Quotes About Not Being Alive

#1. Remember, in the heyday of vitalism, people said that when all the data are in about cells and how they work, we will still know nothing about the life force - about the basic difference between being alive and not being alive.

Patricia Churchland

#2. Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood.

Philip K. Dick

#3. ...what was important, what mattered, was not the fact of being afraid, but what you did, the choices you made, when you were afraid. And maybe that was something to do with being alive--or staying dead.

Graham Gardner

#4. I vote Democrat because I'm not concerned about millions of babies being aborted so long as we keep all death row inmates alive and comfy.

David Letterman

#5. I am grateful for who I am and who I am not. I am grateful for the life I have been given and for all that I have and all that I don't. Every breath I take is a blessing and an opportunity to fully experience the sheer joy of being alive.

Miranda Kerr

#6. A great wave of humiliation and shame swept over me. Shame that I belonged to a race that could be so dealt with; and shame for my country, that it, the great example of democracy to the world, should be the only civilized, if not the only state on earth, where a human being would be burned alive.

James Weldon Johnson

#7. But we ourselves would not be alive if some innocent Being had not first seen us. That was the act that planted the seed of the whole universe, and it was an act of love. You will know your own innocence again when you can see the love that breathes within every iota of creation.

Deepak Chopra

#8. If you ever feel stuck and it seems like you don't know where you are going or you're just not sure what you have signed up for being alive. Well let me tell you this: if you are lost you will always be found.

Diana Rose Morcilla

#9. I'm alive now, but I don't know if I will be tomorrow. The state of being alive is not guaranteed, but should I let that stop me from living?

Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

#10. Why can't life be like this? Human beings in all their magnificence. Working to find that moment of pride. That one second of excellence at being alive...The feeling of belonging not just to oneself but to the entire universe.

Ron Jones

#11. She experienced a moment of incandescent wonder, a sense of being connected, not just to these people, but to everyone and everything alive: every beating heart, every fluttering wing, every green shoot thrusting itself up out of the earth, seeking, as she was, the sun.

Hillary Jordan

#12. What really drives us to seek help is an equally frightening sensation: that of being alive, yet not really living.

Paul Pearsall

#13. Being alive is about playing to win. Being brain dead is when you play not to loose.

Richard Saunders

#14. What's the point in being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? How very odd, to believe God gave you life, and yet not think that life asks more of you than watching TV.

John Green

#15. This is the suffering of fear.
Fear is part of being alive.
Other people experience this too . . . I am not alone. May I be kind to myself . . . may I give myself the compassion I need.

Tara Brach

#16. Morgellons is constantly morphing. There are times when it's directly attacking the nervous system, as if you're being bitten by fleas and lice. It's all in the tissue and it's not a hallucination. It was eating me alive, sucking the juices out. I've been sick all my life.

Joni Mitchell

#17. I would recommend a solo flight to all prospective suicides. It tends to make clear the issue of whether one enjoys being alive or not.

T.H. White

#18. My greatest reward is knowing for certain, as I do with many other acts and artistes, that without Jonathan King being alive and involved, Genesis would not exist, and the guys would have had careers as intended - as accountants and lawyers!

Jonathan King

#19. She understands all at once, with a small shock, exactly what it is she always needed to tell Harland: being there in person is not the same as watching. You might see things better on television, but you'll never know if you were alive or dead while you watched.

Barbara Kingsolver

#20. I would have gone to bed with him that night. If he had asked. If he had come and kissed me. Not for his sake, but for being alive's.

John Fowles

#21. The truth is I love being alive. And I love feeling free. So if I can't have those things then I feel like a caged animal and I'd rather not be in a cage. I'd rather be dead. And it's real simple. And I think it's not that uncommon.

Angelina Jolie

#22. Every step I took hurt, I walked on daggers, on hot blue fire. Not holding him was like not breathing, not being quite alive. As

Alice Hoffman

#23. Sometimes living can be hard, but it's only because we're alive that we can make each other laugh,cry ... be happy! In this world, if that's not a reason for being born in this world ... I don't know what is!

