Leitmotif Of My Life Quotes

What was a zero anyway? A zero signified nothing, all it did was tell you nothing about nothing. Still, wasn't zero also something meaningful, a number in and of itself? In jianpu notation, zero indicated a caesura, a pause or rest of indeterminate length. Did time that went uncounted, unrecorded, still qualify as time? If zero was both everything and nothing, did an empty life have exactly the same weight as a full life? Was zero like the desert, both finite and infinite? ~ Madeleine Thien

I hope that I will be able to work all of my life - even when I am older. It's easier to do that in Europe than in America, because in America it is difficult for older actresses to find work. ~ Penelope Cruz

I have learned that bitterness, resentment and self-pity do nothing to lift the gloomy clouds of a spiritual February in my life. If anything, these sins only harden the soil of my heart, making it difficult for new growth to spring forth at God's appointed time. ~ Katherine J. Walden

Then we are nothing to him,' said the merchant, sorrow brimming in his eyes. 'I surrendered everything, all my wealth, for yet another indifferent god. If he cannot protect us, what is the point?'

She wished that she had an answer to such questions. Were these not the very grist of priestly endeavours? To grind out palatable answers, to hint of promising paths to true salvation? To show a benign countenance gifted by god-given wisdom, glowing as if fanned by sacred breath? 'It is my feeling,' she said, haltingly, 'that a faith that delivers perfect answers to every question is not a true faith, for its only purpose is to satisfy, to ease the mind and so end its questing.' She held up a hand to still the objections she saw awakened among these six honest, serious believers. 'Is it for faith to deliver peace, when on all sides inequity thrives? For it shall indeed thrive, when the blessed walk past blissfully blind, content in their own moral purity, in the peace filling their souls. Oh, you might then reach out a hand to the wretched by the roadside, offering them your own footprints, and you may see the blessed burgeon in number, grow into a multitude, until you are as an army. But there will be, will ever be, those who turn away from your hand. The ones who quest because it is in their nature to quest, who fear the seduction of self-satisfaction, who mistrust easy answers. Are these ones then to be your enemy? Does the army grow angered now? Does it strike out at ~ Steven Erikson

It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus - that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying with our entire curved and silenced selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that are being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it? ~ Ocean Vuong

But there's not enough time in life to go sit at a party, have a drink, and make idle conversation. There's too many important things to do. Just being together with my husband, spending time alone, which I have very little of. ~ Pia Zadora

Throughout my life, I've always been really close with girls and made friends with girls. And I've always been a really sickly, feminine person anyhow, so I thought I was gay for a while because I didn't find any of the girls in my high school attractive at all. ~ Kurt Cobain

When Hillel died, it was during one of the happiest times of my life. I was married and completely in love and had a baby on the way. ~ Flea

The day I stood in front of the mirror and saw and loved my face and my hair for the first time in my life I was alone--completely utterly alone. We are always alone when we find the truth.
The fact that we are alone makes the taste of affirmation no less sweet. ~ Marita Golden

I think my mother was baffled by me. We were polar opposites. She was shy and retiring. I was over-fond of the limelight. Many times in my life, I was conscious of embarrassing her with my carrying on. ~ Laurie Graham

It's part of my life to feel like a criminal, to have eyes in my back and see if I'm being followed. It's a feeling that comes from street juggling because I have been arrested so many times. ~ Philippe Petit

I don't understand hospital chaplains that try to rob my patients of their anger. Sometimes anger is a key motivator that gets people to take action. Anger can push a cancer patient to jump out of his hospital bed, walk down to the nurses station and scream, "I am getting the hell out of here!". There is a misconception that God is simply sweet and passive. Actually, God can be quite cunning, manipulative and relentless with his children. What we consider as negative traits are actually helpful in molding us. He will use a negative emotion if needed to push people to do things that will change them for the better. He will allow people or situations to derail us if there is a chance that those interactions will push us forward. Personally, I don't want a God that is going to send some church member to my deathbed with a plate of cookies and tell me to have faith. Actually, I rather have a God that screams, "Get the hell off your ass, stop feeling sorry for yourself. Walk down the hall with that Physical Therapist so you can get on with your life!" A little anger in a person can push them to do amazing things. ~ Shannon L. Alder

