Living Life On The Edge Quotes

I think it's the misperception of addiction and living life on the edge, as if it's cool. ~ Mariel Hemingway

No, you don't know what it's like
When nothing feels all right
You don't know what it's like
To be like me
To be hurt
To feel lost
To be left out in the dark
To be kicked when you're down
To feel like you've been pushed around
To be on the edge of breaking down
And no one's there to save you
No, you don't know what it's like
Welcome to my life ~ Simple Plan

Something else gets under your skin, keeps you working days and nights at the sacrifice of your sleeping and eating and attention to your family and friends, something beyond the love of puzzle solving. And that other force is the anticipation of understanding something about the world that no one has ever understood before you.

Einstein wrote that when he first realized that gravity was equivalent to acceleration -- an idea that would underlie his new theory of gravity -- it was the "happiest thought of my life." On projects of far smaller weight, I have experienced that pleasure of discovering something new. It is an exquisite sensation, a feeling of power, a rush of the blood, a sense of living forever. To be the first vessel to hold this new thing.

All of the scientists I've known have at least one more quality in common: they do what they do because they love it, and because they cannot imagine doing anything else. In a sense, this is the real reason a scientist does science. Because the scientist must. Such a compulsion is both blessing and burden. A blessing because the creative life, in any endeavor, is a gift filled with beauty and not given to everyone, a burden because the call is unrelenting and can drown out the rest of life.

This mixed blessing and burden must be why the astrophysicist Chandrasekhar continued working until his mid-80's, why a visitor to Einstein's apartment in Bern found the young physicist rocking his infant wit ~ Alan Lightman

I felt as though the temple curtain had been drawn aside without warning and I, a goggle-eyed stranger somehow mistaken for an initiate, had been ushered into the sanctuary to witness the mystery of mysteries. I saw a phantasmagoria, a living tapestry of forms jeweled in minute detail. They danced together like guests at a rowdy wedding. They changed their shapes. Within themselves they juggled geometrical shards like the fragments in a kaleidoscope. They sent forth extensions of themselves like the flares of suns. Yet all their activity was obviously interrelated; each being's actions were in step with its neighbors'. They were like bees swarming: They obviously recognised each other and were communicating avidly, but it was impossible to know what they were saying. They enacted a pageant whose beauty awed me.

As the lights came back on, the auditorium seemed dull and unreal.I'd been watching various kinds of ordinary cells going about their daily business, as seen through a microscope and recorded by the latest time-lapse movie techniques. The filmmaker frankly admitted that neither he nor anyone else knew just what the cells were doing, or how and why they were doing it. We biologists, especially during our formative years in school, spent most of our time dissecting dead animals and studying preparations of dead cells stained to make their structures more easily visible - "painted tombstones," as someone once called them. Of course, we all knew that life was m ~ Robert O. Becker

The clouds won't shatter my dreams, but this is a story about how I lost myself to the storm."
"And something's got me tethered to you ... "
"Always to you ... "
"They think I'm crazy ... I love him. I swear, I do."
"Then why are you here, T?"
"Esto es complicado, Eli. It's all the lies I made up to get away from you, the distance I drove to free myself, that's brought me here. It's that moment before your kiss and the sound of my name on your lips. It's you that's taken me the five miles I needed to be where you are. I won't run again."
"What are we doing?"
"We're LIVING. ~ Nadege Richards

If we want to be able to pick up the pieces of our lives and go on living, we have to get over the irrational
feeling that every misfortune is our fault, the direct result of our mistakes or misbehavior. We are really not that powerful. Not everything
that happens in the world is our doin ~ Harold S. Kushner

