny
humour
life
|
Orson Scott Card |
|
b22690a
|
You don't know what would have happened if I hadn't pushed. Nobody knows. I did it the way I did it, and it worked. Above all, it worked.
|
|
crazy
ender
genius
life
love
push
|
Orson Scott Card |
|
0236314
|
You can't undo loss. You can't unmake a mistake.
|
|
christmas
first-kiss
holiday
life
love
my-true-love-gave-to-me
winter
|
Stephanie Perkins |
|
3295039
|
But truthfully? Let me tell you what I honestly think. I think, maybe he hasn't even noticed that I'm gone. But. I have.
|
|
life
missing
|
Aimee Bender |
|
fa87252
|
All this attempt to control... We are talking about Western attitudes that are five hundred years old... The basic idea of science - that there was a new way to look at reality, that it was objective, that it did not depend on your beliefs or your nationality, that it was rational - that idea was fresh and exciting back then. It offered promise and hope for the future, and it swept away the old medieval system, which was hundreds of years old. The medieval world of feudal politics and religious dogma and hateful superstitions fell before science. But, in truth, this was because the medieval world didn't really work any more. It didn't work economically, it didn't work intellectually, and it didn't fit the new world that was emerging... But now... science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting to not fit the world any more. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it can not tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways - air, and water, and land - because of ungovernable science... At the same time, the great intellectual justification of science has vanished. Ever since Newton and Descartes, science has explicitly offered us the vision of total control. Science has claimed the power to eventually control everything, through its understanding of natural laws. But in the twentieth century, that claim has been shattered beyond repair. First, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle set limits on what we could know about the subatomic world. Oh well, we say. None of us lives in a subatomic world. It doesn't make any practical difference as we go through our lives. Then Godel's theorem set similar limits to mathematics, the formal language of science. Mathematicians used to think that their language had some inherent trueness that derived from the laws of logic. Now we know what we call 'reason' is just an arbitrary game. It's not special, in the way we thought it was. And now chaos theory proves that unpredictability is built into our daily lives. It is as mundane as the rain storms we cannot predict. And so the grand vision of science, hundreds of years old - the dream of total control - has died, in our century. And with it much of the justification, the rationale for science to do what it does. And for us to listen to it. Science has always said that it may not know everything now but it will know, eventually. But now we see that isn't true. It is an idle boast. As foolish, and misguided, as the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly... We are witnessing the end of the scientific era. Science, like other outmoded systems, is destroying itself. As it gains in power, it proves itself incapable of handling the power. Because things are going very fast now... it will be in everyone's hands. It will be in kits for backyard gardeners. Experiments for schoolchildren. Cheap labs for terrorists and dictators. And that will force everyone to ask the same question - What should I do with my power? - which is the very question science says it cannot answer.
|
|
higher-law
innovation
life
science
|
Michael Crichton |
|
95ad372
|
Dad's death didn't hollow me out the way Helen's had. After all, everyone had assumed Dad was a goner back when he got kicked in the head as a child. Instead, he had cheated death and, despite his gimp and speech impediment, lived a long life doing pretty much what he wanted. He hadn't drawn the best of cards, but he'd played his hand darned well, so what was there to grieve over?
|
|
life
luck
|
Jeannette Walls |
|
14e990c
|
Run after truth until you're breathless. Accept the pain involved in re-creating yourself afresh. These ideas will take a life to comprehend, a hard one interspersed with drunken moments.
|
|
life
truth
|
Naguib Mahfouz |
|
43ac554
|
"Then the true name for religion,' Fat said, 'is death.' 'The secret name,' I agreed. 'You got it. Jesus died; Asklepios died - they killed Mani worse than they killef jesus, but nobody even cares; nobody even remembers. They killed the Catharist in southern France by the tens of thousands. In the Thirty Years War, hundreds of people died. Protestants and Catholics - manual slaughter. Death is the real name for it; not God, not the Savior, not love - death. Kevin is rights about his cat. It's all there in his dead cat. The Great Judge can't answer Kevin: "Why did my cat die?" Answer: "Damned i I knoe." There is no answer; there is only a dead animal that just wanted to cross the street. We're all animals that want to cross the street only something mows us down half-way across that we never saw. Go ask Kevin. "Your cat was stupid." "Who made the cat? Why did he make the cat stupid? Did the cat learn by being killed, and if so, what did he learn? Did Sherri learn anything from dying of cancer? did gloria learn anything-' 'Okay, enough,' Fat said. 'Kevin is right,' I said. 'Go out and get laid.'
|
|
god
human-nature
humanity
irrationality
life
religion
science-fiction
spirituality
world
|
Philip K. Dick |
|
28473ee
|
Wine is like many of the fine experiences in life which take time and experience to extract their full pleasure and meaning.
