Quotes by American Authors - Page 139

Sloppy raggedy-assed old life. I love it. I never want to die.
Dennis Trudell
Normal day let me be aware of the treasure you are. Let me learn from you love you savour you bless you before you depart. Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow. Let me hold you while I may for it will not always be so. One day I shall dig my nails into the earth or bury my face in the pillow or stretch myself taut or raise my hands to the sky and want more than all the world your return.
Mary Jean Irion
We're all in this together - by ourselves.
Lily Tomlin
Death and taxes and childbirth. There's never any convenient time for any of them.
Margaret Mitchell
There are two ways to slide easily through life to believe everything or doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.
Alfred Korzybski
My advice to those who are about to begin in earnest the journey of life is to take their heart in one hand and a club in the other.
Josh Billings
Life is painting a picture not doing a sum.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
William James
It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.
Lionel Trilling
It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.
Adlai Stevenson
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly and listen to others even the dull and ignorant they too have their story. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love - for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God whatever you conceive Him to be and whatever your labours and aspirations in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham drudgery and broken dreams it is still a beautiful world.
Max Ehrmann
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
George Santayana
Birth copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks.
T.S Eliot
Life is seldom as unendurable as to judge by the facts it logically ought to be.
Brooks Atkinson
The truth that many people never understand until it is too late is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.
Thomas Merton
The whole of what we know is a system of compensations. Each suffering is rewarded each sacrifice is made up every debt is paid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you're on the merry-go-round you have to go round.
Kent Thompson
You only live once - but if you work it right once is enough.
Joe E. Lewis
Life as it is called is for most of us one long postponement.
Henry Miller
You've got to keep fighting - you've got to risk your life every six months to stay alive.
Elia Kazan
Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.
Thomas la Mance
Were the offer made true I would engage to run again from beginning to end the same career of life. All I would ask should be the privilege of an author to correct in a second edition certain errors of the first.
Benjamin Franklin
I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirm the worth of life as an end in itself as against the saints who deny it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
T.S Eliot
Life is action and passion therefore it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time at peril of being judged not to have lived.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.
Clarence Darrow
Unless you can find some sort of loyalty you cannot find unity and peace in your active living.
Josiah Royce
Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.
Mark Twain
Life is ever since man was born licking honey from a thorn.
Louis Ginsberg
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life. It goes on.
Robert Frost
We live in what is but we find 1 000 ways not to face it. Great theatre strengthens our faculty to face it.
Thornton Wilder
There are days when it takes all you've got just to keep up with the losers.
Robert Orben
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win you're still a rat.
Lily Tomlin
The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over.
Ernest Hemingway
The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad like the season and infinite in wealth and depth of tone - but never hustled.
Henry Adams
The character of human life like the character of the human condition like the character of all life is "ambiguity": the inseparable mixture of good and evil the true and false the creative and destructive forces - both individual and social.
Paul Tillich
Sometimes I wish life had a fast-forward button.
Dan Chopin
Life is the only art that we are required to practise without preparation and without being allowed the preliminary trials the failures and botches that are essential for the training of a mere beginner.
Lewis Mumford
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
Life is made up of sobs sniffles and smiles with sniffles predominating.
o.henry
Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
Eugene O'Neill
Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.
Tennessee Williams
Is not this the true romantic feeling - not to desire to escape life but to prevent life from escaping you.
Thomas Wolfe
In the morning a man walks with his whole body in the evening only with his legs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I try to take one day at a time but sometimes several days attack me at once.
Ashleigh Brilliant
Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught Hell for.
Earl Warren
Don't do things to not die do things to enjoy living. The by-product may be not dying.
Bernie S. Siegel
Cats and monkeys - monkeys and cats - all human life is there.
Henry James
I like life. It's something to do. Somewhere on this globe every 10 seconds there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.
Sam Levenson
All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from and to and why.
James Thurber
The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't mind some people dying all the time or maybe only starving some of the time which isn't half so bad if it isn't you.
Laurence Ferlinghetti
I know a man who gave up smoking drinking sex and rich food. He was healthy right up to the time he killed himself.
Johnny Carson
If your time hasn't come not even a doctor can kill you.
M. A. Perlstein
Life is something that happens to you while you're making other plans.
Margaret Miller
Life is like a B-movie. You don't want to leave in the middle of it but you don't want to see it again.
Ted Turner
No matter how rich you become how famous or powerful when you die the size of your funeral will still pretty much depend on the weather.
Michael Pritchard
If life was fair Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.
Johnny Carson
I do not believe in an afterlife although I am bringing a change of underwear.
Woody Allen
Life doesn't imitate art it imitates bad television.
Woody Allen