Life is the fundamental essence of all reality. It doesn't emerge, and it never dies. Life simply is. It's the inherent quality of everything that is or is not. Under certain conditions, life awakens, and we call it living. But eventually all living forms decay and through so-called death, life transforms back into its elementary stage; the infinite potential for expression. We comprehend such transition as dying, but death is just a term we invented to mark the end of living. Everything that is born and dies is an expression of so-called absolute Life, which exists as a continuum in everything, everywhere, always, and on all levels, forever seeking new ways of becoming alive. We should, therefore, replace the popular saying "it's all about life and death" with "it's all about birth and death, while life is eternal. ~ Joseph Rain

There is just this moment. This now. I take him back into my mouth. I run my tongue over every part of his cock as if my tongue were a memory machine that will hold this shape inside me forever. I move up and down, finding rhythm, as I had done as a girl skipping with a rope. I want to bite him, chew him all up, swallow him down. He grows tense, rigid. I hear the milling of his breath, the quickening beat of his heart and, when he comes, his sperm is warm and fruity, a hint of the sea, a taste that will stay on the edge of my senses for the rest of my life. ~ Chloe Thurlow

Closure is an illusion, the winking of the eye of a storm. Nothing is completely resolved in life, nothing is perfect. The important thing is to keep living because only by living can you see what happens next." - on Murakami's 'Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage' in The New York Times ~ Patti Smith

The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else
we are the busiest people in the world. ~ Eric Hoffer

If you genuinely care about someone, you won't let them ruin themselves. It's as simple as that.
Don't use your 'supportive friend' excuse to justify your ignorance.
If someone in your life is living a self-destructive lifestyle, don't encourage them. Don't stand on the sidelines and watch. Do something.
Tell them they're worth more than that. That they're bigger than what they're facing. Tell them there are better ways to heal. Better ways to grow.
Tell them they can be friends with better people.Tell them there's no escape from reality but it only gets better if you face it. Tell them they're killing themselves slowly by intaking drugs.
Tell them you love them and don't want them to get hurt. Tell them that you care.

Do. Everything. You. Can.
Because even if they may not listen, at least you'll know you tried. ~ Ambu

He pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the road and parked, cell phone tight in one hand, his eyes on the landscape before him. From here he could see the foothills rippling out like a blanket from the ragged edge of the mountains. They spread in loose folds until becoming the flat expanse of prairie that crossed all the way to the Great Lakes. July's bounty was a brash flare of colour: wind combed through golden tracts of wheat and sun-bright canola so brilliant he had to squint.
The truck was balanced along the edge of an invisible wall which blocked Waterton from the rest of the world. He hadn't thought about how very real that barrier was; now that his phone was reconnected, it felt like a physical presence. He wasn't quite sure what he'd find on the other side. ~ Danika Stone

What made more sense was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing. The bargain was already in force. Days and years and feelings much the same, except that the children would grow up, and there might be one or two more of them and they too would grow up, and she and Brendan would grow older and then old.
It was not until now, not until this moment, that she had seen so clearly that she was counting on something happening, something which would change her life. She had accepted her marriage as one big change, but not as the last one.
So, nothing now but what she or anybody else could sensibly foresee. That was to be her happiness, that was what she had bargained for, nothing secret, or strange.
Pay attention to this, she thought. She had a dramatic notion of getting down on her knees. This is serious...
It was a long time ago that this happened. In North Vancouver, when they lived in the Post and Beam house. When she was twenty-four years old and new to bargaining. ~ Alice Munro

Hershey Pennsylvania was self-proclaimed as the "Sweetest Place On Earth," but less advertised than chocolate, it was also home to one of the state's largest Children's Hospitals. The streets lined with Hershey Kiss–shaped streetlamps that led excited children and families on vacation to chocolate tour rides and rollercoasters were the same exact streets that led anxious children and families to x-rays and MRIs on the worsts days of their lives.
Chocolate was being created on the same street that childhood diseases were being diagnosed. And that was life. The sweetest of sensations and the deepest of devastations live next door to each other. ~ Tessa Shaffer

If peace comes from seeing the whole,
then misery stems from a loss of perspective.

