Double Life Quotes

I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not. ~ Sylvia Plath

Or take this girl, for example. At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year-old girl came up to me and said that she'd been to see [The Double Life of] Véronique. She'd gone once, twice, three times and only wanted to say one thing really - that she realized that there is such a thing as a soul. She hadn't known before, but now she knew that the soul does exist. There's something very beautiful in that. It was worth making Véronique for that girl. It was worth working for a year, sacrificing all that money, energy, time, patience, torturing yourself, killing yourself, taking thousands of decisions, so that one young girl in Paris should realize that there is such a thing as a soul. It's worth it. ~ Krzysztof Kieslowski

More than most people, the alcoholic leads a double life. He is very much the actor ~ Bill W.

Who had they been, all these mothers and sisters and wives? What were they now? Moons, blank and faceless, gleaming with borrowed light, each spinning loyally around a bigger sphere.
'Invisible,' said Faith under her breath. Women and girls were so often unseen, forgotten, afterthoughts. Faith herself had used it to good effect, hiding in plain sight and living a double life. But she had been blinded by exactly the same invisibility-of-the-mind, and was only just realizing it. ~ Frances Hardinge

15 "probable illnesses" that are afflicting the curial body, including those of feeling "indispensable;" of excessive work habits and not enough time to rest and recharge before the Lord; of a spiritual hardening of hearts; of over-planning and not leaving room for the Holy Spirit to function; of a lack of collaboration; of living autonomously while forgetting salvation history; of vanity; of living a double life; of the "terrorism of gossip"; of egotistic opportunism; of indifference; of pessimism; of materialism; of cliquishness; and of the allures of power. ~ Anonymous

Valerie, I love you so much. I wanted you to have a normal
childhood - so I lived a double life. Hiding in plain
sight. Living modestly." He began to pace the room, the
words tumbling out of him. "I tried to keep it up, but I've
been so disrespected. Even by my own wife. I couldn't do it
anymore. I've settled for far less than I deserved, and I just
couldn't do it anymore. I decided it was time to leave for
the city....For richer hunting grounds." Cesaire was snarling
now, a scary, powerful force. Valerie felt herself being
drawn to it....
She took a deep, steadying breath. It was not just fear
that she felt. What she felt was so much more complex
than that, something she couldn't understand. "Then why
didn't you just go?"
"Because I loved you girls, and I wanted you to come
with me. To share the wealth."
"But you had to wait until the blood moon. ~ Sarah Blakley-Cartwright

Speech gave man a unique power to lead a double life, he could say one thing and do another. ~ James Harvey Robinson

One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour's household, and, underneath, another – secret and passionate and intense – which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day . . . ~ Willa Cather

After 50 years together as a couple:
"Look how fast the leaves are falling now," Alan says. "The trees will be bare in a couple of days. Do you realize that we have watched the leaves fall together for more than fifty autumns?"
I stand quietly, looking at Alan, letting his words sink in. I am suddenly so moved. ~ Norman Sunshine

The materialistic idealism that governs American life, that on the one hand makes a chariot of every grocery wagon, and on the other a mere hitching post of every star, lets every man lead a very enticing double life. ~ Louis Kronenberger

I used to live on a reserve, but I went back and forth between my reserve and Ottawa where my father lived, so I kind of had a double life growing up. ~ Kaniehtiio Horn

There are some qualities, some incorporate things, that have a double life, which thus is made. A type os twin entity which springs from matter and light, envinced in solid and shade. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice. ~ Martin Amis

When I describe for my far-away friends the Northwest's subtle shades of weather - from gloaming skies of 'high-gray' to 'low-gray' with violet streaks like the water's delicate aura - they wonder if my brain and body have, indeed, become water-logged. Yet still, I find myself praising the solace and privacy of fine, silver drizzle, the comforting cloaks of salt, mold, moss, and fog, the secretive shelter of cedar and clouds.

