Former Life Quotes

My palm connected with the final looking-glass. A wave of brittle fractures rippled outward from the place my sanguine hand had struck. It shattered. I watched the pieces of my former life
the reflection of this monster I'd become - fall about my feet in a hailstorm of blood, tears, and broken mirrors. My attrition was complete. And now dissension boiled in my veins. I would find my penance. Even if God could not forgive me, even if she could not forgive me ... maybe I could at least find the power to forgive myself. ~ S.G. Night

I felt in that moment as if it were all a dream - the training, my former life, the world I had left behind. None of that mattered anymore. Only this place mattered, only this moment, and not because the psychologist had hypnotized me. In the grip of that powerful emotion, I stared out toward the coast, through the jagged narrow spaces between the trees. There, a greater darkness gathered, the confluence of the night, the clouds, and the sea. Somewhere beyond, another border. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

What is it when your former life becomes your dreams? The things you took for granted are now in that mystical realm where you can only see them with your eyes closed, ephemeral and distant. ~ Nicole Adelle Flamer

I didn't falter and together we matched, step for step. Each swing of the sword was blocked, each step countered. No blade ever made contact with flash. We twirled around; my concentration far too focussed to feel dizzy. All I could see was Macrucio's wicked smirk, one that reminded me far more of my past than even Nathaniel did. I wasn't fighting Macrucio now; it was my former life I had to eradicate. ~ Freedom Matthews

Zombies have no memories of their former life. You wont see the undead trying to wash windows or do your taxes. All they know how to do is swarm and feed. ~ Max Brooks

Learning was so dangerous: for how could one tell in advance, while still ignorant, whether a thing could ever be unlearned or forgotten, or if, once known and named, it would invalidate by its significance the whole of one's former life, all of those years wiped out, convicted at one blow, retrospectively darkened by one sudden light? ~ Margaret Drabble

He Kept recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life. ~ Milan Kundera

The counsels of the Divine Mind had some glimpse of truth when they said that men are born in order to suffer the penalty for sins committed in a former life. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Sometimes a voice - have you heard this? -
wants not to be voice any longer, wants something
whispering between the words, some
rumour of its former life. Sometimes, even
in the midst of making sense or conversation, it will
hearken back to breath, or even farther,
to the wind, and recognize itself
as troubled air, a flight path still
looking for its bird. ~ Don Mckay

Not in order to justify, but simply in order to explain my lack of consistency, I say: Look at my present life and then at my former life, and you will see that I do attempt to carry them out. It is true that I have not fulfilled one thousandth part of them [Christian precepts], and I am ashamed of this, but I have failed to fulfill them not because I did not wish to, but because I was unable to. Teach me how to escape from the net of temptations that surrounds me, help me and I will fulfill them; even without help I wish and hope to fulfill them.

Attack me, I do this myself, but attack me rather than the path I follow and which I point out to anyone who asks me where I think it lies. If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side! If it is not the right way, then show me another way; but if I stagger and lose the way, you must help me, you must keep me on the true path, just as I am ready to support you. Do not mislead me, do not be glad that I have got lost, do not shout out joyfully: "Look at him! He said he was going home, but there he is crawling into a bog!" No, do not gloat, but give me your help and support. ~ Leo Tolstoy

I'm 36 and if I met a woman of my own age and married her, I'd also be marrying her former life, her past. It might be OK for some people - I don't want to judge it or anything - but it's not for me. It would destroy my creativity. ~ Henry Rollins

So I punished myself instead. I gave myself the worst punishment I could think of: I decided to live and I decided to stop drinking." "And afterward?" "I got to my feet again and started working. Worked longer days than all the others. Trained. Went on long walks. Read books. Some on law. Stopped meeting bad friends. Good ones too, by the way. The ones I had left after all the boozing. I don't know why in fact, it was like a big cleanup. Everything in my old life had to go, good as well as bad. One day I sat down and rang round all those I thought I had known in my former life and said: 'Hi, we can't meet anymore. It was nice knowing ~ Jo Nesbo

Then between Sixth Street and Seventh Street, my mood was vastly improved when I passed a good-looking dog, a dark brown Lab. We locked eyes for a moment - two lovers from a former life reunited - and I felt quite happy. ~ Jonathan Ames

Oy, your karma really sucks, bubbee. You musta been Hitler in a former life or something. ~ Gemma Halliday

Something was wrong. She'd failed, Phoebe thought, but at what? Imagining herself in Europe, she'd always pictured someone else, physically even, a tall blonde with an answer for everything - as if, in the course of this journey, she would not only shed her former life but cease to exist as herself. Yes, she thought, to leave Phoebe O'Connor behind and be reborn as someone beautiful, mysterious. But the opposite had happened; her own narrow boundaries had hemmed her in, keeping everything real at a distance. ~ Jennifer Egan