We begin so aware and grateful. The sun somehow hangs there in the sky. The little bird sings. The miracle of life just happens. Then we stub our toe, and in that moment of pain, the whole world is reduced to our poor little toe. Now, for a day or two, it is difficult to walk. With every step, we are reminded of our poor little toe.

Our vigilance becomes: Which defines our day - the pinch we feel in walking on a bruised toe, or the miracle still happening?

It is the giving over to smallness that opens us to misery. In truth, we begin taking nothing for granted, grateful that we have enough to eat, that we are well enough to eat. But somehow, through the living of our days, our focus narrows like a camera that shutters down, cropping out the horizon, and one day we're miffed at a diner because the eggs are runny or the hash isn't seasoned just the way we like.

When we narrow our focus, the problem seems everything. We forget when we were lonely, dreaming of a partner. We forget first beholding the beauty of another. We forget the comfort of first being seen and held and heard. When our view shuts down, we're up in the night annoyed by the way our lover pulls the covers or leaves the dishes in the sink without soaking them first.

In actuality, misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything. So, when feeling miserable, we m ~ Mark Nepo

You dare travel on the own sacred road. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Sometimes she'd just walk around the city alone. Watch the people, smell the food, the bus exhaust, the smoke coming up through the grating. She'd feel protected somehow, found a sense of belonging in the hectic sprawl. And the next minute she'd feel like the one who couldn't break the code, hit the right stride, catch the wave. Potholes and traffic and bums, oh my. With all the honking and the hum of movement, the living, breathing blur of noise gently pressing in on her, the great purr of the Metropolitan Cat turning into a dull roar. She'd feel so silent on the inside, her head as quiet as a stretch of sand, a cathedral silently worshipping the life that was all around her, storing it up for later when she needed some 'too much' to draw upon. ~ Carrie Fisher

And maybe they don't because they're under the misapprehension that because I talk about race a lot, that I must love talking about it. I don't. And I'll let you in on a little secret about what other black people rarely say: Explaining your life to a world that doesn't care to listen is often more draining than living in it. ~ Phoebe Robinson

Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies - my only talent - smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall - on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire. ~ Walker Percy

There are men who, at the bottom of the ladder, battle to rise; they study, struggle, keep their wits alive and eventually get up to a place where they are received as an equal among respectable intellectuals. Here they find warmth and comfort for their pride, and here the struggle ends, and a death of many years commences. They could have gone on living. ~ Robert Henri

But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. ~ David Foster Wallace

We have a saying up here. 'Life is wasted on the living. ~ Douglas Adams

What if we all carried little timers that counted down the days of our lives? Maybe the timer's a bit dramatic. Just the date would do. It could be tattooed on our foreheads like the expiration date on a milk bottle. It might be a good thing. Maybe we'd stop wasting our lives worrying about things that never happen or collecting things that we can't take with us. We'd probably treat people better. We certainly wouldn't be screaming at someone who had a day left. Maybe people would finally stop living like they're immortal. Maybe we could finally learn how to live. ~ Richard Paul Evans

Well, then I'll die.' Sooner than other people, obviously. But everybody knows that life isn't worth living. And when it came down to it, I wasn't unaware of the fact that it doesn't matter very much whether you die at thirty or at seventy since, in either case, other men and women will naturally go on living, for thousands of years even. Nothing was plainer, in fact. It was still only me who was dying, whether it was now or in twenty years' time. ~ Albert Camus