Whether it's in the Florida Keys, along the rocky Maine coast, within the Gulf of Mexico's warm curves, on the brave Outer Banks; or, for those who nestle near inland seas, such as the brine-steeped Great Salk Lake or the Midwest's Great Lakes - water is alive and in relationship with those of us who are blessed with such a world-shaping, yet abiding, intimate ally.

Every day I am moved by the double life of water - her power and her humility. But most of all, I am grateful for the partnership of this great body of inland sea. Living by water, I am never alone. Just as water has sculpted soil and canyon, it also molds my own living space, and every story I tell.

…Living by water restores my sense of balance and natural rhythm - the ebb and flow of high tides and low tides, so like the rise and fall of everyday life. Wind, water, waves are not simply a backdrop to my life, they are steady companions. And that is the grace, the gift of inviting nature to live inside my home. Like a Chambered Nautilus I spin out my ~ Brenda Peterson

If someone wants to lead a double life, they will find a way to do it. And they can promise you things until your nerves unfold and you can finally put up your feet. But it can all be a lie. There are no guarantees, even when people mean what they say at the time. People change their minds. People die. And the hurt is as real as a baseball bat. ~ Stephanie Klein

Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens. ~ Dana Gioia

Sometimes I'd knock on the door of somebody I was going to school with, so it was like living a double life. ~ Michelle Rodriguez

I guess I lead a double life, and I must admit I'm happy with both. ~ Yvonne De Carlo

Anyone who still feels today that he has to lead a double life because he's gay is driven by a fear that I think is unfounded. ~ Jens Spahn

What could you do if you valued yourself more?

Whatever you think your worth in life and business, double it. Then double it again. ~ Richie Norton

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy. ~ Oscar Wilde

All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life. ~ Anne Carson

As an artist in the 1960s, Norman Sunshine was able to maintain a moderately out lifestyle. But when the first exhibition of his paintings in New York brought on a profile in The New York Times in 1968, he was photographed in the apartment that he admitted sharing with Shayne. At both his advertising agency and Shayne's television production company, the article was met with absolute silence. ~ Alan Shayne

Upon their meeting in New York in 1958: "We didn't want to live together. We didn't have any examples of what a good love relationship between two men could be. And there was always the problem of hiding so no one would know we were gay. There was no question that if I were known to be gay, living with another man, it would make it more difficult for me to get work as an actor." - Alan Shayne, co-author, Double Life ~ Alan Shayne

A single girl must lead a double life don't you think? ~ Christina Stead

I know it's not strictly sex that accounts for my straying the motive usually attributed to men. I think it's just too tempting to have two lives rather than one. Some people think that too much travel begets infidelity: Separation and opportunity test the bonds of love. I think it's more likely that people who hate to make choices to settle on one thing or another are attracted to travel. Travel doesn't beget a double life. The appeal of the double life begets travel. ~ Elisabeth Eaves

The negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know. Besides, I seemed to hold two lives - the life of thought, and that of reality. ~ Charlotte Bronte

Oh Mickey, it was wonderful, it was fun - the whole kitten and kaboozle. It was like living. And to be denied that whole part would be a great loss. You gave it to me. You gave me a double life. I couldn't have endured with just one."
I'm proud of you and your double life."
All I regret", she said, crying again, crying with him, the two of them in tears..."is that we couldn't sleep together too many nights. To commingle with you. Commingle?"
Why not."
I wish tonight you could spend the night."
I do, too. But I'll be here tomorrow night."
I meant it up at the Grotto. I didn't want to fuck any more men even without the cancer. I wouldn't do that even if I was alive."
You are alive. It is here and now. It's tonight. You're alive."
I wouldn't do it. You're the one I always loved fucking. But I don't regret that I have fucked many. It would have been a great loss to have had otherwise. Some of them, they were sort of wasted times. You must have that, too. Haven't you? With women you didn't enjoy?"
Yes."
Yes, I had experiences where the men would just want to fuck you whether they cared about you or not. That was always harder for me. I give my heart, I give my self, in my fucking."
You do indeed."