Natsuki Takaya

#24. Too many Christians are content with appearing to be a bit more moral than the people around them. But the difference between a true Christian and a non-Christian is not about subtle moral distinctions - it's the difference between being alive and being dead!

Francis Chan

#25. No matter how old you are, as long as a parent is alive, you are still a child. It is only after both die that you cease being a child. And then, all of a sudden, not only are you no longer a child, you are also next in line.

Dennis Prager

#26. Death didn't bother me much. Strong Christian and all that. Method of death did. Being eaten alive. One of my top three ways not to go out.

Laurell K. Hamilton

#27. There is nothing as tragic as being alive and not enjoying life ... Life should be celebrated!

Joyce Meyer

#28. If you ever want to feel like you're on the verge of total, abject bowel-releasing terror, try making your way a klick or two out of a forest, at night, with the certain feeling you're being hunted. It makes you feel alive, it really does, but not in a way you want to feel alive.

John Scalzi

#29. I have always been a Laugher, disturbing people who are not laughers, upsetting whole audiences at theatres ... I laugh, that's all. I love to laugh. Laugher to me is being alive. I have had rotten times, and I have laughed through them. Even in the midst of the very worst times I have laughed.

William, Saroyan

#30. To him now, life seemed a shadow, day a white shadow; night, and death, and stillness, and inaction, this seemed like BEING. To be alive, to be urgent and insistent
that was NOT-TO-BE. The highest of all was to melt out into the darkness and sway there, identified with the great Being.

D.H. Lawrence

#31. What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?

Peter Watts

#32. Fashion is not frivolous. It is a part of being alive today.

Mary Quant

#33. There's something in our makeup and in our bodies that really wants to luxuriate more in just the joy of being alive and not always consuming, creating, building. There's something inside of us that wants desperately to stop and experience and just be
not just always do.

Elizabeth Lesser

#34. Gratitude is not a fair weather virtue. True gratitude means appreciating your life no matter what the storms may bring. Is simply being alive gift enough for you to feel grateful?

Mac Anderson

#35. Women do not avoid fighting because they are dainty or scared, but because they have a greater stake than men in staying alive to rear their offspring. Women compete with each other just as tenaciously as men, but with a stealth and subtlety that reduces their chances of being killed or injured.

Anne Campbell

#36. Until everyone in this country over 35 has passed away, the theocracy will still be alive. And I am not actually of the theocracy, and that could bother people. I think I've probably taken a bit of flak for that, as well as being an arsehole occasionally, obviously.

Sinead O'Connor

#37. The way health care is funded in the U.S. is not sustainable. People are being kept alive who are probably better off dead. The cost of health care is too high, and you don't get much for it - it's twice as high in the U.S. as elsewhere, and it's because of the middlemen.

Richard J. Roberts

#38. In order to know that you're dead, you have to be conscious. . . but if you're conscious, then you're not dead. the only thing you can know is being alive, so that's eternity.

Todd Mitchell

#39. In life and in love, there is only that moment, the NOW. The only reality we know is what we experience this very second. Reality is not what has passed or what has yet to come into being. Grabbing hold of this simple idea makes life magical because it brings love alive.

Leo Buscaglia

#40. His head was pounding and his vision skewed in some way and he was vaguely amazed at being alive and not sure that it was worth it.

Cormac McCarthy

#41. I'm all about taking chances. You have to ask yourself, if you're not taking any chances, are you actually even living? Every time you walk out of your door and you're out in the world, you take a chance on not coming back. That is the danger and the dynamic of being alive.

CeeLo Green

#42. There's not a human being alive I won't talk to. There's a quite simple rule. If you like somebody more than you dislike them you can have a relationship. Once you accept you like 75 per cent but 25 per cent you find irritating for this or that reason, you just have to ignore that 25 per cent.

Robert Powell

#43. How easily we get trapped in that which is not essential - in looking good, winning at competition, gathering power and wealth - when simply being alive is the gift beyond measure.

Parker J. Palmer

#44. In real life we don't know what's going to happen next. So how can you be that way on a stage? Being alive to the possibility of not knowing exactly how everything is going to happen next - if you can find places to have that happen onstage, it can resonate with an experience of living.

