Autumn Of Life Quotes

When iridescent summer nights fade into sullen autumn gray, as the world marches grimly towards the slow, cold death of winter, something changes.

Dark spirits strengthen, emboldened by lengthening shadows and huddled masses. The sunshine of youth once kept these phantoms at bay, but the doors to my soul creak slowly open with the passing years, the seams of a skeptical mind loosen as the autumn of life approaches. ~ Evans Light

Today I saw you and spoke to you for the first time.
It was like an earthquake; everything in me was overturned, the graves of my heart were opened and my own nature was strange to me.
I am forty, and I believed I had reached the autumn of life.
I had wandered far, known much and lived many lives. The Lord had spoken to me, manifesting Himself in many ways; to me angels had revealed themselves and I had not believed them. But when I saw you I was compelled to believe, because of the miracle that happened to me. ~ Mika Waltari

As I drift through the autumn of my life like a fallen leaf blown about by the winds of time, I sometimes ponder my destiny. ~ Peggy Toney Horton

I especially like your autumn trees, gracefully letting their leaves fall. That is how I would like to shed my own leaves in this autumn of life, easily and elegantly. Why be so attached to what we are bound to lose anyway? I suppose I mean youth, which has been so present in our conversations. ~ Isabel Allende

Autumn brings the falling of leaves and cool days. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

But let me begin with a statement of my own passionate and indignant belief
I do not care one goddamned thing about how James Dickey conducted his personal life. I care everything about what this man wrote on blank sheets of paper when he sat alone probing the extremities of imagination. ~ Pat Conroy

Destruction of the embryo in the mother's womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God of mighty powers.
God of great deeds. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Learn to let urgency go. Nothing is urgent. Stress is the product of uncertainty and urgency of life. ~ Debasish Mridha

I can't imagine living the way he does - always keeping track of who gave me what and what I should give them in return, incapable of love or loyalty or forgiveness, a one-eyed man with a knife in hand, looking for someone else's eye to poke out. That isn't life. It's some paler version of life. I wonder where he learned it from. ~ Veronica Roth

We have been living amidst one of the great revolutions of human history, and we hardly know it: the penetration of the State into every aspect of human life and society. Some people regard this as good and "progressive," others regard it as tyrannical; but either way, it's a fact, a transformation as great as, say, the Industrial Revolution. Absolutely nothing is now beyond the scope of State power. ~ Joseph Sobran

I had a period in my life when I was eight or nine when I was so scared of dying that I wouldn't go out of our house for a whole year. ~ Jens Lekman

Historical truth is that, and that alone, which reveals the forces that go to mould the social life of mankind. ~ Ahad Ha'am

Men We Reaped is a fiercely felt meditation on the value of life that at once reminds us of its infinite worth and indicts us - as a society - for our selective, casual complicity in devaluing it. Ward's account of these losses is founded in a compelling emotional honesty, and graced with moments of stark poetry. ~ Peter Ho Davies

[Death is] the best asylum for pains and sorrows and troubles and the injustices of life. ~ Sadegh Hedayat

I look down past the stars to a terrifying darkness. I seem to recognize the place, but it's impossible. "Accident," I whisper. I will fall. I seem to desire the fall, and though I fight it with all my will I know in advance I can't win. Standing baffled, quaking with fear, three feet from the edge of a nightmare cliff, I find myself, incredibly, moving towards it. I look down, down, into bottomless blackness, feeling the dark power moving in me like an ocean current, some monster inside me, deep sea wonder, dread night monarch astir in his cave, moving me slowly to my voluntary tumble into death. ~ John Gardner

It's the relationships between people that are more important than the sort of far away fantasies of what the good life is, the world of supermodels and Bud ads. ~ Mira Sorvino

Things are always terrible
for some people. The question
is the ratio of the palpable hurt
to the general session
of life in an era. ~ Maureen N. McLane

Hitler had charm, loved children, charmed women. But in political respects he would stop at nothing. In other respects he had soft and touching emotions. Just as he could be terribly brutal in following up political ideas, so he could be humanely sensitive for the feelings of individuals, for the individual human life. ~ Wilhelm Keitel

Most people can hardly imagine what it would be like to be at peace with inner disturbance. But if you do not learn to be comfortable with it, you will devote your life to avoiding it. If you feel insecurity, it's just a feeling. You can handle a feelin. If you feel embarrassed, it's just a feeling. It's just a part of creation. If you feel jealousy and your heart burns, just look at it objectively, like you would a mild bruise. It's a thing in the universe that is passing through your system. Laugh at it, have fun with it, but don't be afraid of it. It cannot touch you unless you touch it. ~ Michael Singer

Aurobindo Ghose writes somewhere of the present as 'the pure and virgin moment,' that razor's edge of time and existence which divides the past from the future, and is, and yet, instantaneously is not. The phrase is attractive and yet what does it mean? The virgin moment emerging from the veil of the future in all its naked purity, coming into contact with us, and immediately becoming the soiled and stale past. Is it we that soil it and violate it? Or is the moment not so virgin after all, for it is bound up with all the harlotry of the past? ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

Early in my conscious life one of my fingers, not then subject to my influence, brushed past a shrimp-like protuberance between my legs. And though shrimp and fingertip lay at differing distances from my brain, they felt each other simultaneously, a diverting issue in neuroscience known as the binding problem. ~ Ian McEwan