And then, after just a little drifting, she fell asleep and so he went home - "I'm leaving now" - and within two hours she threw a clot and was dead.
So those were her last words, in English anyway. I give my heart, I ~ Philip Roth

This was the cream of marriage, this nightly turning out of the day's pocketful of memories, this deft habitual sharing of two pairs of eyes, two pairs of ears. It gave you, in a sense, almost a double life: though never, on the other hand, quite a single one. ~ Jan Struther

My parents led this double life. They were in the underground movement to bring down the Nazis. My father was hanged for being a traitor. ~ Veruschka Von Lehndorff

Of everything, for better or worse. A cheater remains a cheater in the same way that an optimist remains an optimist. An optimist is a person who says, after being run over by a drunk driver and having both legs mangled and mortgaging the house to pay the hospital bills: "I was lucky. I could have been killed." To an optimist that kind of statement makes sense. To a cheater it makes sense to be living a double life and talking out of both sides of your mouth at the same time. ~ A.S.A Harrison

As he was speaking, he kept reminding himself that he was going to a rendezvous and that not a living soul knew about it, or, probably, ever would. He led a double life--one in public, in the sight of all whom it concerned, full of conventional truth and conventional deception, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances, and another which flowed in secret. And, owing to some strange, possibly quite accidental chain of circumstances, everything that was important, interesting, essential, everything about which he was sincere and never deceived himself, everything that composed the kernel of his life, went on in secret, while everything that was false in him, everything that composed the husk in which he hid himself and the truth which was in him--his work at the bank, discussions at the club, his 'lower race,' his attendance at anniversary celebrations with his wife--was on the surface. He began to judge others by himself, no longer believing what he saw, and always assuming that the real, the only interesting life of every individual goes on as under cover of night, secretly. Every individual existence revolves around mystery, and perhaps that is the chief reason that all cultivated individuals insisted so strongly on the respect due to personal secrets. ~ Anton Chekhov

The short answer to 'Why do you write' is - I suppose I write for some of the same reasons I read: to live a double life; to go places I haven't been; to examine life on earth; to come to know people in ways, and at depths, that are otherwise impossible; to be surprised. ~ Margaret Atwood

I live an artistic double life: one of classical realism and the other of aesthetic exploration. ~ Alton Tobey

I hear it said of somebody that he is leading a double life. I think to myself: Just two? ~ Leon Wieseltier

I have to smile when newspapers--so predictable in their attempt to explain the behaviour of those transgressing social norms or the workings of the deviant mind--speak of the 'double life' led by this furtive criminal or that. In fact the reverse is true. It is normal people who have a 'double life'. On the outside is your everyday life of going out to work and going on holiday. Then there is the life you wish you had--the life that keeps you awake at night with hope, ambition, plans, frustration, resentment, envy, regret. This is a more seething life of wants, driven by thoughts of possibility and potential. It is the life you can never have. Always changing, it is always out of reach. Would you like more money? Here, have more! An attractive sexual partner? No problem. Higher status? More intelligence? Whiter teeth? You are obsessed with what is just out of reach. It is the itch you cannot scratch. Tortured by the principle that the more you can't have something the more you desire it, you are never happy. ~ Phil Hogan

Stop living a double life, God isn't looking for a part- time christian but he's looking for a full-time Christian. ~ Werley Nortreus

In one way or another, every parent is curious what their children ... what are they doing when we don't see? ... What double lives are they leading? Is there something else? ~ Herman Koch

Sylvia rarely flattered the men in her life- she envied them. She was far more likely to compete with a man than a woman. In her journal she describes this jealousy of which she is painfully aware; "It is an envy born of the desire to be active and doing, not passive and listening." She craved the "double life" of men, who could enjoy career, sex, and family. "I can pretend to forget my envy," she writes, "no matter, it is there, insidious, malignant, latent. ~ Elizabeth Winder

