We Spend Half Our Lives Quotes

We have about three hours of homework a night, and our evening study period is only two hours, so if you want to spend the break at half-past-nine not freaking out, you have to cram. I'm not sure that the picture of the wide-eyed zombie girl biting out the brains of senior douchebag James Page is part of Sam's homework, bit if it is, his physics teacher is awesome. ~ Holly Black

Many of us spend half our time wishing for things we could have if we didn't spend half our time wishing. ~ Alexander Woollcott

For instance, there is no light without darkness - and this troubles many of us - but without it, how else would we tell one from the other? We spend half of every day in darkness; surely we should make our peace with this. ~ Mark Frost

we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us. "(…)
That's tough for a lot of people in important positions to accept, since it challenges something that might be even more powerful than capitalism, and that is the fetish of centrism - of reasonableness, seriousness, splitting the difference, and generally not getting overly excited about anything. This is the habit of thought that truly rules our era, far more among the liberals who concern themselves with matters of climate policy than among conservatives, many of whom simply deny the existence of the crisis. Climate change presents a profound challenge to this cautious centrism because half measures won't cut it. (…)
The challenge, then, is not simply that we need to spend a lot of money and change a lot of policies; it's that we need to think differently, radically differently, for those changes to be remotely possible. Right now, the triumph of market logic, with its ethos of domination and fierce competition, is paralyzing almost all serious efforts to respond to climate change. (…)
It seems to me that our problem has a lot less to do with the mechanics of solar power than the politics of human power - specifically whether there can be a shift in who wields ~ Naomi Klein

We spend about 20 percent of our total sleep time in a dream state. For most of us, this means we dream one and a half hours each night or, on the average, spend four years of our lifetime in a dream state. ~ Patricia Garfield

What are we going to tell the Intergalactic Council of Ministers the first time one of our teenage mothers threw her newborn baby into a dumpster, huh? How're we gonna explain that to the space people? How are we gonna let them know that our ambassador was only late for the meeting because his breakfast was cold and he had to spend half an hour punching his wife around the kitchen? What are they gonna think when they find out that it's just a local custom that over 80 million women in the Third World have had their clitorises forcibly removed in order to reduce their sexual pleasures so they won't cheat on their husbands? Can't you just sense how eager the rest of the universe is for us to show up? Can't you see them out there? ~ George Carlin

It's hard, to live in the present. Right this minute. We spend most of our time in the past. Or in the future…about half in each. But to live in the present! Hardly anybody can do it. ~ Karin Fossum

I am against allowing the CIA to spend $25 million since 1947 for the express purpose, as stated before, to alter our behavior. Is the State supreme over individuals? Who owns or controls our minds? Why was CIA Director Allen Dulles allowed to order 100 million LSD tablets? Were half the U.S. population going to receive their doses? What gives the CIA and Pentagon the right to define normal, or to determine what is national security? Are we being drugged through food, water and supplied with chemicals so we become slaves and robots? Where is all the cancer coming from? Why the preoccupation with death? Why is the U.S. Government in the business of creating a "Psycho-civilized" world? Who is ordering the ultrasonic waves to lower brain waves of city populations to an alpha state, leaving citizens susceptible to mass propaganda and hypnotic suggestion? These facts have been confirmed by researcher Walter Bowart in 1977. I learned about the project years ago. ~ Mae Brussell

You said before that you were tired. Well, I'm tired, too. Tired of letting everything stay unsaid. We spend all our time together, and we do it because we want to, right? And I guess I think a lot about that, and about us. And about … well, more. Us having more. It's not about lust or sex or whatever you want to call it. I mean, some of it is that. But mostly it's about belonging. When I'm with you, I belong. It just naturally felt like that. And I think it felt like that for you. But I don't know where that leaves us, or even what that is. I'm just tired of trying to figure it out myself. I need the other half of the equation. ~ David Levithan

I think our support for the EEC has been very half-hearted. You really cannot join any group of nations and spend all your time criticizing it. The EEC is free Europe getting together. Had we had some vision like that after the First World War, we might never had the Second. My son does not have to go and fight as his father had to fight. Surely that is the most valuable thing of all, the reason for keeping Europe together. ~ Margaret Thatcher