Even when change is elective, it will disorient you. You may go through anxiety. You will miss aspects of your former life. It doesn't matter. The trick is to know in advance of making any big change that you're going to be thrown off your feet by it. So you prepare for this inevitable disorientation and steady yourself to get through it. Then you take the challenge, make the change, and achieve your dream. ~ Harvey MacKay

I have accomplished nothing in the last four and a half years," he lamented - a statement that is only accurate when measured against the yardstick of his former life. ~ Debra Meyerson

Motherhood is exactly the kind of "special circumstance" that lends itself to memoir. It is a time of transition and sometimes a period of intense identity struggle: Who am I if I spend all day shirtless, trying to nurse a colicky baby? What happened to my former life, my former self? How do I balance my own needs with those of my family? I am drawn to all kinds of motherhood memoirs because I am interested in the different ways that women process the challenges and joys of motherhood, and how they write about life in general through their mother eyes. ~ Kate Hopper

The child of the lower or lower middle class is urged in both overt and subtle ways to surpass his background, his well-meaning parents and friends never anticipating that if their dream of upward mobility is realized, the child may adopt the prejudices of the class to which he's lifted and, with a touch of neurotic distress, may permanently scorn his former life and also, to a certain extent, himself, since the class he's invaded is unlikely to accept him fully. ~ John Gardner

We all return. It is this certainty that gives meaning to life and it does not make the slightest difference whether or not in a later incarnation we remember the former life. What counts is not the individual and his comfort, but the great aspiration to the perfect and the pure which goes on in each incarnation. ~ Gustav Mahler

The FA would remove him tomorrow if they had a spine, but clearly, in former lives, were cruel to jellyfish which is why they have returned as them now. ~ Martin Samuel

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

Michael Vick may enjoy watching dogs fight. Someone else may find that repulsive but see nothing wrong with eating an animal who has had a life as full of pain and suffering as the lives of the fighting dogs. It's strange that we regard the latter as morally different from, and superior to, the former. ~ Gary L. Francione

The song she heard from the meadow was the same tune as the bird's call.She looked up in the trees.For a moment she thought she'd lost the bird, and she nearly cried out for him, but he fluttered down,landed right at her feet, and grew into a man."
"Oh." Meg sighed.She'd always liked that part.
"He whistled the tune once more, then the fey man said, 'My lady,will you dance?"
"'I will.' She crossed the bridge to the meadow,and danced with the whistler."
"Tell us they married," Meg said.
"The story doesn't go like that," Poppy reminded.
"It should." Meg stroked Tom's blood-clotted hair.
I fumbled with the charcoal in my blackened fingers. As the story went, the girl danced through the seasons, but when she wandered home at last and reached her cottage door, she was a shriveled-up old women, for a hundred years had passed while she danced with the whistler,and everyone she'd known in her former life had died.
Meg knew how it went.But when our eyes locked, I saw tonight she couldn't bear it. I found another bit of charcoal. "That very spring when the meadow was in bloom,the whistler, who had fey power to transform into a bird and sing any girl he wished to into the wood, chose the one girl who'd followed him so bravely and so far to be his wife. And she lived with him and the fey folk deep in Dragonswood in DunGarrow Castle, a place that blends into the mountainside and cannot be seen with human eyes unless the fairies will it so."
I d ~ Janet Lee Carey

But now Kyle was dead center on the hardwood dancefloor, which had probably been an aerobics room in its former life, lost in herself and her dancing. She was fantastic. Even soused up on Hairy Buffalo, she moved like silk blowing in the wind - smooth and beguiling. ~ Debra Anastasia

In his former life though, as the cool guy, he would never have picked up a book, especially one with poems in it. ~ Shaun Meeks

Do you not feel that sometimes in life one's friendships begin by antipathy - sometimes by indifference - and sometimes by that sudden magnetism of sympathy as if in some former life we had been very near and dear, and were only picking up the threads again, and to such two souls there is no feeling that they are strangers. ~ Elinor Glyn

But you know, my former life as a bibliophile, it possibly kept me from murdering somebody, myself included. it kept me from being an industrialist. it allowed me to endure some women that most men would never be able to live with. it gave me space, a pause. it helped me to write this. ~ Charles Bukowski

This is how I found the strength not to get on with my former life. This is how I found the courage not to pick up the same old pieces. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Life is very difficult. It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feelings; but then such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us,
the ties that have made others dependent on us,
and would cut them in two. ~ George Eliot