When I fly, I'm never afraid the plane is going to crash. But there have often been times when I was afraid it wouldn't crash. I was just afraid it was going to circle O'Hare for the rest of my life. ~ Fran Lebowitz

I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.
Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth ...
What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

In my life so far, I have discovered that there are really only two kinds of people: those who are for you, and those who are against you. Learn to recognize them, for they are often and easily mistaken for each other. ~ Lemmy Kilmister

I can clearly trace my passion for reading back to the Jonesboro, Georgia, library, where, for the first time in my life, I had access to what seemed like an unlimited supply of books. ~ Karin Slaughter

I make enemies deliberately. They are the sauce piquante to my dish of life. ~ Elsa Maxwell

I'm no pawn," said Glinda. "I take all the credit in the world for my own foolishness. Good gracious, dear, all of life is a spell. You know that. But you do have some choice. ~ Gregory Maguire

I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

God's timing is such that I did not fully realize the impact of His blessings until many years later when the full cause and effect of His promise on my life was fulfilled. ~ Adam Gellert

Even though you may not want to hear it, I want you to know that you'll always be a part of me. In our time together, you claimed a special place in my heart, one I'll carry with me forever and that no one can ever replace. You're a hero and a gentleman, you're kind and honest, but more than that, you're the first man I ever truly loved. And no matter what the future brings, you always will be, and I know that my life is better for it. I'm so sorry - Savannah ~ Nicholas Sparks

For those who want to pray for me to "find God," please don't waste your prayers. If you really think God is listening to you, then please use those precious moments to ask God to care for the sick and dying, and leave me out of it. I'm happy without my faith and with living my life in the here and now. Besides, thousands before you have prayed for me to find God and it hasn't worked yet. Why would God value your request over theirs? ~ David G. McAfee

Ya know, right now the most important thing in my life is to make sure you understand that, first of all I thank God I'm alive today, and I mean that. I spent too many years of my life thinking that the big party was the whole thing. ~ Stevie Ray Vaughan

Before I met him, I wondered how I could possibly fit a relationship into my life. My days felt full, of people, things, and concerns, and I wondered what I'd give up to accommodate someone new. Anton made it seem easy. He didn't take me out of my life; instead, he sort of slid into the empty spaces and made himself comfortable. ~ Mina V. Esguerra

Ian!" she cried, afraid to believe it. "I don't want you to ever regret that you married me."
He smiled, and his fingertips caressed her cheeks. "Regret it? How could I?" You are my passionate
Italian wife. You are the woman who is going to give me children and whose bed I intend to sleep in
every night. You're the reason I'll wake up every morning with a smile on my face. I love you, I will be in
love with you every day of my life, and the only day I'm leaving you is the day they put me in the ground. ~ Laura Lee Guhrke

I knew it,' she says. 'I knew I had met you before. I knew it the first time I saw your photograph. It's as if we had to meet again at some point in this life. I talked to my friends about it, but they thought I was crazy, that thousands of people must say the same thing about thousands of other people every day. I thought they must be right, but life… life brought you to me. You came to find me, didn't you? ~ Paulo Coelho

My parents had an experience of life that is as opposite to mine as you can imagine. ~ Jane Pauley

[ ... ] I was afraid to board a streetcar because of the conductor; I was afraid to enter the Kabuki Theater for fear of the usherettes standing along the sides of the red-carpeted staircase at the main entrance; I was afraid to go into a restaurant because I was intimidated by the waiters furtively hovering behind me waiting for my plate to be emptied. ~ Osamu Dazai

I owe a debt to you," his low voice hissed at Shion's ear. "Four years ago, you saved my life. I'm paying back that debt. That's all."

"Then you've paid enough. Too much, even." Shion gripped Nezumi's wrist to pry it away from his collar. But Nezumi's taut muscles showed no signs of relaxing.

"Let go."

"Make me, little boy."

"I'll bite your nose off." Shion clicked his teeth. There was a split second of hesitation. Shion didn't miss it. He slid a hand around the back of Nezumi's neck. "Biting noses off is my specialty."