If we reduce batch sizes by half, we also reduce by half the time it will take to process a batch. That means we reduce queue and wait by half as well. Reduce those by half, and we reduce by about half the total time parts spend in the plant. Reduce the time parts spend in the plant and our total lead time condenses. And with faster turn-around on orders, customers get their orders faster. ~ Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Trina, I never expected to fall in love again. I thought I got my shot, and I was okay with that, because I had my girls. I didn't realize anything was missing. Then came you."
Ms. Rothschild's hands are covering her mouth. She has tears in her eyes.
"I want to spend the rest of my life with you, Trina." Ms. Rothschild starts choking on her candy, and Daddy leaps up off his knee and starts pounding her on the back. She's coughing like crazy.
From his tree Peter whispers, "Should I go do the Heimlich on her? I know how to do it."
"Peter, my dad's a doctor!" I whisper back. "He's got it."
As her coughing subsides, she stands up straight and wipes her eyes. "Wait. Were you asking me to marry you?"
"I was trying to," Daddy says. "Are you all right?"
"Yes!" She claps her hands to her cheeks.
"Yes, you're all right, or yes, you'll marry me?" Daddy asks her, and he's only half kidding.
"Yes, I'll marry you!" she screams, and Daddy reaches for her, and they kiss.
"This feels private," I whisper to Kitty.
"It's all part of the show," she whispers back.
Daddy hands Ms. Rothschild the ring box. I can't quite make out what he says next, but whatever it was, it makes her double over laughing.
"What's he saying?" Kitty asks me, just as Peter says, "What did he say?"
"I can't hear! Both of you be quiet! You're ruining the video!"
Which is when Ms. Rothschild looks over in our direction.
Shoot.
We all pop ba ~ Jenny Han

We spend the early years feeding our brains with information and the latter half trying not to think about it all. ~ George Carlin

I wish America would spend even half as much time complaining about plastics in our oceans as we do about actresses' plastic surgery. ~ Bette Midler

How yet resolves the governor of the town?
This is the latest parle we will admit;
Therefore to our best mercy give yourselves;
Or like to men proud of destruction
Defy us to our worst: for, as I am a soldier,
A name that in my thoughts becomes me best,
If I begin the battery once again,
I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur
Till in her ashes she lie buried.
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the flesh'd soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants.
What is it then to me, if impious war,
Array'd in flames like to the prince of fiends,
Do, with his smirch'd complexion, all fell feats
Enlink'd to waste and desolation?
What is't to me, when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?
What rein can hold licentious wickedness
When down the hill he holds his fierce career?
We may as bootless spend our vain command
Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil
As send precepts to the leviathan
To come ashore. Therefore, you men of Harfleur,
Take pity of your town and of your people,
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil and villa ~ William Shakespeare

One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works. ~ Willa Cather

For half a century now, a new consciousness has been entering the human world, a new awareness that can only be called transcendent, spiritual. If you find yourself reading this book, then perhaps you already sense what is happening, already feel it inside. It begins with a heightened perception of the way our lives move forward. We notice those chance events that occur at just the right moment, and bring forth just the right individuals, to suddenly send our lives in a new and important direction. Perhaps more than any other people in any other time, we intuit higher meaning in these mysterious happenings.

We know that life is really about a spiritual unfolding that is personal and enchanting an unfolding that no science or philosophy or religion has yet fully clarified. And we know something else as well: know that once we do understand what is happening, how to engage this allusive process and maximize its occurrence in our lives, human society will take a quantum leap into a whole new way of life one
that realizes the best of our tradition and creates a culture that has been the goal of history all along.

