How Life Works Quotes

I always see the absurdity in most situations. It's my experience of how life works. ~ Natasha Lyonne

It's so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it's taking forever to come. Then it happens and it's over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed. ~ Lauren Oliver

No matter how many times you fail, you must try again, and use your previously gained experience in order to win the next time. That's how life works. Main is to never stop believing in yourself and who you are. If you don't know who you are, you must go and find your true identity. You must fight to get what you want. No one will serve you some nectar in a golden glass. Life is all about battle and sweat. ~ Tamuna Tsertsvadze

Above, in discussing the perceptive notions of Jesus, remarkable concepts of Plato or the highly introspective lessons of Gautama and Lao Tzu, it took considerable discussion to explore the meaning and relate it to How Life Works. Islam presents no such deep pool of thought to pierce. ~ Thomas Daniel Nehrer

It's just accidental, just temporary. Until the next accident sends me somewhere new. That's how life works. ~ Gayle Forman

Here's how I feel: People take one another for granted. Like, I'd just hang out with Ingrid in all these random places
in her room or at school or just on a sidewalk somewhere. And the whole time we'd tell eachother things, just say our thoughts outloud. Maybe that would have been boring to some people, but it was never boring to us. I never realized what a big deal that was. How amazing it is to find someone who wants to hear about all the things that go on in your head. You just think that things will stay the way they are. You never look up, in a moment that feels like every other moment of your life, and think, "Soon this will be over." But I understand more now. About how life works. ~ Nina LaCour

This is how life works. Deciding whom to love is not an alien form of decision-making, a romantic interlude in the midst of normal life. Instead, decisions about whom to love are more intense versions of the sorts of decisions we make throughout the course of our existence, from what kind of gelato to order to what career to pursue. Living is an inherently emotional business. ~ David Brooks

Lisa, if I could take that hurt from you and carry it for the rest of my life, I would. I know that's not how life works, but know I'd do it in an instant. If I could take all that guilt and shame? There would be no hesitation, but because I can't, at least let me hold your hand while you walk through it. ~ Rachel Van Dyken

I shut down right there because we've been here before, after Dylan broke up with Harriett. Being Harriett's friend was weird for Dylan, and me trying to be Hudson's friend was weird for Arthur. But maybe this isn't how life works. Maybe it's all about people coming into your life for a little while and you take what they give you and use it on your next friendship or relationship. And if you're lucky, maybe some people pop back in after you thought they were gone for good. Like Hudson and Harriett. ~ Becky Albertalli

Indeed, of the major religions, Islam offers no discernible sliver of valid notion for How Life Works. ~ Thomas Daniel Nehrer

I think George R. R. Martin made fantasy grow up. He brought a level of reality into the storytelling where you realize the good guys don't always win and anyone can die, because that's how life works. Bringing that level of reality into the story I think forced the genre to mature in a lot of ways that it hadn't prior. ~ Peter V. Brett

The concept of a Miracle, that is, an event that takes place somehow beyond the scope of functional Reality, is absurd. . . There cannot be a true miracle. There can only be events that appear miraculous when you don't really understand How Life Works. ~ Thomas Daniel Nehrer

His strides are the only evidence he exists, and so he wanders,
lost in a city that he has always called home.

Our creased hides and limp tongues attract neither fashionable
eye nor futile envy, and we no longer feel the burden of his
entire weight, though his heart is heavier than it was.
Sometimes we stop, and he looks with longing at the stars
overhead.

