False Lives Quotes

We're commuter wives. These are our commuter lives. We're capable of carrying alcoholic husbands from the kitchen to the bathroom in a fireman's grip. Between trains, we train to fight with enemies we haven't met yet, battling against punching bags, leaping like the world is made of stone walls and we're storming them.
There's another version of commuting of course, as in to commute a sentence.
This is our sentence, these suburbs, the train that does not stretch to meet them ~ Maria Dahvana Headley

Many people spend their whole lives somewhere they don't want to be out of fear that the alternative is worse. ~ Jo Nesbo

A thousand for his love expired each day, And those who saw his face, in blank dismay Would rave and grieve and mourn their lives away- To die for love of that bewitching sight Was worth a hundred lives without his light. None could survive his absence patiently, None could endure this king's proximity- How strange it was that man could neither brook The presence nor the absence of his look! ~ Farid Al-Din Attar

How can we assert and test hypotheses if there are no such things as assertions that can be evaluated as true or false? How can we design experiments if there is not such thing as design? How can we explain anything if we do not assert anything and if others cannot understand it? ~ Angus J.L. Menuge

People who claim to be Christians while their lives look no different from the rest of the world are clearly not Christians ~ David Platt

And what the white students had not expected to let themselves in for, when boarding the Freedom Train, was the realisation that the black situation in America was but one aspect of the fraudulent nature of American life. They had not expected to be forced to judge their parents, their elders, and their antecedents, so harshly, and they had not realised how cheaply, after all, the rulers of the republic held their white lives to be. Coming to the defence of the rejected and the destitute, they were confronted with the extent of their own alienation, and the unimaginable dimensions of their own poverty. They were privileged and secure only so long as they did, in effect, what they were told: but they had been raised to believe that they were free. ~ James Baldwin

On the one hand, people think they own kids; they feel that they have the right to tell the kids what to do. On the other hand, people envy kids. We'd like to be kids our whole lives. Kids get to do what they do. They live on their instincts. ~ David Duchovny

Have you observed that only death awakens our feelings? How we love the friends who have just departed - don't you find? How we admire those of our masters who have been silenced, their mouths full of dirt! Then our tributes come naturally, tributes that they may have waited all their lives to hear. But do you know why we are always fairer and more generous towards the dead? The reason is simple! We have no obligation where they're concerned! They leave us free, we can take our time, fit the tribute into the interval between cocktails and a nice mistress, in other words, lost moments. If they did oblige us to do anything, it would be to remember, and our memories are short. No, what we like in our friends is fresh death, painful death, our own feelings, in short, ourselves! ~ Albert Camus

Your success is not dependent upon a board of advisers, it's not dependent upon motivational speakers who've gone before you,they're living their lives, they're taking care of their family, they're doing what they have to do to be successful, nobody owes you anything, that was the biggest lesson for me. ~ Eric Thomas

People with disabilities not only need to be given lives, they need to be given lives worth living. (paraphrased, not a direct quote)) ~ Helen Keller

Undeniably, character does count for our citizens, out communities, and our Nation, and this week we celebrate the importance of character in our individual lives ... core ethical values of trustworthiness, fairness, responsibility, caring, respect, and citizenship form the foundation of our democracy, our economy, and our society ... Instilling sound character in our children is essential to maintaining the strength of our Nation into the 21st century. ~ William J. Clinton

Everyone deserves to be happy with or without you in their lives! ~ Sheila Tiller-Tooks

One heart fulfills all hearts.
All hearts lead to the same heart.
"Kingdom Hearts"
A place where the mighty hearts lives.
And where darkness is endlessly deep. ~ Shiro Amano

We should - we will - welcome people of faith into the political process ... It is essential that believers enter the arena. Your involvement in politics helps determine how well our democracy works. We have finally learned that government programs cannot solve our problems. Government can hand out money, but government cannot put hope in our hearts or a sense of purpose in our lives. ~ George W. Bush

Nothing is more hateful to me than photography coated with gimmicks, poses and false effects. Therefore let me speak the truth in all honesty about our age and the people of our age ~ August Sander

I think we all carry within us different versions of ourselves. Our true, greatest, most honest versions of ourselves can either be developed and nourished, or it can remain dead from neglect. Most people opt for the easiest version rather than the best.
But in the end which version lives, which version thrives and which version dies, depends on the choices we make and the people in our lives. ~ Yasmin Mogahed

And what is a friend? More than a father, more than a brother: a traveling companion, with him, you can conquer the impossible, even if you must lose it later. Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing. It is a friend that you communicate the awakening of a desire, the birth of a vision or a terror, the anguish of seeing the sun disappear or of finding that order and justice are no more. That's what you can talk about with a friend. Is the soul immortal, and if so why are we afraid to die? If God exists, how can we lay claim to freedom, since He is its beginning and its end? What is death, when you come down to it? The closing of a parenthesis, and nothing more? And what about life? In the mouth of a philosopher, these questions may have a false ring, but asked during adolescence or friendship, they have the power to change being: a look burns and ordinary gestures tend to transcend themselves. What is a friend? Someone who for the first time makes you aware of your loneliness and his, and helps you to escape so you in turn can help him. Thanks to him who you can hold your tongue without shame and talk freely without risk. That's it. ~ Elie Wiesel

We all spend our lives living beside the people we could have been. ~ Richard Zimler

You can change your tomorrow if you do something today. Few people understand how the way you live today impacts your tomorrow. Today is the only time we have within our grasp, yet many people let it slip through their fingers, recognizing neither its value nor potential. If we want to do something with our lives, then we must make today matter, because that's where tomorrow's success lies. ~ John C. Maxwell

