Another Life Altogether Quotes

Instead of killing herself, I wondered, could a person just shrink and crumple until she became nothing, until her traits and quirks wasted along with her body, until one day you realized that she had faded away? ~ Elaine Beale

My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments - we hear a word that sticks in our mind - or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly - we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed to the mallard ducks in the lagoon; a small child starts a conversation with us in a Dairy Queen - or we have an episode like the one I had with the M&M cars back at the Husky station.

And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection - certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether; one we didn't even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real - this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives. ~ Douglas Coupland

And I have been able to give freedom and life which was acknowledged in the ecstasy of walking hand in hand across the most beautiful bridge of the world, the cables enclosing us and pulling us upward in such a dance as I have never walked and never can walk with another. ~ Hart Crane

I realized that Eastern thought had somewhat more compassion for all living things. Man was a form of life that in another reincarnation might possibly be a horsefly or a bird of paradise or a deer. So a man of such a faith, looking at animals, might be looking at old friends or ancestors. In the East the wilderness has no evil connotation; it is thought of as an expression of the unity and harmony of the universe. ~ William O. Douglas

Fact: life is a giant classroom and every day is an opportunity to learn something new.
Fact: you have to be prepared for pop quizzes, because they can come from anywhere or anyone.
Also fact: I wished I'd called in sick today.
What I learned from professor Frosty?
How to properly boost cars. The guy could do wicked things with a single piece of wire.
"I'm a criminal now," I lamented as we soared down the highway. Killing in self defense didn't count.
"I'm an accomplice. A thief."
"Actually," he said smoothly, "you're a freelance valet. All you're doing is moving a car from one location to another. There's nothing wrong with that, now, is there? ~ Gena Showalter

I think the great thing about grandparents is seeing another home, realising that people you love can have different priorities, different diversions, different opinions and lead quite different lives from the ones you see every day, and that is immensely valuable. ~ Simon Hoggart

Appreciation is one of those funny things that you have to just allow it to blend together on its own. Past reveals all as they say. You will indefinitely know when the time comes to leave a crappy relationship. There's just no mistaking it. There comes a time when no more growth can come to a union for many folks. Well then go plant your seeds into your own garden before you come invest your time into another person again. Whatever you need to connect with will come and go as necessary. ~ Sereda Aleta Dailey

Do you consider yourself a blessing or just another person? ~ Jonathan Anthony Burkett

And if you're referring to your anguish, it's just a thing. The shape of a trailor, a wheel, or a knife. Leave the details of your life and find another one. ~ Alice Notley

She had felt a collision with him and known that she had wanted this her whole life: to crash for just one moment into another person at such a velocity as to fuse with him. ~ Ali Shaw

Do not let another day go by where your dedication to other people's opinions is greater than your dedication to your own emotions! ~ Steve Maraboli

Perhaps such things pass for virtue among the gods. But how is there glory in taking life? We die so easily. Would you make him another Pyrrhus? Let the stories of him be something more. ~ Madeline Miller

My mind when the sounding bowls are in play. I also draw Angel Cards17 several times a day to help me stay focused on what I believe is important in life. The original Angel Cards come in sets of assorted sizes with each card having a single word written on them. Every morning when I first get up, I ritualistically invite an angel into my life and draw a card. I then focus my attention on that particular angel throughout my day. If I am feeling stressed or have an important phone call to make, I will often draw another angel to help me shift my mind. I am ~ Jill Bolte Taylor

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another. ~ Joseph Addison

People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.
A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.
A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master ... ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Let us choose life and love, and happily use our selves up in loving service to one another. ~ Doris Haddock

What great philosophers do for us is not to hand out such an all-purpose system. It is to light up and clarify some special aspect of life, to supply conceptual tools which will do a certain necessary kind of work. Wide though that area of work may be, it is never the whole, and all ideas lose their proper power when they are used out of their appropriate context. That is why one great philosopher does not necessarily displace another, why there is room for all of them and a great many more whom we do not have yet. ~ Mary Midgley

Each individual composes the music of his own life. If he injures another, he brings disharmony. When his sphere is disturbed, he is disturbed himself, and there is a discord in the melody of his life. If he can quicken the feeling of another to joy or to gratitude, by that much he adds to his own life; he becomes himself by that much more alive. Whether conscious of it or not, his thought is affected for the better by the joy or gratitude of another, and his power and vitality increase thereby, and the music of his life grows more in harmony. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan

Thus the sum of things is ever being reviewed, and mortals dependent one upon another. Some nations increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and like runners pass on the torch of life. ~ Lucretius

Each life is yet another chance given to humanity, but it was not even a half a chance in Coinman's case. ~ Pawan Mishra

Changing the external conditions of your lives - earn more money, be in a better physical shape, have another partner or travel more - will not change how you feel. It never works because the emptiness is not around, is within. The only way to come back to life is to acknowledge that little voice rising from your heart and begging you to return to love, to return to truth. ~ Dragos Bratasanu