I would have met Jesus sooner if not for Christians who led double lives. ~ Keith Green

A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

It's nice not to have to live a double life. ~ Lance Bass

We also have to give up the notion of a divine savior, which has nothing to do with what religion we belong to, but refers to the idea of someone or something who will save us without our having to go through any pain. In fact, giving up that kind of false hope is the first step. We have to be with ourselves. We have to be real people. There is no way of beating around the bush, hoping for the best. If you are really interested in working with yourself, you can't lead that kind of double life, adopting ideas, techniques, and concepts of all kinds, simply in order to get away from yourself. ~ Chogyam Trungpa

We make our lives pleasurable, and therefore bearable, by picturing them as they might be; it is less obvious, though, what these compelling fantasy lives - lives of, as it were, a more complete satisfaction - are a self-cure for. Our solutions tell us what our problems are; our fantasy lives are not - or not necessarily - alternatives to, or refuges from, those real lives but an essential part of them. As some critics of psychoanalysis rightly point out, a lot depends on whether our daydreams - our personal preoccupations - turn into political action (and, indeed, on whether our preferred worlds are shared worlds, and on what kind of sharing goes on in them). There is nothing more obscure than the relationship between the lived and the unloved life. (Each member of a couple, for example, is always having a relationship, wittingly or unwittingly, with their partner's unloved lives; their initial and initiating relationship is between what they assume are their potential selves.) So we may need to think of ourselves as always living a double life, the one that we wish for and the one that we practice; the one that never happens and the one that keeps happening. ~ Adam Phillips

Surely,' she said, much quieter, more reasonable, 'surely you've been with other women?'
His glance at her was dry. 'What do you think?'
She looked away at random. 'I think that it appears we have a double standard, here. Men can have sex, women can't. Who, then, do the men have sex with? ~ Amanda Carpenter

Well, I live a double life. Tonight, I'll escort you to dinner. Then I have to rush home and finish my calculus homework.'
'You're not joking, are you?'
'I never joke about calculus homework. ~ Rick Riordan

He grasped at a prescient feeling, akin to the dialectic of dreams, that this reunion could never come to pass, yet somehow
it most definitely would. ~ Kenzaburo Oe

You need to make time for your family no matter what happens in your life ~ Matthew Quick

They teach you how to handle life in England, but they don't teach you a thing about death. There's no book telling you what to do when your mum or dad dies. ~ Ozzy Osbourne

The power to accomplish the life of your dreams rests with none other than you. Whatever holds you back is also within you. ~ Pooja Ruprell

The best times in my life were out in the bush with Steve. ~ Terri Irwin

Your mother said that Fraser sent her back to me, knowing that I would protect her
and you ... And like him, perhaps I send you back, knowing
as he knew of me
that he will protect you with his life. I love you forever, Brianna. I know whose child you truly are. With all my love, Dad. ~ Diana Gabaldon

When you hear the Word of God at Sunday Mass, expect healing, expect that you will experience God's love, expect that God will move in your life to meet all your needs. ~ Robert Degrandis

I have learned yet again (this has been going on all my life) what folly it is to take any thing for granted without examining it skeptically. ~ Jane Jacobs

I have a lot of friends who are around. I'm having a wonderful time in my life now with my platonic relationships with men and women, because when that sexual tension is off the requirement of the interplay, then you get to who the people really are, and to yourself. ~ Shirley Maclaine

JANE: What to do when it is that time in your girl child's life:

1. Sit down calmly and explain sex to her?

2. Buy her a book, video, or CD that gives her the details?

3. Buy her condoms and put her on the pill?

Or do as many mothers before you did - just stick your head in the sand and hope she joins a convent.

Of course these days your child may know more about sex than you did at her age, what with in-school health lessons, and out-of-school R-rated movies easily accessed on the TV, not to mention the Starr Report!