|
|
life
meaning-of-life
pleasure
wine
|
Douglas Preston |
|
9ba15b4
|
But in life you have to take lots of deductions and if you don't take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do.So it is good to have a reason why you hate some things and why you like others.
|
|
life
|
Mark Haddon |
|
3644764
|
"Maybe someday, if I succeed at something, I'll stop saying, "It isn't fair" about everything else."
|
|
aims
ambition
dedication
determination
difficulties
dreams
equality
fairness
hardships
life
perseverance
success
trials
|
Lois Lowry |
|
73044a4
|
Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.
|
|
life
living
meaning
mortality
|
Muriel Spark |
|
509230b
|
Leven is het weer. Leven is maaltijden. Lunch op een blauw-geruit kleed waar zout op is gemorst. De geur van tabak. Brie, gele appels, messen met houten handvaten.
|
|
hapiness
life
|
James Salter |
|
2ab0b40
|
If we were entirely sane, if madness did not have a serious grip on one side of us, other people's tragedies would hold a great deal less interest for us.
|
|
life
madness
sanity
tragedy
|
Alain de Botton |
|
cc660e2
|
The river of life, of mysterious laws and mysterious choice, flows past a deserted embankment; and along that other deserted embankment Charles now begins to pace, a man behind the invisible gun carriage on which rests his own corpse. He walks towards an imminent, self-given death? I think not; for he has at which to build; has already begun, though he would still bitterly deny it, thought there are tears in his eyes to support his denial, to realize that life, however advantageously Sarah may in some ways seem to fit the role of Sphinx, is not a symbol, is not one riddle and one failure to guess it, is not to inhabit one face alone or to be given up after one losing throw of the dice; but is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly into the city's iron heart, endured. And out again, upon the unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.
|
|
life
|
John Fowles |
|
2edcf00
|
Pray that your children will develop a heart that seeks after God.
|
|
god
life
parenting
power
prayer
|
Stormie Omartian |
|
99d16c9
|
He's turned against me too, Theon realized. Of late it seemed to him as if the very stones of Winterfell had turned against him. If I die, I die friendless and abandoned. What choice did that leave him, but to live?
|
|
death
friendless
game-of-thrones
life
lorren
theon
winterfell
|
George R.R. Martin |
|
3c20d7b
|
That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.
|
|
death
government
government-corruption
hemingway
illness
life
syphilis
war
|
Ernest Hemingway |
|
fc27ae4
|
With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make-believe they're happy.
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hope
lie
life
reality
truth
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Fernando Pessoa |
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729db85
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For me life is an inn where I must stay until the carriage from the abyss calls to collect me [...] I could consider this inn to be a prison, since I'm compelled to stay here; I could consider it a kind of club, because I meet other people here. However, unlike others, I am neither impatient nor sociable. I leave those who chatter in the living room, from where the cosy sound of music and voices reaches me. I sit at the door and fill my eyes and ears with the colours and sounds of the landscape and slowly, just for myself, I sing vague songs that I compose while I wait. Night will fall on all of us and the carriage will arrive. I enjoy the breeze given to me and the soul given to me to enjoy it and I ask no more questions, look no further. If what I leave written in the visitors' book is one day read by others and entertains them on their journey, that's fine. If no one reads it or is entertained by it, that's fine too.
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life
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Fernando Pessoa |
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9aa278d
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"-Hey, listen," I said. "You know those ducks in that lagoon right near Central Park South? That little lake? By any chance, do you happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over? Do you happen to know, by any chance?" I realized it was only one chance in a million." --
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life
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J.D. Salinger |
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e7edd5a
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La libertad es una carga pesada, extrana y abrumadora para el espiritu que ha de llevarla. No es comoda. No es un regalo que se recibe, sino una eleccion que se hace, y la eleccion puede ser dificil.
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life
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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0b34c64
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I do understand that they fall when I'm least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but everywhere: poetry just is, whether we revere it or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace, communicated from one soul to another.
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grace
life
poems
poetry
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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d2b10a4
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Which of us saved the other from the Labyrinth, Ged?
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life
saved
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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63fa695
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Let's only care about the place where we are. There's beauty enough in being here and not anywhere else. If there's someone beyond the curve in the road, Let them worry about what's past the curve in the road, That's what the road is to them.
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being
feeling
god
it-is-what-it-is
life
living
meaning
nature
paganism
pantheism
worry
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Alberto Caeiro |
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33d7bcf
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"I was there laughing and joking with everyone else, but it's like there was some part of me standing back, watching, thinking, "Is this as good as it gets?"
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conflict
life
problems
youth
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Margaret Peterson Haddix |
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33444c3
|
"I was the nicest person you'd ever want to know," Alex recalls, "but the world wasn't that way. The problem was that if you were just a nice person, you'd get crushed. I refused to live a life where people could do that stuff to me."
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life
nice
person
world
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Susan Cain |