Life Is Way Too Short Quotes

We cannot waste time. We can only waste ourselves. ~ George Matthew Adams

Life is way too short to be bogged down by challenges we may face. ~ Asa Don Brown

Live as you will wish to have lived when you are dying. ~ Christian Furchtegott Gellert

Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs. ~ Charlotte Bronte

STOP talking about your dreams and just go out and live them. Life is way too short ... what are you waiting for? ~ Timothy Pina

I never wanted to be the person who said, "I woulda, coulda, shoulda." Life is way too short, and you may not last that long. ~ Joy Bryant

Life is way too short, so try to enjoy every minute of it with a sense of humor! ~ Christina Scalise

Life is way too short to get lost, so follow the script the way it comes and keep changing the checkpoints on every page. ~ Neetesh Dixit

Honey, if he doesn't get you and treat you like a queen, move on! Your king is out there! Life is way too short to be losing precious time over a loser. Love yourself and know you deserve a healthy and happy relationship. ~ Jamie Beckman

Indeed, a bird is made in such a way that it can fly, gather food and build a nest, and when I see a bird doing these things I rejoice. Goats, hares and wolves are made in order to eat, multiply and feed their families, and when they do this I feel quite sure that they are happy and that their lives are meaningful. What should a man do? He too must work for his existence, just as the animals do, but with the difference that he will perish if he does it alone, for he must work for an existence, not just for himself, but for everyone. And when he does this I feel quite sure that he is happy and that his life has meaning. And what had I been doing for all those thirty years of conscious life? Far from working for an existence for everyone, I had not even done so for myself. I had lived as a parasite and when I asked myself why I lived, I received the answer: for nothing. If the meaning of human existence lies in working to procure it I had spent thirty years attempting, not to procure it, but to destroy it for myself and for others. How then could I get any answer other than that my life is evil and meaningless? Indeed it was evil and meaningless. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Life is too hard to behave normal all the time. Just the other day my mom told me I should learn to behave more neurotypically because then I would make more friends. This attitude is truly not great -- insisting that I behave in a way that makes no sense to me. This illustrates the hopelessness of trying to be your own person because this means you must behave like everyone else to be accepted. Being different is not seen as a positive trait. I feel if I have to wear a different face, then I will attract people I don't care to know. ~ Jeremy Sicile-Kira

Dogs, lives are short, too short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you're going to lose a dog, and there's going to be great anguish, so you live fully in the moment with her, never fail to share her joy or delight in her innocence, because you can't support the illusion that a dog can be your lifelong companion. There's such beauty in the hard honesty of that, in accepting and giving love while always aware that it comes with an unbearable price. Maybe loving dogs is a way we do penance for all the other illusions we allow ourselves and the mistakes we make because of those illusions. ~ Dean Koontz

In the English language, we have one word for love, which translates into our sexual drive. The ancient Greeks had more than one word for it, including the word agape. It means to compromise or sacrifice, and it's a kind of love I've seen in all couples who have gotten married and stayed married. It is my opinion that this kind of love determines the entire success of your married life, and to an extent, it's a good part of your financial life too. Reaching a financial goal always takes a little bit of sacrifice, and would be impossible to do on your own. Once you and your spouse realize that mutual sacrifice is a healthy part of your marriage, you are well on your way to achieving harmony in planning for your finances together. ~ Celso Cukierkorn

Travelling in other's shoes is a complex process. Everyone carries loads of inherited virtues and then, heaps of experience acquired while travelling their own exclusive path of life. One's personality, particularly the way one thinks, beholds both inborn traits and learned knowledge. Unless one is born to the same parents as the other, exactly at same time, beholding same blend of inherent traits and travelled the same path the other has travelled so far - a biological and pragmatic impossibility - it is imprudent to claim having knowledge of other's thought process. One's uniqueness is not constrained to the physical form, but is pertinent, too, to intellectual, emotional and spiritual forms. ~ Hari Parameshwar