The following story is offered toward this new understanding. If it touches you, if it crystalizes something that you perceive in life, then pass on what you see to another for I think our new awareness of the spiritual is expanding in exactly this way, no longer through hype nor fad, but personally, through a kind of positive psychological con ~ James Redfield

The Iraq war was fought by one-half of one percent of us. And unless we were part of that small group or had a relative who was, we went about our lives as usual most of the time: no draft, no new taxes, no changes. Not so for the small group who fought the war and their families. ~ Bob Schieffer

If you spend time comparing yourself with someone else, the only thing you're doing is setting yourself up for disappointment and failure. You won't ever feel good enough. There are seven and half billion people in the world, so chances are that someone will always be "better" than you in some respect. But is that person you? Did she grow up in your family? Did she grow up at the same time you did, share your parents, your siblings, your childhood, your teachers, your friends, your advantages, your disadvantages, your education, your jobs, or . . . ? Of course she didn't. When we frame things that way, the idea of comparing ourselves to other people seems ridiculous. I compare myself with only one person: me. Am I doing the best I can at my job? Am I being the best wife, the best mother, the best friend, the best human being? How can I keep learning and improving? ~ Gisele Bundchen

Our lives are a story shaped by circumstance, twisted by Fate, and ultimately judged by how we reacted. ~ Mary Marchese

How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn't someone want to talk about it! We've started and won two atomic wars since 2022! Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much? I've heard the rumors about hate too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don't, that's sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes! ~ Ray Bradbury

Man is made up of opposing characteristics. History demonstrates vividly the fact that it always moves in the worst possible direction. Either man is not capable of directing history, or else he does direct it, but only by pushing it down the most terrible, wrong path there is.
There is not a single example to prove the opposite. People are not capable of governing others. They are only capable of destroying. And materialism - naked and cynical - is going to complete the destruction.
Despite the fact that God lives in every soul, that every soul has the capacity to accumulate what is eternal and good, as a mass people can do nothing but destroy. For they have come together not in the name of an ideal, but simply for the sake of a material notion.
Mankind has hurried to protect the body (perhaps on the strength of that natural and unconscious gesture which served as the beginning of what is called progress) and has given no thought to protecting the soul.
The church (as opposed to religion) has not been able to do so. In the course of the history of civilization, the spiritual half of man has been separated further and further from the animal, the material, and now in an infinite expanse of darkness we can just make out, like the lights of a departing train, the other half of our being as it rushes away, irrevocably and for ever.
Spirit and flesh, feeling and reason can never again be made one. It's too late. For the moment we are crippled by the appa ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

Wherever the truth lies, in order to eliminate flicker, the rotating shutter within the projector has to allow each image to be flashed upon the screen twice. Thus, whenever we watch a movie, we spend half the time gazing at an optical illusion and the other half sitting in the dark in front of a blank screen. ~ David Parkinson

On one of the evenings, apropos of nothing ('apropos' was another new word), when Dr Hunter and Reggie were giving the baby a bath, Dr Hunter turned to Reggie and said, 'You now there are no rules,' and Reggie said, 'Really?' because she could think of a lot of rules, like cutting grapes in half and wearing a cap when you went swimming, not to mention separating all the rubbish for the recycling bins. Unlike Ms MacDonald, recycling was something that Dr Hunter was very keen on. She said, 'No, not those kinds of things, I mean the way we live our lives. There isn't a template, a pattern that we're supposed to follow. There's no one watching us to see if we're doing it properly, there is no properly, we just make it up as we go along. ~ Kate Atkinson

I don't do a lot of rehearsal. I don't like rehearsals. I rehearse the day or morning. I spend one hour and a half with all the actors, and we go over the scenes, and we change it and change the dialogue, and we do a lot of things to it, but prior to shooting, I don't really rehearse. ~ Susanne Bier

So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make our own lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that "there's no place like home," but rather that there is no longer such a place as home: except, of course, for the homes we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz, which is anywhere and everywhere, except the place from which we began.
In the place from which I began, after all, I watched the film from the child's - Dorothy's point of view. I experienced, with her, the frustration of being brushed aside by Uncle Henry and Auntie Em, busy with their dull grown-up counting. Like all adults, they couldn't focus on what was really important to Dorothy: namely, the threat to Toto. I ran away with Dorothy and then ran back. Even the shock of discovering that the Wizard was a humbug was a shock I felt as a child, a shock to the child's faith in adults. Perhaps, too, I felt something deeper, something I couldn't articulate; perhaps some half-formed suspicion about grown-ups was being confirmed.
Now, as I look at the movie again, I have become the fallible adult. Now I am a member of the tribe of imperfect parents who cannot listen to their children's voices. I, who no longer have a father, have become a father instead, and now it is my fate to be unable to satisfy the ~ Salman Rushdie