Oh my god," I shrieked. "Who did I screw over in a former life that those douches get to go to cool cities and I have to go home to an island called Hung?" "Those douches do have hairy asses and not just on a full moon. You're the only female agent I have that looks like a model so you're going to Georgia. Period." "Fine. I'll quit. I'll open a bakery." Angela smiled and an icky feeling skittered down my spine. "Excellent, I'll let you tell the Council that all the money they invested in your training is going to be flushed down the toilet ~ Robyn Peterman

Of course, you'll defend Jay," says Rango, He was a part of your former life, of your former values. I will never be able to alter that. I want you to think as I do."
"But Rango, you couldn't respect someone who surrendered an opinion merely to please you . It would be hypocrisy. ~ Anais Nin

As former physicist Al Slawsky put it in the early 1990s, "It was a bad year for value investing. In my former life, there was never a 'bad year' for gravity. ~ Richard R. Lindsey

The book was sandwiched firmly between Analytic Keys to the Genera and Species of North American Mosses, and the Complete English-Russian Dictionary by A. Alexandrow, which had me actually speculating on just what terrible crimes I might have committed against love and peace in a former life to have earned myself this one. ~ Melissa Jensen

It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feeling; but then, such feelings continually come across the ties that our former life has made for us -- the ties that have made others dependent on us -- and would cut them in two. If life were quite easy and simple, as it might have been in paradise, and we could always see that one being first towards whom -- I mean, if life did not make duties for us before love comes, love would be a sign that two people ought to belong to each other. But I see -- I feel it is not so now; there are things we must renounce in life; some of us must resign love. Many thing are difficult and dark to me, but I see one thing quite clearly: that I must not, cannot, seek my own happiness by sacrificing others. Love is natural, but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too. And they would live in me still and punish me if I did not obey them. I should be haunted by the suffering I had caused. Our love would be poisoned. ~ George Eliot

In my spare time I like to stare at shit. I mean, not literally. I like to stare at the TV, or the Internet, or a book, or cat videos. There's a lot of sitting very still and not moving involved. I suspect in a former life I was probably a statue because I am profoundly good at it. ~ Jenny Lawson

It is to live twice when we can enjoy the recollections of our former life. ~ Martial

This never would have happened in India. In India they understood that life unfolded the way it unfolded, whether you liked it or not: the cow in the road, the swerve that saves or kills you. One life ended, a new one began, maybe it was better than the last one, maybe it wasn't. The Indians (and the Thais, and the Sri Lankans) accepted this the way they accepted monsoons or the heat, with a resignation that was like simple good sense. Damned Americans. Americans, unschooled in the burning dung heaps and the sudden swerves, Americans couldn't help but cling tightly to the life they were living like clutching a spindly branch that was sure to break … and when things didn't go quite as expected, Americans lost their shit. Himself included. ~ Sharon Guskin

Life's not about sitting at home in front of the TV waiting for your life to begin. Get out there and take some chances. ~ Queen Latifah

Whenever you've got a choice, do good, kiddo. It isn't always fun or easy, but in the long run it makes your life better. ~ Jim Butcher

Tell Allen I plead guilty to vampirism and other crimes against life. But I love him and nothing else cancels love.
~ William S. Burroughs

People who are willing to stick to a strong pro-life position aren't going to be pushed off a strong anti-tax position. For people who like to think in ideologically cohesive ways, it makes no sense, but that's the way it is. ~ Grover Norquist

Religion is as healthy and normal as life itself. ~ Charles Fletcher Dole

If you can help anyone in any way, that is what we are here for. The pinnacle of my life has really been two lives - golf and service to my fellow man. ~ Billy Casper

The look on his face became like the tiny snapshot of a beloved that soldiers take with them to the battlefield, not only to remember there are good things in life and that happiness awaits them, but to remind themselves that this face might never forgive them for coming back in a body bag. ~ Andre Aciman

A sense of humor has been linked with longevity. It is a possibility that the mental attitude reflected in a lively sense of humor is an important factor predisposing some people toward long life. ~ Raymond Moody

A life without Jesus Christ is a life without purpose. ~ Evans Biya

The whites who administered Native American subjugation claimed to be recruiting the Indians to join them in a truer, more coherent worldview - but whether it was about spirituality and the afterlife, the role of women, the nature of glaciers, the age of the world, or the theory of evolution, these white Victorians were in a world topsy-turvy with change, uncertainty and controversy. Deference was paid to Christianity and honest agricultural toil, but more than few questioned the former, and most, as the gold rushes, confidence men, and lionized millionaires proved, would gladly escape the latter. So the attempt to make Indians into Christian agriculturists was akin to those contemporary efforts whereby charities send cast-off clothing to impoverished regions: the Indians were being handed a system that was worn out ... ~ Rebecca Solnit