The irony is, though your parents always deplored his absence of Protestant industry, those two have more in common with Kevin than anyone I know. If they don't know what life is for, what to do with it, Kevin doesn't, either; interestingly, both your parents and your firstborn abhor leisure time. Your son always attacked this antipathy head-on, which involves a certain bravery if you think about it; he was never one to deceive himself that, by merely filling it, he was putting his time to productive use. Oh, no
you'll remember he would sit by the hour stewing and glowering and doing nothing but reviling every second of every minute of his Saturday afternoon. ~ Lionel Shriver

Life is a summation of the choices we make. ~ Tonya Lampley

With longer life spans and better health and education, many feel that giving birth to a baby a mere couple of decades after they themselves were in the cradle is a little premature. ~ Mariella Frostrup

Daily life, the sacred time of a man. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from time's beginning but nearer its end. ~ H.G.Wells

The life an infertile person seeks comes to her not by accident and not by fate but by hard-fought choices. How to put together the portfolio of photographs. How to answer at the home study. What clinic or doctor or procedure. Donor egg or donor sperm or donor embryo. Open or closed adoption. What country, what boxes to check or uncheck. What questions to ask, and ask again. When to start and when to stop. What to say when her child says, Tell me my story. ~ Belle Boggs

But the ultimate truth is that they aren't dead, those people. The writers of books do not truly die; their characters, even the ones who throw themselves in front of trains or are killed in battle, come back to life over and over again. Books are the means to immortality: Plato lives forever, as do Dickens, and Dr. Seuss, Soames Forsyte, Jo March, Scrooge, Anna Karenina, and Vronsky. Over and over again Heathcliff wanders the moors searching for his Cathy. Over and over again Ahab fights the whale. Through them all we experience other times, other places, other lives. We manage to become much more than our own selves. The only dead are those who grow sere and shriveled within, unable to step outside their own lives and into those of others. Ignorance is death. A closed mind is catafalque. ~ Anna Quindlen

I was struck by the image of Daddy still dressed in that same plaid shirt and undershirt with the bloodstains below the neck, the one I had first seen him wearing in the jail the previous day. ~ Earl B. Russell

When things are difficult, awful, stressful, the thing that always gets you through is a sense of humour. I don't mean - well, maybe I do - laugh at the hangman as he puts the noose around your neck. But an eye, an ear, for the ridiculous, the absurd in life, can get you through a lot. ~ Paul Merton

Saint or sage or the awakened being is not the one free from all desires and expectations, but the one who has an active conscience to see the real implications of those desires and expectations and then act accordingly for the best possible outcome for the self as well as the society. ~ Abhijit Naskar

We are all lumps, and of so various and inform a contexture, that every piece plays, every moment, its own game, and there is as much difference betwixt us and ourselves as betwixt us and others. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Life is the stuff of miracles. ~ A.D. Posey

I'm not lookin' for someone who can save me. Life rafts might keep you afloat but they rarely get you anywhere and I've got places I wanna go. So break me in two, peel back my rib cage and cover every page of my heart with love poems you will burn someday. ~ Andrea Gibson

I don't want to die, Arlen, but I would lay down my life for any of these men, or they for me. That's a real thing, sacrifice, but you will never understand it. ~ Erika Johansen

Words are never frail. They have all the powers to change the personality and features of a man. The way he relates and depicts the things are based on the words he discovers. At one point where words portray happiness for someone, it also counts for the tears to some. The day we comprehend the strength of words, we would choose them more closely and patiently. Where we would prefer silence more over words. If words are our strength, they are our weakness too. ~ Nishikant

I decided that I was ready to assume this position when I discovered that the chance to save the country was very meager. I was prepared to sacrifice myself for this country and its 90 million people. They want food, fuel and electricity and yearn for a decent life. Any president who does not pay attention to such details or is unable to provide the minimum level of stability should leave office. ~ Abdel Fattah El-Sisi

Time passes. That is the only thing one can be sure of in life: Time does not stop. Not for anyone. Not for anything. Time marches on, oblivious to all. ~ R.J. Palacio

Her words at the party replayed in my mind.
If we were in another life, I could love you.
Abby was lying weak and sick in my arms, depending on me to take care of her. In
that moment I recognized that my feelings for her were a lot stronger than I thought. Sometime between
the moment we met, and holding her on that bathroom floor, I had fallen in love with her. ~ Jamie McGuire

It is one of my decided opinions that married people ought to have no one, be the tie ever so close and dear, living permanently with them, to break the sacred duality - no, let me say the unity of their home. ~ Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

All values are important, everyone who has ever touched my life in some way was a mentor for good or bad. Life is a blend, and a person is a blend of all the influences that have touched their lives. ~ Colin Powell

As a child, I felt that books were holy objects, to be caressed, rapturously sniffed, and devotedly provided for. I gave my life to them. I still do. I continue to do what I did as a child; dream of books, make books and collect books. ~ Maurice Sendak

I never really set out to research any of these stories. I try to lead an interesting life though. I guess the closest I came to research was when I applied to work at the state mental institution in Austin, TX. I wanted to work the night shift like Ken Kesey did when he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I thought that might inspire me to write a book that great. ~ Arthur Bradford