I am sick and tired of coming good on expectations. ~ Parul Wadhwa

Max's unflinching gaze never left that house.
"What do you think's going to happen?" Jules asked him quietly, "if you let yourself peel that giant S off your shirt and take a nap? If you let yourself spend an hour, an evening, screw it, a whole weekend doing nothing more than breaking and taking enjoyment from living in the moment? What's going to happen, Max, if - after this is over - you give yourself permission to actually enjoy Gina's company? To sit with her arms around you and let yourself be happy. You don't have to be happy forever - just for that short amount of time."
Max didn't say anything.
So Jules went on. "And then maybe you could let yourself be happy again the next weekend. Not too happy," he added quickly. "We wouldn't want that. But just happy in a small way, because this amazing woman is part of your life, because she makes you smile and probably fucks like a dream and yeah - see? You are listening. Don't kill me, I was just making sure you hadn't checked out."
Max was giving him that look. "Are you done?"
"Oh, sweetie, we have nowhere to go and hours til dawn. I'm just getting started."
Shit, Max said with his body language. But he didn't stand up and walk away. He just sat there.
Across the street, nothing moved. And then it still didn't move. But once again, Max was back to watching it not move.
Jules let the silence go for an entire minute and a half. "Just in case I didn't make myself clear," he said, "I believe ~ Suzanne Brockmann

In all honesty, I don't envy you the possession of this power over memory, nor do I admire you. Because humans are usually completely unconcerned with the memories of other creatures. Human existence involves the willful destruction of the existential memories of other creatures and of your own memories as well. No life can survive without other lives, with the ecological memories of other living creatures have, memories of the environments in which the live. People don't realize they need to rely on the memories of other organisms to survive. You think that flowers bloom in colorful profusion just to please your eyes. That a wild boar exists just to provide meat for your table. That a fish takes the bait just for you sake. That only you can mourn. That a stone falling into a gorge is of no significance. That a sambar deer, its head bent low to sip at a creek is not a revelation . . . When in fact the finest movement of any organism represents a change in an ecosystem." The man with the compound eyes takes a deep sign and says: "But if you were any different you wouldn't be human. ~ Wu Ming-Yi

There are mainly four types of living beings: vegetables, parasites, animals and humans. Vegetables go through life without any conscience of what it means to be alive, and all they can do is react to what happens around them and unto them. Parasites take advantage of others beings to survive but cannot survive on their own. In fact, they rather kill their host than to improve themselves independently. Animals are driven by basic instincts, like sex and pleasure for food. Animals can have attachments but that is as far as they go in what concerns love. Now human, they are capable of all that, plus the ability to love on will, to change, help others change, and create any reality they want to experience. However, almost everyone I encounter, is either pretending to be a plant, a parasite or an animal, not a human. Few people know what it means to be human, and that's how the waste their own existence. This said, we wouldn't need to answer questions about life purpose when the purpose is understood in being what one was born to be. ~ Robin Sacredfire

The way I see it," Miles went on, "it's no good hiding yourself away, like Pa and lots of other people. And it's no good just thinking of your own pleasure, either. People got to do something useful if they're going to take up space in the world. ~ Natalie Babbitt

Fiction
at least for me
requires long, relatively uninterrupted time stretches in which to bring it to fruition. I've never been a two-hour-in-the-morning writer, who could put in another six hours on Sunday afternoon. For me, a novel requires weeks of living in a largely mental and wholly internal landscape. Everything else has to be relegated to the odd hour here, the bit of time there. Sadly, however, uninterrupted time blocks are not what life doles out today to any of us with regularity. ~ Samuel R. Delany

To know our own self is bliss. To see themselves clearly, a person must plunge themselves into the world they inhabit. We enhance our personal perspective by acquiring knowledge of the world. The more one knows about living through vivid personal encounters in the world that they occupy, the more that a person will come to understand him or herself. Self-knowledge requires an honest accounting of a person's experiences, frank admission of their furtive desires, and gracious acceptance of reality without surrendering their willingness to work to improve oneself and comfort other people. By attaching images to their real life experiences and secret dreams, a person learns rightly about the world. By writing about what adversities they experienced, a person can consciously go about integrating new ideas into their way of living. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Life and death are balanced on the edge of a razor. ~ Homer