I have lived through many wars and have lost everything many times Yet, life is beautiful, and I have so much to learn and enjoy. I have no space nor time for pessimism and hate. ~ Alice Herz-Sommer

All my life I have tried to pluck a thistle and plant a flower wherever the flower would grow in thought and mind. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Lovesick, bitter and hardened heart. Aching, waiting for life to start ~ Bil Keane

When you know what God says, what He means, and how to put His truths into practice, you will be equipped for every circumstance of life. ~ Kay Arthur

At school, I decided I wanted to be a director and then I went out and spent the rest of my adult life trying to be a director. It was really clear to me. So in that sense I was very lucky. ~ Stephen Daldry

Always recognize the foces that will shape my life. I let them do their work. Sometimes they tear through my life like a hurricane. Sometimes they simply shift the ground under me, so that I stand on different earth, and something or someone has been swallowed up. I steady myself, in the earthquate. I lie down, and let the hurricane pass over me. I never fight. Afterwards I look around me, and I say, 'Ah, so this at least is left for me. And that dear person has also survived.' I quietly inscribe on the stone tablet of my heart the name which has gone forever. Th inscription is a thing of agony. Then I start on my way again. ~ Josephine Hart

Most of all I hated Evie, all the more 'cause I wanted her so goddamned bad. I took another draw from my bottle to numb the pain - but not in my arm.

Just to make the night weirder, when Evie had been screaming at me, I'd seen things that couldn't be right. Like something had been . . . glowing on her face.

I shook away the thought, taking another slug.

"Why were you so mean to her, Jack? You've never been unkind to a fille a day in your life."

When I'd first seen Evie and looked into her eyes, for a split second everything in me had gone from full-on chaos to something like . . . peace. Christ, that feeling was addictive. So how was I going to live without it? "She's got me twisted up inside. ~ Kresley Cole

Ask yourself a simple question. Do you want to keep playing, offence and defense included, for the rest of your life? Is this what you are marrying for? If answer is no, then stay away from Sporting Demons. If somehow the answer is yes or you, yourself, are a sporting demon then go ahead ... But don't come complaining if the game goes too far or too crappier to handle. ~ Gracia Hunter

The food in the hostel mess is worst of a kind. The grief in my words reach easily to those who have "been there and done that" Chapatti in the meal is either so uncooked or overly cooked and you can only expect dal in the ocean of water when you are ready to swim. ~ Parul Wadhwa

You're not a broken soul. You're a whole soul who's just feeling a little lost as you try a new path up the mountain. ~ Brittany Burgunder

I would never exchange my life with anybody else's. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger

The tallest slugger touched my forehead, and I ignited like a sparkler on the Fourth of July. Shards of dazzling light rippled under my skin. I was the constellation Grus. The Trifid Nebula. I was the Big Bang, expanding endlessly through time and space forever.
"I thought I was dying. That I was going to expire on a cold slab, trapped inside an UFO, my body filled with every light that had ever existed. I couldn't imagine a better way to die. ~ Shaun David Hutchinson

You can change your health, you can change your relationships, you can change your income, you can change anything. ~ Bob Proctor

University was a chance to people-watch and to mix with people from all various walks of life, which as an actor is a great experience because you get to observe people. ~ Tom Riley

I am truly not an axiologist, but I am concerned about the value of life in all of its forms and shapes. ~ Debasish Mridha

It's so weird how a person can be a normal part of your everyday life, and then just disappear. And when they do, you realize that some of those everyday things go with them. Like the smell of food cooking. ~ Jason Reynolds

I wanted to pull away, remind him that I was a big girl, a highly trained operative, a spy - that I'd been training for this mission my entire life, and I wasn't going to be left on the sidelines. But in the dim space with Zach pressed tightly against me, only one thought came to mind. I kissed him - longer and deeper than I ever had before. The school was not watching us this time. There was nothing playful in the tone. We were just two people kissing as if for the first time, as if it might be the last.
And then I broke away. "So," I asked, as if I got kissed like that all the time (which, believe me, I don't), "where is it you're taking me again?"
"The tombs. ~ Ally Carter

Most restaurants fail. The sad ones are stillborn. The mad ones flourish within the bustle and excitement of fame, notoriety, the thrill of the new. But they rarely sustain the glow. They are balloons kept aloft by a restless crowd. Only the strange, the freaks of restaurant perfection, can sustain life beyond a few years. ~ Sam Sifton

What is a business? It's simply an idea that makes someone else's life better ~ Richard Branson

They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings steal a little and they throw you in jail. Steal a lot and then they make you king. ~ Bob Dylan