"Huh? Wait a second, that's dirty―"

"I forgot to mention, over these past four years, I've also learned how to fight. ~ Atsuko Asano

They are part of lots of sessions that makeup a hazy part of my session life. ~ Jim Sullivan

Somebody said to me the other day, 'You know, it's really senseless, what you're doing. There's always been suffering, there will always be suffering, and you're just prolonging the suffering of these children [by rescuing them].' My answer is, 'Okay, then, let's start with your grandchild. Don't buy antibiotics if it gets pneumonia. Don't take it to the hospital of it has an accident. It's against life-against humanity-to think that way. ~ Audrey Hepburn

I'm going to keep talking about what I think is interesting for my entire career. If you want to hear about how women do a lot of shoe shopping or how being married sucks, go see the guy who does jokes about that. But if you come to see my live show, there's going to be 20 minutes on religion for the rest of my life, probably. If that makes me a caricature, so be it. ~ David Cross

All right. If you insist. I do not sleep with girls. No, no, no, let me be absolutely accurate. I've gone through the motions of sleeping with girls exactly three times, all of them disastrous. The word for my sex life now is nil. Or as you Americans would say, plenty of nuttin'. ~ Jay Presson Allen

O world, why do you wish to persecute me? How do I offend you, when I intend only to fix beauty in my intellect, & never my intellect fix on beauty?
I do not set store by treasures or riches; & therefore it always brings me more joy only to fix riches in my intellect, & never my intellect fix on riches.
I do not set store by a lovely face that, vanquished, is civil plunder of the ages, & perfidious wealth has never pleased me,
for I deem it best, as one of my truths, to deplete the vanities of this life & never this life to deplete in vanities. ~ Juana Ines De La Cruz

And I saw you - I saw you saying that sometimes compassion is understood like being awake, and being unable to react. So every morning, I find myself a different person. I'm always a mystery to myself. If I knew in the first hours of the morning, what I'm going to do, what is going to happen, what attitude or decision should I take? I think my life would be deadly boring because, well, what makes life interesting is the unknown. It is the risks that we take every single moment of our day - of a single day. So, I think that this contradiction should be accepted. Having said that, I mean that learning how to live with our contradictions does not keep us away from the ethic and respecting our neighbor, and learning about tolerance, and learning about compassion. These are two very important words today that were totally forgotten. If you have tolerance and compassion, you can go to the battle, in the metaphoric sense of course, fighting for your dreams without harming anyone. ~ Paulo Coelho

My father, my uncles, my aunts, from my father's side and my mother's side ... they were all professional musicians. My father was a concert master, he took me to a lot of rehearsals, concerts, performances, opera, ballet. For me, that was life. ~ Lalo Schifrin

I simply don't understand. I have not the remotest clue what the nature or extent of my neighbor's woes can be. Practical troubles, griefs that can be assuaged if only there is enough to eat - these may be the most intense of all burning hells, horrible enough to blast to smithereens my ten misfortunes, but that is precisely what I don't understand: if my neighbors manage to survive without killing themselves, without going mad, maintaining an interest in political parties, not yielding to despair, resolutely pursuing the fight for existence, can their griefs really be genuine? Am I wrong in thinking that these people have become such complete egoists and are so convinced of the normality of their way of life that they have never once doubted themselves? ~ Osamu Dazai

My darling Julie, I know you'll never see this letter, but it helps to write to you every day. It keeps you close to me. G-d, I miss you so. You haunt every hour of my life. I wish I'd never met you. No-I don't mean that! What good would my life be without my memories of you to make me smile.

I keep wondering if you're happy. I want you to be. I want you to have a glorious life. That's why I couldn't say the things I knew you wanted to hear when we were together. I was afraid if I did, you'd wait for me for years. I knew you wanted me to say I loved you. Not saying that to you was the only unselfish thing I did in Colorado, and I now I regret even that.

I love you, Julie. Christ, I love you so much. I'd give up all my life to have one year with you. Six months. Three. Anything.

You stole my heart in just a few days, darling, but you gave me your heart, too. I know you did- I could see it in your eyes every time you looked at me.

I don't regret the loss of my freedom any more or rage at the injustice of the years I spent in prison. Now, my only regret is that I can't have you. You're young, and I know you'll forget about me quickly and go on with your own life. That's exactly what you should do. It's what you must do. I want you to do that, Julie.