Children should be taught about history not as is usually the case now, that this is the record of long past events, which one ought to know about for some reason or other. But that this is a story from which one may learn not only what has happened, but what may, and probably will, happen again.
Literature and history, these two great branches of human learning, records of human behaviour, human thought, are less and less valued by the young, and by educators, too. Yet from them one may learn how to be a citizen and a human being. We may learn how to look at ourselves and at the society we live in, in that calm, cool, critical and sceptical way which is the only possible stance for a civilized human being, or so have said all the philosophers and the sages.
But all the pressures go the other way, towards learning what is immediately useful, what is functional. More and more the demand is for people to be educated to function in an almost certainly temporary stage of technology. Educated for the short term. ~ Doris Lessing

Architecture is art. I don't think you should say that too much, but it is art. I mean, architecture is many, many things. Architecture is science, is technology, is geography, is typography, is anthropology, is sociology, is art, is history. You know all this comes together. Architecture is a kind of bouillabaisse, an incredible bouillabaisse. And, by the way, architecture is also a very polluted art in the sense that it's polluted by life, and by the complexity of things. ~ Renzo Piano

The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What's that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating ... and you finish off as an orgasm. ~ George Carlin

Black and white, good and evil, is just a way to simplify life and make it easier for people to deal with. People love it too; that's why so many people go to church on a Sunday. ~ Neil Walker

Not all coincidence has to be loaded with meaning. Sometimes, things simply recur because that's how it is in life, that's how the mood gets in. It's good to subtly overdo it too, as Nabokov does, as Sebald does. It's a good way to intensify that region of localized weather that we call a novel. ~ Teju Cole

No, when the stresses are too great for the tired metal, when the ground mechanic who checks the de-icing equipment is crossed in love and skimps his job, way back in London, Idlewild, Gander, Montreal; when those or many things happen, then the little warm room with propellers in front falls straight down out of the sky into the sea or on to the land, heavier than air, fallible, vain. And the forty little heavier-than-air people, fallible within the plane's fallibility, vain within its larger vanity, fall down with it and make little holes in the land or little splashes in the sea. Which is anyway their destiny, so why worry? You are linked to the ground mechanic's careless fingers in Nassau just as you are linked to the weak head of the little man in the family saloon who mistakes the red light for the green and meets you head-on, for the first and last time, as you are motoring quietly home from some private sin. There's nothing to do about it. You start to die the moment you are born. The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death. So take it easy. Light a cigarette and be grateful you are still alive as you suck the smoke deep into your lungs. Your stars have already let you come quite a long way since you left your mother's womb and whimpered at the cold air of the world. Perhaps they'll even let you go to Jamaica tonight. Can't you hear those cheerful voices in the control tower that have said quietly all day long, 'Come in BOAC. Come in Panam. Come in KLM'? ~ Ian Fleming

I have observed an analogy between a force field equilibrium and resistance to change in organizations. Let us imagine change to be a coiled spring in a field of opposing forces, such that some forces support change and others resist it. By increasing supporting forces such as supervisory pressure, prospects of career growth and monetary benefits or decreasing the resisting forces such as group norms, social rewards and work avoidance, the situation can be directed towards the desired result - but for a short time only, and that too only to a certain extent. After a while the resisting forces push back with greater force as they are compressed even more tightly. Therefore, a better approach would be to decrease the resisting force in such a manner that there is no concomitant increase in the supporting forces. In this way, less energy will be needed to bring about and maintain change.
The result of the forces i mentioned above, is motive. ~ Arun Tiwari

Could she possibly have
someone who really could love
And add to her fins the wings
of a dove

So not only the waves could
she enjoy through the day
But soar 'bove the clouds,
perhaps see a new way

To enjoy a full life she didn't
think she'd deserve
Too far out of reach so far as
she could observe

The final decision she and she
alone must make
One heart is committed,
but both are at stake ~ Ken Maxon

From what I've gathered during the time I could stomach listening to your omegas exaggerate every good thing about you, Violet is going tonight to try to talk Arion into some deal with real peace between you two. It's cute how she thinks life is simply that simple. The omegas adore her just for trying to give it a shot."