Sam Shepard

#45. Breathing is supposed to keep you calm, but also it keeps you alive and so you are not calm, because you are alive and being alive is never calm.

A. L. Kennedy

#46. Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.

William S. Burroughs

#47. Only the words of love kept alive are worthy of not being wasted.

Arlo Guthrie

#48. To the being of fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present like a halo.

John Dewey

#49. Passion is not a quality that is foreign to you. It is not a characteristic that some people are born with and some must do without. To be passionate is as natural to you as breathing, as natural as being alive. It is the source of who you are.

Barbara De Angelis

#50. She had had the pain; it had been like being boiled alive in scalding oil and not being able to die to get free of it

Betty Smith

#51. Being alive, you have to do something. Not doing anything is also some kind of action.

Jeff Bridges

#52. Its not staying alive, its being alive

J.A. Mock

#53. I'll take this. I'll take this every day and every day I'll know in the end I beat that bastard. He might not have been alive to see it, but I bet his goddamned, motherfucking ass.
Seriously, he was hot when he was being all vengeful badass.

Kristen Ashley

#54. I know you're always supposed to want more of everything. But in truth, I'm having a nice ebb and flow of being in my daughter's life every day and getting to keep my work life alive. I'm not nominated for ten thousand everythings every minute, but I am acting and telling stories I love.

Helen Hunt

#55. When you're young, you don't especially think of yourself as being young. You're just alive and everything's interesting and you don't think of things in terms of age because you're not conscious of it.

Richard Hell

#56. A good man lives for the joy in life and the happiness of being alive, not shackled to the wants of the future or the regrets of the past.

Carew Papritz

#57. I felt like I was being eaten alive by guilt, and what I needed what your patience and your kindness, not for you to yell at me.

Veronica Roth

#58. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.

Margery Williams

#59. In the sense that people who produce things and work get rewarded, statistically. You don't get rewarded precisely for your effort, but in Russia you got rewarded for being alive, but not very well rewarded.

Esther Dyson

#60. Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#61. It's not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is part of being alive, something we all share.

Pema Chodron

#62. To be alive, Professor Sharif, means not being completely consistent.

David Lagercrantz

#63. Pain is a part of being alive, and we need to learn that. Pain does not last forever, nor is it necessarily unbeatable, and we need to be taught that.

Harold S. Kushner

#64. The fact that you are even here, alive, on this planet is a mathematical miracle, and you should not spend the time that you have being busy being miserable.

Philip DeFranco

#65. Death doesn't frighten me, it bothers me. It bothers me for example that someone can be there tomorrow but me I am no longer there. What bothers me is no longer being alive, not being dead.

Mario Monicelli

#66. I thought I lost you again. You couldn't know what those four years were like. To not know where you were, who you were with, or if you were being treated well? I wasn't sure for a long time if you were even alive. I don't ever want to go through that again. Vance ... The Elder Effect

D.L. Given

#67. To be alive is the biggest fear humans have. Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive - the risk to be alive and express what we really are. Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of humans.

Miguel Ruiz

#68. I'm not afraid of being dead, that's to say there's nothing to be afraid of. I won't know I'm dead, would be my strong conviction. And if I find that I'm alive in any way at all, that'll be a pleasant surprise. I quite like surprises.

Christopher Hitchens

#69. I'm not scared of death, just tired. So fucking tired of being alive yet never fully breathing.

Jessica Sorensen

#70. What's the point of being alive," she said, "if you're not going to communicate?

Kurt Vonnegut

#71. We're all monsters ... Being a monster is not the same as being a bad person. It just means you're willing to eat the world if that's what you have to do to keep yourself alive.

Mira Grant

#72. I had taken this time to fall in love instead - inn love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt inn death - the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human - feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light - all of it part of nagivating the unknown.

Alice Sebold

#73. Part of being alive is having life change us. The people around us, the events we live through, all of them shape us. And that's what I think you're afraid of. Maybe not of dying. But of this you, the you you've become, ceasing to exist.

Amie Kaufman

#74. But as with so may diagnoses it is, in the end, the symptoms that matter, not the cause, because this is what being alive means, this is what being a person means, to be sickened by an illness known as you.