The Christian mystic therefore is one for whom God and Christ are not merely objects of belief, but living facts experimentally known first hand; and mysticism for him becomes, in so far as he responds to its demands, a life based on this conscious communion with God ~ Carl McColman

Love is the only flame that set the soul on fire. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise rebellion: to refuse to tape yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge - and then you are going to live your life on a tightrope. ~ Philippe Petit

We believe and we hold our beliefs to be true and sacred until the day we discover that we were duped. The end of belief is a challenging moment. You feel lonely, unconnected, with nothing to hang on. Your life becomes empty and aimless. You curse the day doubt entered your mind but you cannot undo the damage. You need to find a new direction for your life, something new to hang your hope on to continue living. And most of the time that thing is you. At that junction in life you will need to believe in yourself to continue living. ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

All life produces waste. The act of living produces costs, hazards and disposal questions, and so the Ministry has found itself in the center of all life, mitigating, guiding and policing the detritus of the average person along with investigating the infractions of the greedy and short-sighted, the ones who wish to make quick profits and trade on others' lives for it. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

Nowhere on the shore is the relation of a creature to its surroundings a matter of a single cause and effect; each living thing is bound to its world by many threads, weaving the intricate design of the fabric of life. ~ Rachel Carson

He could not feel that they were an island of life journeying through an abyss of death. He felt almost the opposite--that life was waiting outside the little iron egg-shell in which they rode, ready at any moment to break in, and that, if it killed them, it would kill them by excess of its vitality. He hoped passionately that if they were to perish they would perish by the "unbodying" of the space-ship and not by suffocation within it. To be let out, to be free, to dissolve into the ocean of eternal noon, seemed to him at certain moments a consummation even more desirable than their return to Earth. And if he had felt some such lift of the heart when first he passed through heaven on their outward journey, he felt it now tenfold, for now he was convinced that the abyss was full of life in the most literal sense, full of living creatures. ~ C.S. Lewis

At noontime in midsummer, when the sun is at its highest and everything is in a state of embroiled repose, flashes may be seen in the southern sky. Into the radiance of daylight come bursts of light even more radiant. Exactly half a year later, when the fjord is frozen over and the land buried in snow, the very same spirit taunts creation. At night cracks in the ice race from one end of the fjord to the other, resounding like gunshots or like the roaring of a mad demon.
The peasants dig tunnels from their door through the drifts over to the cow shed. Where are the trolls and the elves now, and where are the sounds of nature? Even the Beast may well be dead and forgotten. Life itself hangs in suspension - existence has shrunk to nothingness. Now it is only a question of survival. The fox thrashes around in a blizzard in the oak thicket and fights his way out, mortally terrified.
It is a time of stillness. Hoarfrost lies in a timeless shroud over the fjord. All day long a strange, sighing sound is heard from out on the ice. It is a fisherman, standing alone at his hole and spearing eel.
One night it snows again. The air is sheer snow and the wind a frigid blast. No living creature is stirring. Then a rider comes to the crossing at Hvalpsund. There is no difficulty in getting over­ - he does not even slacken his speed, but rides at a brisk trot from the shore out onto the ice.
The hoofbeats thunder beneath him and the ice roars for miles around. He reaches th ~ Johannes V. Jensen

But I was living my life sideway. I did not act on what I wanted, I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted; no matter what I was doing, I was always imagining something else. ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

Don't count on cheerleaders once you start living a life more reflective of your truth. They may not want to do somersaults and backflips for your awakening, not when they're still asleep. Don't let that stop you. Most of us have only been trained to cheer for conformity, to commend those who are just like us. But aren't you bored of being congratulated for fitting
in? Aren't you tired of ignoring your heart's requests?
Don't wait for cheerleaders. Be grateful if they show up, but you show up regardless, with or without them.
You will never be defined by the reception you get from others, only by the truth with which you receive yourself. Be your biggest cheerleader. Love yourself. And applaud every single step you take toward truth. ~ Scott Stabile