Life makes fools of all of us sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor and you'll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace.
—Paul Murray in Skippy Dies
Because life is like that, isn't it? If you thought of all the tiny things that divert your path one way or another, some good, some bad, you'd never do anything ever again. And some people don't. Some people go through life not really deciding to do much, not wanting to, always too fearful of the consequences to try something new. Of course, that in itself is also a decision.
—Jenny Colgan in The Bookshop on the Corner
Really, when I look back on it, I did exactly what I had set out to do. I changed my life. I woke myself up. I rediscovered passions of every variety. I forced myself to take a little time. I found a way to bring some of who I used to be into who I was.
—Katherine Center in Everyone is Beautiful
Life is meant to be lived, and if you're offered the chance to experience things with an extraordinary person, then there isn't one reason in the world to say no.
—Amber L. Johnson in Puddle Jumping
Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible.
—Edward Teller
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy—I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
—Bertrand Russell
People find life entirely too time-consuming.
—Stanislaw J. Lec
Life's a tough proposition, and the first hundred years are the hardest.
—Wilson Mizner
If you're alive, there's a purpose for your life.
—Rick Warren
If life was fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.
—Johnny Carson
One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.
—Oscar Wilde
The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is important.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
Why does life keep teaching me lessons I have no desire to learn?
—Ashleigh Brilliant
Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you… You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life.
—John Gardner