He flicks an orange peel away after he licks it clean like he's the wolf.

"The only good part of all this is that I now know you'll never again get laid by those wolves, no matter how much they praise you to Violet. They've not just picked out a girlfriend; they've picked you out a mate."

I glare at him, and he just grins, never meeting my eyes.

"Too bad I'm way out ahead of you," he adds.

"I'd say Vance is winning, if this is a sprint instead of a marathon," I tell him, still not even sure if I actually want her or if I just want her long enough to piss them all off.

"Vance lucked into his moment and failed to follow-through with charming stalkery. She's leaving a window open for me at night now."

I roll my eyes as I start heading toward the omega wing. ~ Kristy Cunning

But will anyone again look at that tree, read that poem, love a dog in quite my way? I am a particular and, despite the commonness of all people, a unique person in the way I perceive and think and appreciate, and I am sad that this particularity shall before too long be gone. This is not arrogance; it is the simple truth, known to anyone who has loved a person dead in the fullness of her life: what we miss is the particularity, that unique voice. [pp. 184-185] ~ Carolyn G. Heilbrun

Feminism is a way of understanding reality, not just a series of things to do. Feminism challenges our predilection for one right answer, one right God, one size fits all.
As a feminist, one can be spiritual or secular. One can lead an outwardly conservative life and yet, in feminist terms, be profoundly radical. So too, feminist leaders (like everyone else) can be sexist, or racist, or class-blind, in either their professional or personal lives. Or in both.
Feminist of my generation told the truth about women's condition. We were messengers from the past, or from the future. As ever, some people thought that killing, or at least defaming, the messengers was a way of making us and our truths disappear.
I'm counting on you not to do that. ~ Phyllis Chesler

And her. What would she do without him?

She's not special, not like BB and Ghostly, who awe her with their intelligence and the things they're capable of, all their humbling potential. All she does is write - a lot - because it's fun. She's under no illusions, she's popular through quantity not quality, she's not bad but she is not Blackbindings and she never will be. She writes because it's fun. And she thinks about him, and what he does.

She works three jobs she hates, just to keep the bills paid. She wanted to get into journalism but she can't afford the internships. She already sees what her life will be like, she sees the path ahead, she knows there's no way off; she'll never not be working three dead end jobs she hates, she'll marry her boyfriend and unless there's an accident they'll decide almost too late that fuck it they'd better have those kids now or never, because they never will be able to afford them; she'll never do anything amazing, never be anything amazing, just a person in a world full of people, getting by.

But there's him. And every time she faces life and thinks she can't bear it, there's him. If he can be so brave, can't she manage the littlest bravery? Because - because her little pointless life that will never mean anything, that will have vanished beyond notice within hardly more than a hundred years if she has those kids to remember her, her dragging, struggling life of bills and broken pipes and fuck it it's anothe ~ Rainjoy

Jesus is ready to set us free from the heavy yoke of an oppressive way of life. Plenty of wealthy Christians are suffocating from the weight of the American dream, heavily burdened by the lifeless toil and consumption we embrace. This is the yoke from which we are being set free. And as we are liberated from the yoke of global capitalism, our sisters and brothers in Guatemala, Liberia, Iraq, and Sri Lanka will also be liberated. Our family overseas, who are making our clothes, growing our food, pumping our oil, and assembling our electronics
they too need to be liberated from the empire's yoke of slavery. Their liberation is tangled up with our own. ~ Shane Claiborne

What we all have discovered together, only rarely in classrooms, is that the passage of years guarantees very little in the way of answers, that ambivalence and ambiguity will follow us all the days of our lives, but that words and wit and woods and food and music will endure as sources of comfort.