In the days of fairy tales, sex was dangerous because so many women died in childbirth. Today sex is again dangerous because of diseases like AIDS. So what do we say? ~ Jane Yolen

Life is truly a matter of choices, reactions, and actions...each and every choice is governed by our reactions which in turn affect our actions and consequently the future turn of events ~ Kapil Kumar Bhaskar

It wasn't like a date, she reasoned. Not like some weird double date with her and the brother of the dead guy and her best friend and her best friend's ex-husband who didn't really count. It was just eating. ~ Nora Roberts

All our troubles come from not being able to be alone. ~ Blaise Pascal

I have a theory in life that there is no learning. There is no learning curve. Everything is tabula rasa. Everybody has to discover things for themselves. ~ Seymour Hersh

Mean that you can't do anything else but pray. But it does mean that you are always ready and willing to go before God with any concern or praise. Nothing is too small or too big for prayer. Prayer is simply opening your heart and connecting with God. It's taking His promises and applying them to your life. Prayer processes the plan of God. You should bathe your life in prayer. Pray for wisdom, peace, and patience. Pray for your relationships, your job, and your children. Pray for your country and leaders. Pray with others, knowing that when two or more are gathered in His name, He is there. ~ Joel Osteen

Ask me to cut off my right arm for you, and I'll do it. Ask me to lay down my life for you, and I'll do it. But Please don't ask me to give you up now that I've found you again. Don't ask that, Amy ~ Catherine Anderson

Coping with the demands of everyday life would be exceedingly trying if one could arrive at solutions to problems only by actually performing possible options and suffering the consequences. ~ Albert Bandura

Cause when I hear your name I can not stop cheesing
I love you so much that my heart stops beating when you're leaving
And I'm grieving and my heart starts bleeding
Life without you has no goddamn meaning ~ Various

Carefully analyze the old stories that you choose to perpetually tell, for these are really life-long meditations. ~ Bryant McGill

As long as he had life, who deserved it so little, he would use it, wield it, and do whatever he could in its name, even if it was not, was never, enough ~ Laini Taylor

There are some things in life you can alter – your weight, your appearance, even your name – but there are others that wishing and trying and working hard can never make any difference to. Those things are the ones that shape us. Not the things we can change but the ones we can't. ~ C.J. Tudor

The more you work with your dreams and your unconscious, and honor it, the more you understand it and it understands you. When you develop a relationship with your psyche this way, you begin to carry that energy into life and your relationships. ~ Marion Woodman

Our desire is the warmth in our life, it's not a blanket. ~ Greg Plitt

Becoming mature means learning to accept what you cannot change, facing unresolved sorrows and learning to love life as it really happens, not as you would have it happen. ~ Barbara Sher

There's two kinds of folk in the world, just like there's two kinds of life in a seed. Something sends one kind up to hunt its food in the light and air, and sends the other kind down into the earth to make the roots. ~ Pearl S. Buck

For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone. ~ Sam Levenson

I'm not a hugely social person. Obviously there's a big part of the job that requires that as actors, but it's not the most comfortable for me. I'm a homebody. I don't go out. My life is work and family. There's not a lot in between. That's how I like it. ~ Deborah Mailman

If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life
that life that must go on, come what may. You are all like dogs that lick everything they smell. You with your promise of a humdrum happiness
provided a person doesn't ask much of life. I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now! I want it total, complete: otherwise I reject it! I will not be moderate. I will not be satisfied with the bit of cake you offer me if I promise to be a good little girl. I want to be sure of everything this very day; sure that everything will be as beautiful as when I was a little girl. If not, I want to die! ~ Jean Anouilh

Too many people are stuck on sickness benefits because of issues that could be addressed but instead are not, some have drug or alcohol problems, but refuse treatment. In other cases, people have problems with their weight that could be addressed, but instead a life on benefits rather than work becomes the choice. ~ David Cameron