I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It’s not the best way to live. But it’s the way I am.
—Jeffrey Eugenides in Middlesex
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
When the right one comes along, you figure it out. You move mountains, you change your life and you do whatever it takes to keep them with you.
—Jay Crownover in Jet
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
—Steven Weinberg
People with a grudge against the world are always dangerous. They seem to think life owes them something. I’ve known many who have suffered worse and been cut off from life much more… and they’ve managed to lead happy contented lives. It’s what’s in yourself that makes you happy or unhappy.
—Agatha Christie in A Murder Is Announced
Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love—and to put its trust in life.
—Joseph Conrad
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
There is so much beauty in just existing. In being alive.
—Hannah Harrington in Saving June
You’re the one who has to live with your choice, everyone else will get over it, move on, no matter what you decide. But you never will.
—Veronica Roth in The Transfer
I am against using death as a punishment. I am also against using it as a reward.
—Stanislaw J. Lec
Man is the only animal who has to be encouraged to live.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
A man lives with himself for seventy years, and doesn't know who he is.
—Israel Salanter Lipkin
That life… that she had complained against, had murmured at, had raged at and defied—nonetheless she had loved it so, joyed in it so, both in good days and evil, that not one day had there been when it would not have seemed hard to give it back to God, nor one grief that she could have forgone without regret.
—Sigrid Undsetfs
You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.
—Woody Allen
I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it.
—Rita Mae Brown