We have learned that surprises exhilarate, if they don't barrage us too fast, and that the quest for the proper balances between stillness and motion, restraint and excess, sound and silence, will continue, and that too much freedom - a life too much at large…can feel at least as constricting as too little. We have learned, maybe most importantly of all, to cherish the company of those who can make us laugh, who can forgive us our shortcomings, who can restore to us or evoke in us a feeling of purpose in the face of absurdity. ~ Jane Howard

I'm not capable of turning you down," he said on a pained laugh, gaze devouring her breasts. "I'm going to take you to my bed and pleasure the fuck out of you. But the panties stay on. It's nonnegotiable."
Her entire system rebelled against his words. How could he touch her, kiss her like this, and refuse to take it all the way? It didn't make sense. Men didn't have that kind of willpower, did they? She certainly didn't have that kind of willpower. "W-what? Is it too late to give a different answer about why I changed my mind?"
"Yes. But don't worry, baby." Before she could
register his intention, he'd swung her up into his arms.
"Even with your panties on, it'll still be the best sex of your life. ~ Tessa Bailey

But if you were going to change the chain of events that killed your child, where would you begin? How far back would you go? All the way back to their birth? And how many times had you saved your child's life without even realizing how close you'd just come to disaster, to being one link too late in a chain of events that would wrap around your neck and choke you forever? How close had you come to knowing this place - the place where you collapse on your knees with one fist in your belly and the other clutching a blue GAP bag containing your baby's ruined clothes, the place from which there is no going back? ~ Kelly Kittel

My writing is often a way of 'bearing witness' for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own stories, so I hope that my writing won't be affected too much by my personal life. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I've tried to teach what I learned all those years in my mother and father's house, all those things I didn't realize I was learning and that I never knew I'd be so grateful for. When you have love and it's proffered every day in a kind of tender, yet stern insistence and even reckless laughter, when it is given to you and you accept it in life as a thing as natural as rain or snow, or the littler of leaves in fall, you can't help but take it for granted. For a bewildered while you incorrectly understand that the world has given you this becuase it's there in equal measure, everywhere. You never knowuntil it's too late to do anything about it, how seet the effort is: how lasting the human will to love can be in the breast of people who want to make it for you, who want to give it to you, without calculating what's in it fo them, without thinking at all of what it will mean when you grow to full adulthood, see the world as it is, and forget to mention what you have been given.

Ever day of my grown-up life, I have wanted to do what my parents did. I have wanted to widen the province of love and weaken hate and bitterness in the hearts of my children. And I've done these things because of what I got from my family, all those lovely years when I was growing up, being loved and cherished and, unbeknown to me, and in the best way, honored, for myself. ~ Marian Wright Edelman

Why?' says the boy.
'Why? Because staying alive is more important than anything else.'
'Why is staying alive more important than anything?'
He is about to answer, about to produce the correct, patient, educative words, when something wells up inside him. Anger? No. Irritation? No: more than that. Despair? Perhaps: despair in one of its minor forms. Why? Because he would like to believe he is guiding the child through the maze of the moral life when, correctly, patiently, he answers his unceasing 'Why' questions. But where is there any evidence that the child absorbs his guidance or even hears what he says?
He stops where he is on the busy sidewalk. Inés and the boy stop too, and stare at him in puzzlement. 'Think of it in this way,' he says. 'We are tramping through the desert, you and Inés and I. You tell me you are thirsty and I offer you a glass of water. Instead of drinking the water you pour it out in the sand. You say you thirst for answers: 'Why this? Why that?' I, because I am patient, because I love you, offer you an answer each time, which you pour away in the sand. Today, at last, I am tired of offering you water. 'Why is staying alive important?' If life does not seem important to you, so be it.'
Inés raises a hand to her mouth in dismay. As for the boy, his face sets in a frown. 'You say you love me but you don't love me,' he says. 'You just pretend. ~ J.M. Coetzee