We remain on the ground. We have no concept of up, for out
reality lies below. It is how life works. This too shall pass. ~ Krishna Udayasankar

We were sweet, lovely people who wanted to throw out all the staid institutions who placed money and wars above all else. When you're young you think that's how life works. ~ Margot Kidder

But maybe this isn't how life works. Maybe it's all about people coming into your life for a little while and you take what they give you and use it on your next friendship or relationship. And if you're lucky, maybe some people pop back in after you thought they were gone for good. ~ Becky Albertalli

I can't go into Oklahoma without thinking about Larry Clark's photography book 'Tulsa.' It's a great book about how life works. ~ Buzz Osborne

If I've learned one thing on my journey so far, it's to take all of who I am and embrace it… All of it, and CELEBRATE it. It is so awesome when you can come to a place of personal discovery and discover the deepest parts of you and what makes you come alive. I have also learned that failure is a part of life. I have failed more than I have ever succeeded, but I think that is how life works. The more you fail, the more you will succeed. You will eventually get to your destination, or how I like to call it – that awareness of what you came here to be; to share your gifts with the world. Trust me, this world needs you…The authentic YOU. What a beautiful transformation that can be. ~ Suzanne Nielsen

Best way to learn how life works is to have the guts to truly go out and live it! ~ Robin Sharma

Anyway, that's the past, and what matters is the future. That's how life works, because it's short and precious and kind of doubtful. ~ Terry Brooks

Of the hundreds of religions and philosophies ever entertained by the mind of man, each considered by the convinced holder to be the only valid one, only at the very most one can be accurate. . . Just as obvious should be the possibility, if not likelihood, if not certainty, that none of those hundreds of religions accurately depicts How Life Works. ~ Thomas Daniel Nehrer

You get a job when you have the right qualifications and work experience. Similarly, individuals should be allowed to be parents (considering that parenting is a full time job for at least 16 years) only when they completely understand how life/mind works and have implemented it in their lives. ~ Maddy Malhotra

Your beliefs about your worth, deservingness and ability decides the amount of happiness, success and love in your life. ~ Maddy Malhotra

That's how life works. You know it when you know it.
They're nineteen and in love. Alone except for each other. Jobless and homeless, looking for something, somewhere, anywhere here.
They're on a sixteen-line highway.
Driving west. ~ James Frey

It's funny how life works like a seesaw: Some things go up while others plunge down. ~ Sophie Kinsella

Do you remember how as kids we sat in front of a scooter & believed we were the one steering it, while someone else was actually driving & we never really had any control?
That's how life works. ~ Nitya Prakash

Life's better now. I wouldn't do it all over again, though. It's funny how life works. Maybe it was meant to happen for many reasons, because my life in many ways richer. ~ Giuliana Rancic

The young have to kill the old. The young, if they want to achieve their own platform, have to diminish the reputations of the ones that have gone before. That's how life works. ~ Moby

It's funny how life works sometimes, isn't it? ~ Riley Hart

Every man lives by exchanging. ~ Adam Smith

I kept waiting for something to happen, which isn't how life works. In closed environments, everything just repeats. ~ Kiera Cass

I got into science because I thought that, with inspiration and hard work, I could figure out how life works. ~ Randy Schekman

Learn how to separate the majors and the minors. A lot of people don't do well simply because they major in minor things. ~ Jim Rohn

How do we know that our life really happened and that we are not simply accumulating details, making it all up as we go along? ~ Rachel Klein

It's impossible to be the Mockingjay. Impossible to complete even this one sentence. Because now I know that everything I say will be directly taken out on Peeta. Result in his torture. But not his death, no, nothing so merciful as that. Snow will ensure that his life is much more worse than death.

"Cut," I hear Cressida say quietly.

"What's wrong with her?" Plutarch says under his breath.

"She's figured out how Snow's using Peeta," says Finnick.

There's something like a collective sigh of regret from that semicircle of people spread out before me. Because I know this now. Because there will never be a way for me to not know this again. Because, beyond the military disadvantage losing a entails, I am broken.

Several sets of arms would embrace me. But in the end, the only person I truly want to comfort me is Haymitch, because he loves Peeta, too. I reach out for him and say something like his name and he's there, holding me and patting my back. "It's okay. It'll be okay, sweetheart." He sits me on a length of broken marble pillar and keeps an arm around me while I sob.

"I can't do this anymore," I say.