Heidi Julavits

#75. Which was better: being alive (if that was the right word) but not remembering anything, or being dead?

Laurie Halse Anderson

#76. If being alive is not a virtue, then there is little virtue in virtue.

Tom Robbins

#77. Not being tense but ready.
Not thinking but not dreaming.
Not being set but flexible.
Liberation from the uneasy sense of confinement.
It is being wholly and quietly alive, aware and alert, ready for whatever may come.

Bruce Lee

#78. Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.

Viktor E. Frankl

#79. There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life's meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.

Andre Breton

#80. We have not merely escaped from something but into something ... We have joined the greatest of all communities, which is not that of man alone but of everything which shares with us the great adventure of being alive.

Joseph Wood Krutch

#81. Humor [in a scene] is not jokes. It is that attitude toward being alive without which you would long ago have jumped off the 59th Street Bridge.

Michael Shurtleff

#82. Just as good books give me the joys of being alive, bad novels depress me, and as I notice this sentiment coming from the pages, I stop. I also do not hesitate to walk out of a movie house if the film is bad.

Orhan Pamuk

#83. I had witnessed the moment when this girl found out that nobody (not even Papa) knows what's going to happen to her or him or anyone and that's called Dramatic Tension and that's called the Suspense of Life and that's called Being Alive.

Catherine Lacey

#84. Stalwart Zeno seemed oblivious, that faith in his daughter being alive after more than forty days did not compute with faith that Brett Kincaid would soon be arrested for a crime involving his daughter.

Joyce Carol Oates

#85. The yells and yammering, croaking, gibbering and jabbering, howls and growls and curses, shrieking and shrinking that followed were beyond description. Several hundred wildcats and wolves being roasted slowly alive together would not have compared with it.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#86. Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.

C.S. Lewis

#87. Part of the pleasure of being alive is the knowledge that you're not dead yet.

George Carlin

#88. Retiring isn't even a word I'd understand. Taking what makes you feel alive, and everyone's looking for ways of making them feel alive, in whatever they do - relationships, business or work - and not just being a voice for a money making business.

Anita Roddick

#89. Good questions work on us, we don't work on them. They are not a project to be completed but a doorway opening onto greater depth of understanding, actions that will take us into being more fully alive.

Peter Block

#90. My passion for human ecology was not a drive for closure - but rather the joy of endless openings and newfound connections. There is no final goal or perfect completion, only the expanding experience of being alive.

Richard J. Borden

#91. It's not so bad, my darling. Being dead. It's like being alive, only colder.

Catherynne M Valente

#92. I Don't Think There's A Good Excuse For Being Unhappy. I'm Not Particularly Unhappy, But I Know What Pain Is. I think That Life Is Characterized By Pain, Partly. Part Of The Way You Can Tell You're Alive Is By How Much Pain You're Experiencing, Or How Little ...

Jerry Garcia

#93. But, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive.

Richard Dawkins

#94. If your mother had any idea we were talking about this, she'd skin me alive. I'm not being metaphorical about that. I think she could actually, literally skin me. She gets these wild eyes sometimes. There's Cossack blood in her; I'd bet anything.

Claudia Gray

#95. She told me to live ... I didn't know how to tell Her that simply being alive was not enough to be called living.

Kiera Cass

#96. It's not about being liberal or conservative, it's about being human.
It's not about being rich or poor, it's about being alive and happy.
It's not about being right, it's about being considerate and compassionate.

Karen L. Syed

#97. It is the fear of being as dependent as a young child, while not being loved as a child is loved, but merely being kept alive against one's will.

Malcolm Cowley

#98. I've done a lot of death cartoons - tombstones, Grim Reaper, illness, obituaries ... I'm not great at analyzing things, but my guess is that maybe the only relief from the terror of being alive is jokes.

Roz Chast

#99. Instead of fretting about getting everything done, why not simply accept that being alive means having things to do? Then drop into full engagement with whatever you're doing, and let the worry go.

Martha Beck

#100. Life's not just about being alive, but being well.

Martial