It's your world, but I make my way in it. At fifteen, no, I couldn't stand up to you. The age of illusions, when we know nothing, we hope for everything; we're wandering in a mist ... And the half of the world that's never had any use for us, suddenly is besieging us. You need us, you adore us, you're suffering for us. You want everything--except to know what we think. You look deep in our eyes--and put your hand up our dress. You call us, "Pretty thing." That confuses us. The most beautiful woman, the highest ranked, lives half dazzled by constant attention, half stifled by obvious contempt. We think all we're good for is pleasing you--till one day, long acquaintance with you dispels the last mist. In a clear light, we suddenly see you as you are--and generally we start preferring ourselves. At thirty, I could finally say no--or really say yes. That's when you begin backing away from us. Now I'm full-grown. I pursue my happiness the same as any man. ~ Pierre-Augustin Caron De Beaumarchais

Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time? ~ Herman Melville

Half our family does seem to owe you their lives, now I stop and think about it," Mr. Weasley said in a constricted voice. "Well, all I can say is that it was a lucky day for the Weasleys when Ron decided to sit in your compartment on the Hogwarts Express, Harry. ~ J.K. Rowling

Some people become tired at the end of ten minutes or half an hour of prayer. What will they do when they have to spend Eternity in the presence of God? We must begin the habit here and become used to being with God. ~ Sadhu Sundar Singh

Are we not wasps who spend all day in a fruitless attempt to traverse a window-pane - while the other half of the window is wide open? ~ Wei Wu Wei

We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world's preeminent democracy, after all, if the large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

It doesn't matter what the end looks like - what matters is that it came. Bam, you're done. But life, Axi? There are degrees of life. You can live it well or half-asleep. You can go sledding down a sand dune, or you can spend your life in front of the TV. And I don't mean to sound like a stupid after-school special, but you have to keep living the way we did these last weeks. Risk, Axi. That's the secret. Risk everything."
I nodded, trying not to cry again. "Okay. But I might not keep stealing cars."
"That's all right," he said. ~ James Patterson

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

Joel Lane documents a life we don't quite live, in a city we can't quite find: half glimpsed and half imagined, we know it's out there somewhere. Waiting, maybe. Mixing fear with desire, reputation with regret. Touching the blood-beat of our secret hunger with the rhythms of a music that never felt alien till now. Wasted lives, with never a wasted word. It's an extraordinary achievement: vivid as neon, real as rain. Devastating. ~ Chaz Brenchley

What if more women, mothers, gave birth as an ecstatic celebration of female sexuality? Mothers who do will often declare, "Now I can do anything!" What would the world look like if half of our population felt empowered to make a difference with their lives? ~ Jeannine Parvati Baker

The first half of our lives are ruined by our parents and the second half by our children. ~ Clarence Darrow

Life goes not in a straight line, lad, but in a circle. The first half we spend venturing as far as the world's end from home and kin and stillness, and the latter half brings us back, by roundabout ways but surely, to that state from which we set out. ~ Ellis Peters

Mento mori - remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die - what makes this any different from a half hour? ~ Leo Tolstoy

Course they wouldn't have all the details, like whether or not they played in squares of sunlight on their walls, if they wore spiders on their hats, if they ate hamburger every other day, if they had ever made love in a yellow canola field tenderly or passionately or awkwardly. If they preferred dresses or pants, if they shaved their legs or didn't, or if they preferred red peppers to green. Stuff was happening. Even in Half-a-Life. Little things, but it all added up to something big. To our lives. It was happening all along. These were our lives. This was it. My mom was hanging on to the lives, the recorded lives, of these women. We might escape, but what if we didn't? What if we lived in Half-a-Life all our lives, poor, lonely, proud, happy? If we did, we did. These were our lives. If we couldn't escape them, we'd have to live them. ~ Miriam Toews

For a moment the image before us is frozen: our world, our lives, reduced to a handful broken stars half lost in uncharted space. Then it's gone, the view swallowed by the hyperspace winds streaming past, blue-green auroras wiping the after-images away.
Until all that's left is us ~ Amie Kaufman