There is a destiny which makes us brothers; none goes his way alone. All that we send into the lives of others comes back into our own. ~ Edwin Markham

caring about lives is not caring about your own life. it's all about giving your last breath for others to live. The caring man is like the last crab out of a bucket. letting others step on your back to get out, and letting you not step on others back and that is love. ~ Christian

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face. ~ W.B.Yeats

If we try to complicate our lives, developing clever plans and ambitions, we lose sight of the way in which small, insignificant things actually hold the key to what we seek. ~ Yi-Ping Ong

There are moments in our lives - eras in our lives - when self-care demands more. When you're actually suffering an enormous loss or reeling, the best thing you can do is step outside of the pressure cookers of your life. One of the things I did in my own life when I found myself at that kind of bottom moment is I said, "I have got to do something that's going to remind me of my strength. I've got to do something that's going to bring me back to clarity, simplicity, humility, and strength." And so I went and hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. Remember that the only thing that's important is your well-being, your sense of "okay-ness" in the world. So go and get that. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Most of the time when we tell our children how to live their lives, it's because we don't respect them. We feel sorry for them, and we try to do for them what they should do for themselves. ~ Miguel Ruiz

Quitting my day job and starting my life as a writer was a tremendous risk. It was a fool's leap, a shot in the dark. But anything of any value in our lives, whether that be a career, a work of art, a relationship, will always start with such a leap. And in order to be able to make it you have to put aside the fear of failing and the desire of succeeding. ( ... ) Because things that we do without lust of result are the purest actions that we shall ever take. ~ Alan Moore

The person who is to succeed will never let his mind dwell on past mistakes. He will forgive the past in his life and in the lives of other people. If he makes a mistake he will at once forgive it. ~ Ernest Holmes

We get very few of he true images in our heads of the kind I am talking about, the kind which become more and more vivid for us as if the passage of the years did not obscure their reality but, year by year, drew off another veil to expose a meaning which we had only dimly surmised at first. Very probably the last veil will not be removed, for there are not enough years, but the brightness of the image increases and our conviction increases that the brightness is meaning, or the legend of meaning, and without the image our lives would be nothing except an old piece of film rolled on a spool and thrown into a desk drawer of unanswered letters. ~ Robert Penn Warren

The Rusanovs loved the People, their great People. They served the People and were ready to give their lives for the People. But as the years went by they found themselves less and less able to tolerate actual human beings, those obstinate creatures who were always resistant, refusing to do what they were told to and, besides, demanding something for themselves. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Why do most people think their own impoverished lives must be the norm of the universe? ~ Poul Anderson

The postmortem readjustment is one that many of us have had to make when our parents die. The parental door against which we have spent a lifetime pushing finally gives way, and we lurch forward, unprepared and disbelieving, into the rest of our lives. ~ Sally Mann

It is said that in those days one could hear seventy languages in the streets of Istanbul. The vast Ottoman Empire, shrunken and weakened though it now was, had made it normal and natural for Greeks to inhabit Egypt, Persians to settle in Arabia and Albanians to live with Slavs. Christians and Muslims of all sects, Alevis, Zoroastrians, Jews, worshippers of the Peacock Angel, subsisted side by side in the most improbable places and combinations. There were Muslim Greeks, Catholic Armenians, Arab Christians and Serbian Jews. Istanbul was the hub of this broken-felloed wheel, and there could be found epitomised the fantastical bedlam and babel, which although no one realised it at the time, was destined to be the model and precursor of all the world's great metropoles a hundred years hence, by which time Istanbul itself would, paradoxically, have lost its cosmopolitan brilliance entirely. It would be destined, perhaps, one day to find it again, if only the devilish false idols of nationalism, that specious patriotism of the morally stunted, might finally be toppled in the century to come. ~ Louis De Bernieres

Who lives to Nature, rarely can be poor ; who lives to fancy, never can be rich. ~ Edward Young

We are kept out of the Garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what we think to be the goods of our life. ~ Joseph Campbell

Living in the moment" all the time may not be practical if one lives for many years. Planning for the future confers benefits, especially financially. What may be good for a twenty-year plan might not be best for five years. It causes incredible tension . . . the uncertainty just becomes a part of your life. But it is tiring. I've thought, "I wish I could just get sick." I just didn't have the energy to keep living, waiting to get sick. It takes energy to be optimistic: I run out of steam. ~ Robert Klitzman

Most people spend their entire lives on a fantasy island called 'Someday I'll.' ~ Denis Waitley

The Iraq war was fought by one-half of one percent of us. And unless we were part of that small group or had a relative who was, we went about our lives as usual most of the time: no draft, no new taxes, no changes. Not so for the small group who fought the war and their families. ~ Bob Schieffer

I don't mean to bum you out but... we're all going to die. The thing is, very few of us actually believe it. We look at pictures of people who have died and marvel at the pathos. 'Ah, there's Jean all smiling. She didn't know she'd be dead in three months.' Well, maybe Jean knew and maybe she didn't. But what she didn't do was go around hoping to provide someone else with a satisfying sense of dramatic irony. Nobody lives like that and it's odd that we do it to the dead sometimes. ~ Robert Webb

The doctor said that every man will have cancer if he lives to be old enough. I don't know why I got it - I ain't old. ~ Ray Price

If you are taught how to love, your love is going to be false. Real love should be spontaneous. How can you be taught to love? If you are taught, then you will act accroding to those rules and the natural flow will not be there. ~ Osho

May our lives be born from the beauty of darkness, and shine with the possibility of light. ~ T. Thorn Coyle