"I know," he says. ~ Suzanne Collins

She lays her tired head on my shoulder and looks through the shell with me, into the great mystery. I think again that heaven must be like this place, and I say that to Isabelle. I wonder, When she is in heaven and I am not, how far away will she be? "It's just another journey," she whispers. . . I thought of my mother, of how desperately I wanted her to be here a little longer, a lot longer, forever. Sometimes it seemed that I should be able to change things, to alter the course of events, just by wanting it badly enough. But I couldn't. Iola's observations said as much. We, in our humanness, cannot help but foolishly desire eternity in this life. ~ Lisa Wingate

How life goes in bad directions when your heart is asleep. ~ Robert Goolrick

People aren't born good or bad. It's the way you live your life that matters and how many people you inspire and empower after you're gone. ~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

At many meetings, you will be able to sit there with a cup of coffee and a handful of cookies. How much better do you want your life? You haven't been treated this well since kindergarten. Cookies, coffee, and the story of The Little Junkie That Could. The only thing better would be if it came with a nap. ~ Bucky Sinister

I don't know how often I can discuss one incident in my entire life, but I'll continue to do that. ~ O.J. Simpson

As a person, [Barbara Stanwyck] was a great deal like the character she played in Ball of Fire, a stripper called Sugarpuss O'Shea. She had a wonderful, free, open quality in that picture, and that's what she was like as a woman. Reclusive by nature, she was happy to just stay home, but she read everything. She got me reading books as a way of life and, if I asked her, would help me out with my acting. We only had one scene together in Titanic - I played her daughter's boyfriend! - so there was a limit to what I could learn by working with her. She taught me what to do with my hands, how to get over my self-consciousness, and how to lower my voice, which I thought was still too high. And she taught me to be decisive with things like entrances. "When you walk in," she told me, "be sure you're standing up straight. Walk in with confidence." She didn't want me to sidle into a scene as if I were ashamed to be in the movie. Make the entrance! Take the scene! But I wasn't going there for acting tutorials. ~ Robert J. Wagner

I woke up remember the good times and the bad. I know one can't really exist without the other, so I always remind myself that life isn't about hanging onto memories, it's about experience. It's about learning from experience and understanding how to use it. It's about being intelligent enough to turn memories into golden moments, no matter what they may be. ~ Nicole DSettemi

It seemed to him that in Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they dodged. A decent life was the train that hadn't hit you, the slumlord you hadn't offended, the malaria you hadn't caught. ~ Katherine Boo

Nessa had never really felt truly beautiful before, but tonight she not only understood that she was beautiful, she understood that everyone was. That for all the competition and fear and knowing that the next runner was coming up behind you, she had been missing out on how beautiful life could be. She should have been watching and appreciating others instead of waiting inside herself for the right time to shine. The time was now. ~ C.D. Bell

A tree never feels how much fragrance it spreads. It's just its nature to be like that. ~ Moazzam Shaikh

Ain't it shame how folk see time like money in the bank when it's more like a loan that might jus' fall due any second? ~ Patrick Neate

John Frame's 'tri-perspectivalism' helps me understand Willow. The Willow Creek style churches have a 'kingly' emphasis on leadership, strategic thinking, and wise administration. The danger there is that the mechanical obscures how organic and spontaneous church life can be. The Reformed churches have a 'prophetic' emphasis on preaching, teaching, and doctrine. The danger there is that we can have a naïve and unBiblical view that, if we just expound the Word faithfully, everything else in the church - leader development, community building, stewardship of resources, unified vision - will just happen by themselves. The emerging churches have a 'priestly' emphasis on community, liturgy and sacraments, service and justice. The danger there is to view 'community' as the magic bullet in the same way Reformed people view preaching. ~ Timothy J. Keller