Is it only when you're in love with another person that you see them as they really are? And in the ordinary way, when you're not in love, you see only a fragmented version of that being? Because when you're in love with someone, you do indeed see them as a divine being. And suppose that's what they are, truly. And your eyes have, by your beloved, been opened. If you should be so fortunate as to encounter this spiritual experience, it seems to me to be a total denial of life to refuse it. ~ Alan W. Watts

Toward the end of his second decade in the airport, Clark was thinking about how lucky he'd been. Not just the mere fact of survival, which was of course remarkable in and of itself, but to have seen one world end and another begin. And not just to have seen the remembered splendors of the former world, the space shuttles and the electrical grid and the amplified guitars, the computers that could be held in the palm of a hand and the high-speed trains between cities, but to have lived among those wonders for so long. To have dwelt in that spectacular world for fifty-one years of his life. Sometimes he lay awake in Concourse B of the Severn City Airport and thought, "I was there," and the thought pierced him through with an admixture of sadness and exhilaration. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

Not just a thief, but a murderer as well. Beneath the handsome man, Kelsea sensed another man, a terrible one, with a life as black as the water in an ice-covered lake. A murderer many, many times.
The idea should have brought horror. Kelsea waited for a long moment, bu what came instead was an even worse realization: it didn't matter at all. ~ Erika Johansen

Maybe life was just a series of phases - one phase after another after another. Maybe, in a couple of years, I'd be going through the same phase as the eighteen-year-old lifeguards. ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz

The only evidence, so far as I know, about another life is, first, that we have no evidence; and secondly, that we are rather sorry that we have not, and wish we had. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

It's always wonderful when something altogether wrong ends right, without the help of either religion or the police. ~ Ludwig Bemelmans

Sometimes it seems' said Grok, 'that the faces exist of themselves, in a disembodied somewhere, waiting for the clown who will wear them, who will bring them to life. Faces that wait in the mirrors of unknown dressing-rooms, unseen in the depths of the glass like fish in dusty pools, fish that will rise up out of the obscure profundity when they spot the one who anxiously scrutinises his own reflection for the face it lacks, man eating fish waiting to gobble up your being and give you another instead ... ~ Angela Carter

A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belongs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all. ~ Honore De Balzac

This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window. ~ Charles Baudelaire

Looking back on my life, I'd say I am grateful to my two sons for having brought me up. It could not have been easy - for them or for their father. For me it was a "Poetry Workshop," a way of doing poetry by another means (in no sense a continuation of Iowa) - as well as the sort of upbringing I never got from my mother.

As luck would have it, I had a poet, a classical poet, for a mother. She didn't write free verse; she wrote poetry until the last years of her life in the classical Chinese style. So a lot of work was done for me - when you imbibe Tang and Sung poets with a mother who chanted verses on the balcony in the moonlight. ~ Wong May

We are already so many things by the time we reach the middle of life that it is possible to see that really anything can happen, and that, by extension, anything is doable. I decided I'd write 'The Calling' as someone else. Another writer entirely, a fictional one who would be played by me. ~ Michael Redhill

What Caul liked most about Tom was his kindness. Kindness was not valued back in Grimsby, where the older boys were encouraged to torment the younger ones, who would grow up to torment another batch of youngsters in their turn. "Good practice for life," Uncle said. "Hard knocks, that's all the world's about!" But maybe Uncle had never met anyone like Tom, who was kind to other people and seemed to expect nothing more than kindness in return. ~ Philip Reeve

He is my shy stubborn! Sounds weird! But it is true. He is stubborn no doubt, but he has no courage to face me! He loves me a lot! But he lives in that secret only! He cares for me, but feel angry to reveal it! But my darling, mark my words, I know you better in this world! Even you don't know, who are you! You know where is my life is living, It's in you. I don't know another meaning of purity other than this. ~ Eagles

Another basic characteristic of liberalism which constitutes a formidable obstacle to an oppressed group's liberation is its conception of human nature. If selfishness, aggressiveness, the drive to conquer and dominate, really are among defining human traits, as every liberal philosopher since Locke tries to convince us, the oppression in civil society - i.e. in the social sphere not regulated by the state - is a fact of life, and the basic civil relationship between a man and a women will always remain a battlefield. Woman, being less aggressive, is then either the less human of the two and doomed to subjugation, or else she must get more power-hungry herself and try to dominate man. Liberation for both is not feasible. ~ Mihailo Markovic

What they say is, life goes on, and that is mostly true. The mail is delivered and the Christmas lights go up and the ladders get put away and you open yet another box of cereal. In time, the volume of my feelings would be turned down in gentle increments to a near quiet, and yet the record would still spin, always spin. There was a place for Rose so deeply within myself that it was another country, another world, with its own light and time and its own language. A lost world. Yet its foundations and edges were permanent-the ruins of Pompeii, the glorious remnants or the Forum. A world that endured, even as it retreated into the past. A world visited, imagined, ever waiting, yet asleep ~ Deb Caletti