Lots of talk lately about the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL that seems to be exclusively masculine. And how many of the characters in the GENIUS BOOKS are likable? Is Holden Caulfield likable? Is Meursault in The Stranger? Is Henry Miller? Is any character in any of these system novels particularly likable? Aren't they usually loathsome but human, etc., loathsome and neurotic and obsessed? In my memory, all the characters in Jonathan Franzen are total douchebags (I know, I know, I'm not supposed to use that, feminine imagery, whatever, but it is SO satisfying to say and think). How about female characters in the genius books? Was Madame Bovary likable? Was Anna Karenina? Is Daisy Buchanan likable? Is Daisy Miller? Is it the specific way in which supposed readers HATE unlikable female characters (who are too depressed, too crazy, too vain, too self-involved, too bored, too boring), that mirrors the specific way in which people HATE unlikable girls and women for the same qualities? We do not allow, really, the notion of the antiheroine, as penned by women, because we confuse the autobiographical, and we pass judgment on the female author for her terrible self-involved and indulgent life. We do not hate Scott Fitzgerald in "The Crack-Up" or Georges Bataille in Guilty for being drunken and totally wading in their own pathos, but Jean Rhys is too much of a victim. ~ Kate Zambreno

You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can't remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind. And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.
But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. YOu have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive. ~ Wendell Berry

What we call happiness is sometimes the accordance between our life and circumstances,our biography and history ,our personal aspirations and historical currents .If i look at things that way,I can say : I was born too early to be happy.But birth is one of the many things we do not get to choose.It's part of our destiny.
If I were offered life again,I would refuse it. But ,If i had to be born again. I would choose my life ~ Alija Izetbegovic

I do not believe, as do so many musicians, that genius should be left to fight its way to the light. Genius is too rare, too precious, to be permitted to waste the best years of life
the years of youth and lofty dreams
in a heart-breaking struggle for bread. To starve the soul with the body is to do worse than murder. Think, too, of what the public loses! ~ Ignacy Jan Paderewski

If you are reading this book and you feel that way too then you are not alone. I understand how you feel. I think that anyone who has suffered from even mild depression understands how it feels. Yet we forget that others understand our suffering. We withdraw, isolate or shut down completely. We lose ourselves in our selves, and in the illness.
It doesn't have to be that way. If we connect with even one other human being who understands, we take one step out of the illness. Life is about connection. There is nothing else. Depression is the opposite; it is an illness defined by alienation. So I offer this book by way of connection. I offer it, too, as a source of hope. I hope that by sharing what I was like, what happened and what I am like now, that it may bring someone else comfort. ~ Sally Brampton

Our instructors do not understand how it is. To be bound to someone in such a way. They are too old, too out of touch with their emotions. They no longer remember what it is to live and breathe within the world. They think it simple to pit any two people against each other. It is never simple. The other person becomes how you define your life, how you define yourself. They become as necessary as breathing. Then they expect the victor to continue on without that. It would be like pulling the Murray twins apart and expecting them to be the same. They would be whole but not complete. ~ Erin Morgenstern

Modern Christianity, in dramatic reversal of its biblical form, promises to relieve the pain of living in a fallen world. Then message, whether it's from fundamentalists requiring us to live by a favored set of rules or from charismatics urging a deeper surrender to the Spirit's power, is too often the same: The promise of bliss is for now! Complete satisfaction can be ours this side of heaven. Some speak of the joys of fellowship and obedience, others of a rich awareness of their value and worth. The language may be reassuringly biblical or it may reflect the influence of current psychological thought. Either way, the point of living the Christian life has shifted from knowing and serving Christ till He returns to soothing, or at least learning to ignore, the ache in our soul. ~ Larry Crabb

With the persistence of data, there is, too, the persistence of people. If you friend someone as a ten-year-old, it takes positive action to unfriend that person. In principle, everyone wants to stay in touch with the people they grew up with but social networking makes the idea of "people from one's past" close to an anachronism. Corbin reaches for a way to express his discomfort. he says "For the first time, people will stay your friends. It makes it harder to let go of your life and move on." Sanjay, sixteen, who wonders if he will be "writing on my friends' walls when I'm a grown-up," sums up his misgivings: "For the first time people can stay in touch with people all of their lives. But it used to be good that people could leave their high school friends behind and take on new identities. ~ Sherry Turkle