I have never in my life encountered a religion as oppressive, cold, and stiff as Progressivism. I've never known a faith more eager to burn heretics at the stake. Even a fundamentalist Iranian Muslim would flinch if he came face to face with a western liberal's rigid dogmatism. I imagine that even a Saudi Arabian Islamic cleric would take one look at how American left wingers react when anyone deviates ever so slightly from their established orthodoxy, and say to himself, 'man, these people REALLY need to chill. ~ Matt Walsh

Then there was Mr Mandela. Everybody knew about Mr Mandela and how he had forgiven those who had imprisoned him. They had taken away years and years of his life simply because he wanted justice. They had set him to work in a quarry and his eyes had been permanently damaged by the rock dust. But at last, when he had walked out of the prison on that breathless, luminous day, he had said nothing about revenge or even retribution. He had said that there were more important things to do than to complain about the past, and in time he had shown that he meant this by hundreds of acts of kindness towards those who had treated him so badly. That was the real African way, the tradition that was closest to the heart of Africa. We are all children of Africa, and none of us is better or more important than the other. This is what Africa could say to the world: it could remind it what it is to be human. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily life, how she captures so much meaning and consequence in the smallest details of a day. ~ Karen Thompson Walker

I think what I have done is claimed the space and pushed it forward as much as I can in relationship to who I am and how I live my life. ~ Mickalene Thomas

The idea that no matter how cold and callous and heartless the world seemed, there was somebody out there who just wanted to make life better. Not better for worlds or countries in some vague way. Just better for people trying to live their lives, even if they didn't know about him. ~ Peter Clines

I am acquainted with a wife and mother who is chained securely at the present time to a life-style of murmuring and criticism. She is the first to point out faults in her husband or to repeat neighborhood gossip. How damaging is a habit that permits fault-finding, character assassination, and the sharing of malicious rumors! Gossip and caustic comments often create chains of contention. These chains may appear to be very small, but what misery and woe they can cause! ~ Marvin J. Ashton

Rose: My mum's here.
The Doctor: Oh, that's just what I need! Don't you dare make this place domestic!
Mickey Smith: You ruined my life, Doctor. [the Doctor turns and looks at him, irritated] They thought she was dead, I was a murder suspect because of you!
The Doctor: [looks at Rose] See what I mean? Domestic!
Mickey: I bet you don't even remember my name!
The Doctor: Ricky.
Mickey: It's Mickey!
The Doctor: No, it's Ricky.
Mickey: I think I know my own name!
The Doctor: You think you know your own name? How stupid are you? ~ Russell T. Davies

Arin, are you all right?"
"How?" He managed. "How did her arm break?"
"She fell of a ladder."
He must have visibly relaxed, because his cousin raised her brows and looked ready to scold.
"I imagined something worse," he tried to explain.
She appeared to understand his relief that pain, if it had to come, came this time without malice. Just and accident. Done by no one. The luck, sometimes of life. A bad slip that ends with bread, and someone to bind you. ~ Marie Rutkoski

I have learned that my quenchless longing for life is, after all, unconsciously, a secret, unutterable yearning after God; for how can you conceive of life apart from Him? ~ Frank W. Boreham

The American writer is a very pampered figure - by foundations, by fellowships, by publishing advances. Even though I am not American, I have been pampered enough myself to know how it can make your life too frictionless. ~ Pankaj Mishra

At the point where he, today's Ivan Ilyich, began to emerge, all the pleasures that had seemed so real melted away now before his eyes and turned into something trivial and often disgusting.
And the further he was from childhood, the nearer he got to the present day, the more trivial and dubious his pleasures appeared. It started with law school. That had retained a little something that was really good: there was fun, there was friendship, there was hope. But in the last years the good times had become more exceptional. Then, at the beginning of his service with the governor, some good times came again: memories of making love to a woman. Then it became all confused, and the good times were not so many. After that there were fewer still; the further he went the fewer there were.
Marriage. . .an accident and such a disappointment, and his wife's bad breath, and all that sensuality and hypocrisy! And the deadlines of his working life, and those money worries, going on for a year, two years, ten, twenty - always the same old story. And the longer it went on the deadlier it became.
'It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me...And now it's all over. Nothing left but to die! ~ Leo Tolstoy