There's a power struggle going on across Europe these days. A few cities are competing against each other to see who shall emerge as the great 21st century European metropolis. Will it be London? Paris? Berlin? Zurich? Maybe Brussels, center of the young union? They all strive to outdo one another culturally, architecturally, politically, fiscally. But Rome, it should be said, has not bothered to join the race for status. Rome doesn't compete. Rome just watches all the fussing and striving, completely unfazed. I am inspired by the regal self-assurance of this city, so grounded and rounded, so amused and monumental, knowing she is held securely in the palm of history. I would like to be like Rome when I am an old lady. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

In order to console himself, man created a dream of another world where there is no death, and for that dream he forfeited *this* world, gave it up decidedly to death.
Therefore, the most important and most profound question of the Christian faith must be, How and from where did death arise, and why has it become stronger than life? Why has it become so powerful that the world itself has become a kind of cosmic cemetery, a place where a collection of people condemned to death live either in fear or terror, or in their efforts to forget about death find themselves rushing around one great, big burial plot? ~ Alexander Schmemann

Well," he said softly, "in this life you're often born one thing and die another. You don't have to accept that what you're given when you come in is all you'll have when you leave. ~ Terry Brooks

There are places on the face of earth where rules - all rules, without exception - are suspended until further notice. Places where evil prospers, unobstructed, and the secret nature of men can be let loose without limitations. In these deserts of egotism, life and death have a relative value and another person's suffering becomes a bargaining chip. ~ Donato Carrisi

Relaxing the shoulders is vital for relaxation in general. However, owing to the effects of gravity, relaxation is problematic unless we let the shoulders remain in their natural place. Let the shoulders drop, or settle in harmony with gravity, into their most comfortable position. It isn't too difficult to do this for a moment, but to sustain this condition unconsciously in our lives is another matter. We raise our shoulders unnaturally when we lean on a desk or hold the telephone between our shoulders and ears, when we are shocked by a loud noise, and who knows how many other times throughout the day. And the unsettling of the shoulders doesn't have to be large to produce anxiety, stiff necks, and headaches. Just slightly raising them will create tension, and this tension throws the nervous system out of balance.

When do we raise the shoulders in daily life? What are we feeling at that moment and leading up to that moment? Remembering that the body reflects the mind, and that the raising of the shoulders not only creates tension but also is a physical manifestation of psychological tension itself, what are the roots of this tension? Bringing the mind into the moment, let's observe ourselves in a state free of preconceived ideas or beliefs. Don't guess at these questions. Observe yourself in relationship to others and the universe ~ H.E. Davey

What's more, sharia finance is another tool of Islamic separatism; instead of assimilating into American society, Muslims are demanding, and receiving, parallel financial institutions that reinforce the idea that they are unique, not subject to the laws and norms to which the rest of us are subject-a privileged class. At the same time, sharia finance initiatives are giving Islamic interests increased control over Western economic life. ~ Robert Spencer

When one door closes, another thousand get a chance to be opened by you.

Never feel sad at not getting something in life. You may be on your way to something better! ~ Avijeet Das

Sun benches at the curb bespeak
another season, truncated poplars
that having served for shade
served also later for the fire. ~ William Carlos Williams

When you think about it, everything has been said before, in one way or another. It's only our experience of it that makes it new. ~ Lauren Willig

Learn, earn, return - these are the 3 phases of life. Jack Balousek There is no more noble occupation in the world than to assist another human being - to help someone to succeed. ~ Alan Loy McGinnis

The spiritual life and especially its expression in mystical experience, is not so much a matter of striving for heights of mystical union between the soul and God who is utterly different from us. It is rather more a matter of attending to God's presence with us and responding to God's presence by being altogether present to the divine presence which is always near. The long history of Christian spirituality has to do with the various ways of responding to God's presence and participating ever more fully in the divine life altogether present in human life, history, the world and the church. ~ Michael Downey

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth
certainly the machine will wear out ... but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Life, as I've learned, fails to be a concrete, concise package that can easily be wrapped up and contained. Life is full of messy, unpredictable circumstances that test not only our characters, but the people around us as well. Our choices are not always about choosing between right and wrong, good or bad. They are sometimes about following the path that you simply have to follow, for one reason or another. ~ Lindsay Detwiler

If you are present, then you can see that you give yourself presents in each moment that you can unwrap and thoroughly enjoy - the amazing world around us that we can explore, each incredible detail, the lives, and the stories we tell ourselves or experience so that we can feel what it's like to be human, the things we can learn from an interaction, about ourselves as well as everything and everyone else.

Everyone is here in their own story, writing the script as they go, living the movie picture.... choosing who to meet, what to do, how to react to each new experience. We each find our own tools to help us traverse the terrain of each particular part of our journeys. It cannot be right to judge another, or yourself, for we are all at different stages, or on different stages. We do as we need to according to where and how we find ourselves, but the more you realise that you actually put yourself exactly where you are in each moment, the more your eyes will widen. You are an amazing Being playing the game of life - your attitude makes all the difference. ~ Jay Woodman