Writing is not always a priority. . . .I only write those things that are necessary for me to write. I love to write, and when I'm not writing, I often feel as if I'm betraying my art, my gift, my calling, but that sensation is probably hubris or neurosis as much as anything else. The problem, and one of the joys of writing poetry, is that none of us can really count on entering the canon. The chances are that none of our work will survive long after we're gone. That's just the way it is. To feel otherwise is foolish. we write in competition with the dead for the attention of the unborn. We are writing poems that are trying to take the attention of people away from Sappho, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Baudelaire. Good luck to you! There's a built-in failure to writing poetry that I find comforting.
If you know you're doomed to failure, then you can work freely. People who think their work is going to last, or that it matters, well . . . I always try to disabuse my students of their desire to write for fame. I ask them, "Who here has read Shakespeare?" Everyone raises his or her hand. We agree that his work is immortal, then I remind them: "he's still dead. He's as dead as he'd have been if you hadn't read him; and you'll be dead too someday, no matter how well you write." To sacrifice your life for your art is an appalling notion. On the other hand, I have been called to be a poet, ad it's an unimaginably rich gift. Like every artist, I know that in order to be a moral, eff ~ Tony Leuzzi

I know that no one has ever looked at me this way. I know that this connection is not just one-sided, that she feels it too. I know that I scare her and fascinate her as much as she scares and fascinates me. I know that sooner or later I will fuck her, that she will enjoy it. That I will enjoy it. And somehow, with certainty that exceeds every other fact that I've come to accept in this space of seconds, I know that my life will never be the same again. ~ Laurelin Paige

But if we understand anything of the unconscious, we know that it cannot be swallowed. We also know that it is dangerous to suppress it, because the unconscious is life and this life turns against us if suppressed, as happens in neurosis. Conscious and unconscious do not make a whole when one of them is suppressed and injured by the other. If they must contend, at least let it be a fair fight with equal rights on both sides. Both are aspects of life. Consciousness should defend its reason and protect itself, and the chaotic life of the unconscious should be given the chance of having its way too - as much of it as we can stand. This means open conflict and open collaboration at once. That, evidently, is the way human life should be. It is the old game of hammer and anvil: between them the patient iron is forged into an indestructible whole, an 'individual.' This, roughly, is what I mean by the individuation process. ~ C. G. Jung

I had the feeling of slipping down a smooth bottomless pit. It had nothing to do with Breuer and the people. It had nothing to do with Pat even. It was the melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them; that love begins with a human being but does not end in him; and that everything can be there: a human being, love, happiness, life - and that yet in some terrible way it is always too little, and grows ever less the more it seems. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

The way we live our lives is not sustainable. I don't just mean recycling and turning off the faucet while brushing your teeth. I mean the way we treat each other. The way we pick and choose whose lives are important – who we actually treat as human. There is nobody on this earth whose life is not of value. And that includes those of us who have been left behind. Maybe they did go to some Christian heaven. But what I'm saying is, we're good people too. We're worthwhile people. I'd vouch for every last one of you. ~ Katie Coyle

Don't shut love out of your life by saying it's impossible to find time. The quickest way to receive love is to give; the fastest way to lose love is to hold it too tightly; and the best way to keep love is to give it wings. ~ Brian Dyson

Dear Gerald,

I know it's a little early for me to be saying this, but I think you're probably the best friend I've ever had.
This isn't saying much because I've never had a best friend.
Once I thought I had a best friend, but then she started to get interested in clothes and we ended up not being friends anymore.