You want to live-but do you know how to live? You are scared of dying-and, tell me, is the kind of life you lead really any different from being dead? ~ Seneca The Younger

Find your purpose, find your passion. Find your passion, find your purpose. Turn either way, it doesn't matter. Because how do you separate conjoined twins like these? ~ Jacob Nordby

We made mistakes trying to correct mistakes. Isn't that how we knew we were parents? ~ The Odd Life Of Timothy Green

She felt ... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach. ~ Virginia Woolf

O youth! youth! you have no concerns, you possess, as it were, all the treasures of the universe, even grief is a comfort to you, even sadness suits your looks, you are self-assured and bold, you say: 'Look, I'm the only one alive!' while the very days of your life run away and vanish without a trace and without number and everything in you disappears like wax, like snow in the hear of the sun... And perhaps the entire et of your charm consists not in the possibility of doing everything, but in the possibility of thinking perhaps it consists precisely in the fact that you want only to scatter on the wind energies that you wouldn't know how to use for anything else, perhaps it consists in the fact that each one of us seriously regards himself as a spendthrift and seriously considers that he has the right to say: 'Oh, the things I could have done if only I hadn't wasted my time! ~ Ivan Turgenev

In Two Parts You come and go so easily, your life is as you knew - while mine is split in two. How I envy so the half of me, who lived before love's due, who was yet to know of you. ~ Lang Leav

How different her life would be if Orrin hadn't contacted her in July. She wouldn't be embroiled in kidnapping, espionage, and murder. ~ Donna Grant

Remember the decisions you make determine the schedule you keep. The schedule you keep determines the life you live. And how you live your life determines how you spend your soul. ~ Lysa TerKeurst

I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need. I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others. - Howard Roark ~ Ayn Rand

How did wheat convince Homo sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a more miserable existence? What did it offer in return? It did not offer a better diet. Remember, humans are omnivorous apes who thrive on a wide variety of foods. Grains made up only a small fraction of the human diet before the Agricultural Revolution. A diet based on cereals is poor in minerals and vitamins, hard to digest, and really bad for your teeth and gums. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

You are inexperienced. So was I, once. So is every man. The measure of a person is not how much they have lived ... It's in how they make us of what life has shown them. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Those who are weak have great difficulty finding their place in our society. The image of the ideal human as powerful and capable disenfranchises the old, the sick, the less-abled. For me, society must, by definition, be inclusive of the needs and gifts of all its members. How can we lay claim to making an open and friendly society where human rights are respected and fostered when, by the values we teach and foster, we systematically exclude segments of our population? I believe that those we most often exclude from the normal life of society, people with disabilities, have profound lessons to teach us. When we do include them, they add richly to our lives and add immensely to our world. ~ Jean Vanier

How upset are you?"
Phoebe smiled ruefully. "There's a half-pound box of butterscotch squares from See's in my car. I'm also planning to stop by the grocery store on my way home and buy a bottle of wine."
"Liquor and sugar. That's pretty bad."
"It's as close as I'll come to a life of crime. ~ Susan Mallery

I thought that if I couldn't make a living as an artist, at least I shouldn't starve.

By the time I had finished these studies, I had realized that I simply did not draw well enough to be the kind of artist and illustrator that I wanted to be, and so for two days a week over two years I drew - and drew and drew - from the models in the life classes at Chelsea School of Art. I really found out how people looked and moved and balanced, and though nowadays I almost never use a sketchbook and just make everything up as I go along, it's those days in the life room that are the back of it all. ~ Quentin Blake

I'm sure that if [Walter] could still talk to the living, he would tell us that the simplest things in life can be treasures, and there are no physical or metaphysical limitations on how much we can love-both in this life and beyond. ~ Amelia Cotter