That's such a lousy lie. What I really want is to see you again, to hold you in my arms, to make love to you over and over again until I've filled you so completely that ther ~ Judith McNaught

My daughter's eggs are silver points of potential energy, the light at the beginning of the tunnel, a near-life experience. Boys don't make sperm - their proud "seed" - until they reach puberty. But my daughter's sex cells, our seed, are already settled upon prenatally, the chromosomes sorted, the potsherds of her parents' histories packed into their little phospholipid baggies. ~ Natalie Angier

I should not like to leave an impression that all structural problems can be settled by X-ray analysis or that all crystal structures are easy to solve. I seem to have spent much more of my life not solving structures than solving them. ~ Dorothy Hodgkin

The marvel is that we did not all die of cold. As a matter of fact, only one of my party actually froze to death before he could be got back, but I am not able to tell how many have ended up in hospital. We were marooned in a frozen desert. There was not a sign of life on the horizon and a thousand signs of death. ~ Wilfred Owen

You make me feel three times the rush of skydiving or bungee jumping ... I felt the biggest rush of my life when you said you love me. ~ Miranda Kenneally

All practice is the practice of making a turn in a different direction. Toward one thing and away from another; the particulars in any given situation don't matter, because you always know the right way. A different way. With practice, you get better at turning.
This is my practice. It's not anything special you need to learn. It is not some new information you neet to get. It is nothing you haven't heard before. It is just a turn you might not yet have made, or made again, and again, and again. A turn toward intimate engagement with the life you already have.
Fulfillment derives not from lofty achievements, but from ordinary feats. It arrives not once in a lifetime, but every moment of the livelong day. ~ Karen Maezen Miller

Poems are my link with the times, with the new life of my people. ~ Anna Akhmatova

Two Songs For The World's End

I
Bombs ripen on the leafless tree
under which the children play.
And there my darling all alone
dances in the spying day.

I gave her nerves to feel her pain,
I put her mortal beauty on.
I taught her love that hate might find,
its black work the easier done.

I sent her out alone to play;
and I must watch, and I must hear,
how underneath the leafless tree,
the children dance and sing with Fear.

II
Lighted by the rage of time
where the blind and dying weep,
in my shadow take your sleep,
though wakeful I.

Sleep unhearing while I pray -
Should the red tent of the sky
fall to fold your time away,
wake to weep before you die.

Die believing all is true
that love your maker said to you
Still believe
that had you lived you would have found
love, world, sight, sound,
sorrow, beauty - all true.
Grieve for death your moment - grieve.

The world, the lover you must take,
is the murderer you will meet.
But if you die before you wake
never think death sweet. ~ Judith A. Wright

...somewhere in that intersection of broken hearts and shattered souls... broken is not the end of things, but the beginning. Maybe broken is what happens before you become unbroken. What's more, maybe our broken pieces don't fit us... maybe my pieces are the very pieces needed to mend you and your pieces are the very pieces needed to mend me, but until we've been broken we don't have the pieces to mend each other. Maybe in the offering we discover the meaning, and value of being broken. Maybe...somewhere on the planet is another somebody standing around holding a bag of all the jagged, painful pieces of themselves and they can't get whole without you... Maybe love, the real kind, the kind only wished for in whispers and the kind our hearts are hardwired to want, is opening up the bag of you... And what's more, they don't cost you anything. They're free. I paid for them in the breaking... And because you're desperate, and you've tried most everything else, you empty my bag across the floor... and...find the one piece you've been missing... And when you insert that piece into the puzzle that had become you, it stops the hemorrhage, and for the first time in maybe your whole life, the wound starts to heal. ~ Charles Martin

I was 19 when I got my first passport as an adult. I had moved from California to New York City and was living out of a suitcase, staying with friends. I'd just finished filming my first movie, 'Ordinary People,' but I didn't know whether acting was what I wanted to do with my life. ~ Timothy Hutton

Ah," Gary said dreamily. " 'Free time.' I've heard about that. Don't fool yourself, Fire-Top. What with extra hours of lessons for punishments, and the extra work you get every day, free time is an illusion. It's what you get when you die and the gods reward you for a life spent working from dawn until midnight. We all face up to it sooner or later
the only real free time you get here is what my honored sire chooses to give you, when he thinks you have earned it."
"And he doesn't give it to you at night," Alex put in. "He gives it to you when you've been here awhile, on Market Day and sometimes a morning or afternoon all to yourself. But never at night. At night you study. During the day you study. In your sleep
~ Tamora Pierce

One of the most constant and sustaining truths of my life has been this: I love the library. ~ Deb Caletti

Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life is
that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. ~ Joseph Conrad