I like you a lot because you give a shit, Gerald. You really give a shit.
I know we don't talk much about some stuff because of the rules, but I never felt like anyone could give a shit about Hannah McCarthy.
Everyone knows I'm the junkman's daughter and I decided awhile ago that I was okay with that because there's nothing I can do about that.
And today you turn 17 and I think it's about time that you know that you're the boy from TV and until you leave here, you will always be the boy from TV and I will always be the junkman's daughter.
And I feel a bond with you because of this.
Because neither of us is happy here and I want to find a way out.
Out of Blue Marsh. Of my life. Of my house, of my family. I want a way out. And it looks like you want that, too.
I know this girl from my old job and she wanted out of her family, too, and so she married a guy when she was 17.
Don't worry, I'm not about to propose to you. But I also think that maybe we could find a way out early.
I can't handle senior year. I can't handle another day as Cinderella. I can't handle one more day of living like the j ~ A.S. King

Lao-tzu didn't actually say very much more about the meaning of Tao. The Way of Nature, the Way of happening self-so, or, if you like, the very process of life, was something which he was much too wise to define. For to try to say anything definite about the Tao is like trying to eat your mouth: you can't get outside it to chew it. To put it the other way round: anything you can chew is not your mouth. ~ Alan W. Watts

I don't know, and have no intention of finding out. IQ is like dick size - if you have to measure, you're way too invested in it. And both are gauche to discuss in polite company. (Upon being asked his IQ on Quora) ~ Adrian Lamo

Can I trust him again? Even after all he said? If I do and I'm wrong, the cost is too high. My life. "You'll wait for me to agree to go back with you?" I want to be clear on this point. "You won't force me in any way? Or reveal yourself to anyone, no matter what?"
"I'll wait," he promises. "However long you need."
He'll wait. But he'll be lurking about. Nearby. Watching. And I won't always know it.
Funny how things change. In the beginning, I thought I could never stay here. Now I don't want to leave. Mostly because of Will, but also because I've decided to give Mom and Tamra what they want. A chance. It can't be all about me. If I'm strong enough, smart enough, my draki can make it. And of course, Will can help with that. A few kisses. A smile. A brush of his hand and my draki is revived. And I no longer have to hide it from him.
I can last through high school. For Mom, for Tamra. After graduation, I can go with Will when he cuts free from his family. Just two more years. We'll figure out the specifics. The how and where. For the first time since coming here, I feel the stirrings of hope. I won't let Cassian ruin that.
"You're going to wait forever," I vow. "I won't change my mind."
Cassian's mouth curves enigmatically. Like he knows something I don't. He's eighteen, but in that moment I can believe he has several more years than that on me. "Things change all the time. People change. I'll take my chances."
I shake my head. "You'll see. I w ~ Sophie Jordan

I have been married twice, and those were not the happiest times of my life. Part of the problem, quite frankly, is that when you get married, the romance disappears and the children arrive and the love is transferred. It shouldn't be that way, but too often it is transferred to the children. ~ Hugh Hefner

Weight (too much or too little) is a by-product. Weight is what happens when you use food to flatten your life. Even with aching joints, it's not about food. Even with arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure. It's about your desire to flatten your life. It's about the fact that you've given up without saying so. It's about your belief that it's not possible to live any other way
and you're using food to act that out without ever having to admit it. (p. 53) ~ Geneen Roth

I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It's always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers- the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and he Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees-must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers.
Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, always flowing but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along andante, sometimes surging over rapids furioso, sometimes meandering wit hardly any visible movement tranquilo, lento, ppp pianissimo, sometimes gurgling giacoso with pleasure, sometimes sparkling brillante in the sun, sometimes lacrimoso, sometimes appassionato, sometimes misterioso, sometimes pesante, sometimes legato, sometimes staccato, sometimes sospirando, sometimes vivace, and always, I hope, amoroso.
Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there's too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I st ~ Aidan Chambers

Seeing is itself touched with elegy. Reality seems to press its light into us, it is happening, but that's not the way things are. The eye can process only so many images per second, taking in sights the way a camera takes a series of stills. The reality we see is the sketchpad comics we made as kids, me and my brothers and sister. Draw a stickman taking a step on one page, and on the next draw that same figure, only his foot is slightly further ahead, and again on the next page, draw this figure, but with his foot on the ground. Flip through them quickly, and he appears to walk. That's the mechanics of the eye, too. We think we are seeing life as it happens, but pictures are missing. Moments disappear between the stills and make up our unwitnessed lives. To see is to miss things. Loss is always with us. ~ Ryan Knighton