That Was Life Quotes

#1. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.

Julian Barnes

#2. I don't know what kind of life you had, what sorts of joys and sorrows you experienced. But even if there was something that left you unfulfilled, you can't go around seeking it at other people's doors. Even if it is at the place you're most familiar with, and the sort of act that is your forte.

Haruki Murakami

#3. The years would not wait for Zealers and saviors, not for chance nor hope. The erratic line would scribble on until Nyra washed away from life itself, her youth stolen forever by the malediction that was wishing.

Kelly Michelle Baker

#4. I think you've all heard my story about my daughter and how we felt Children's Hospital saved her life when she was less than a year old. I won't go through all of the details of that.

Jack Nicklaus

#5. I didn't think at all as a young child that music would be my profession. It was just something that one did along with going to Brownies or going to church or going to school or anything else that one did in sort of one's very young life.

Jessye Norman

#6. Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists called a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake.

Stella Gibbons

#7. He had learned long ago that life became much easier if you ignored what was not right before you.

Joe Abercrombie

#8. Our Christian hope is that we are going to live with Christ in a new earth, where there is not only no more death, but where life is what it was always meant to be.

Timothy Keller

#9. She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.

Charles Frazier

#10. A life that was surprisingly full, even though it was simple. Or maybe because it was simple.

Carlene O'Connor

#11. You have to like the present; if not your life becomes secondhand, if you think it was better before. Or that it will be better in the future.

Karl Lagerfeld

#12. He'd said he was in love with her. And that just filled her up and emptied her out again. It made her want to shake, it made her want to weep. It made her want to hold onto him as if her life depended on it.

Nora Roberts

#13. She would never again lie in bed on a Good Friday morning and relax in the blissful knowledge that there was nothing to do and nowhere to be, because for the rest of her life, there would always, always be something left undone. An unmade confession. An ugly secret.

Liane Moriarty

#14. I was able to shoot a movie like 'Tree of Life' because I had done 'Y Tu Mama Tambien.' The camera needed to capture that sense of freedom and joy and life you have when you're young.

Emmanuel Lubezki

#15. At this stage of my life, I had reached the conclusion that I would never be the protagonist of any story. The only thing I could hope for was to make an appearance in somebody else's.

Cesar Aira

#16. 'Evil Dead' was such a big movie in my life. It's one of the few that I really remember when I watched it for the first time. I mean, I don't remember when I first saw 'The Empire Strikes Back,' and it's one of my favourite movies.

Fede Alvarez

#17. And one of the things I learned is that one should live in spite of. Although, one should eat. Although, one should love. Although, it must die. Even it is often the same even though it pushes us forward. It was despite the fact that it gave me an unhappy anguish that was the creator of my own life.

Clarice Lispector

#18. Things were a little untidy, but what did that matter? It was possible to become the slave of things; possible to miss life in preparation for living.

Elizabeth Von Arnim

#19. I think there's nothing better than laughing in life, so that's nice, to be thought of as someone who can make someone laugh. It's 'cause I think life is hard. You know, my dad was a really silly man. A great Irish silly man. And that's fine.

Joan Cusack

#20. Eleanor Roosevelt never thought that she was attractive. She never thought that she was really sufficiently appealing. And I think her whole life was a response to her effort to get her mother to pay attention to her, to love her, and to love her as much as she loved her brothers.

Blanche Wiesen Cook

#21. As he thought about his life, he felt both tears and mockery welling up inside him. All that lay before him was madness or suicide. He walked down the darkening street alone, determined now to wait for the destiny that would come to annihilate him.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

#22. But I did what I thought was right in the moment. In the end, that's all a man has to measure his life, and it's plenty.

Justin Cronin

#23. I lived at Star City for more than a year ahead of my trip to Mir on May 18, 1991 in Soyuz TM-12. My life at Star City was so remote that learning Russian became my greatest priority.

Helen Sharman

#24. There was not a scrap of tangible evidence to show that he had spent the most wonderful year of his life with her.
Which only increased his desire to remain faithful to her.

Milan Kundera

#25. I could deal with hate and fear, but for the love of all that's right in the world, don't fake like me. Life was too short to waste energy faking anything.

Donna Augustine

#26. I was working for Time-Life Books from 1962 to 1970, as a staff writer, and after that, I was a journalist. Eventually, I became an editor at 'The Saturday Review' and 'Horizon.'

Edmund White

#27. I was utterly without worldly ambition because I knew that all that was needed for a rich, full life was a few shillings a week with which to buy SF magazines and beer.

Bob Shaw

#28. It occurred to her then that there was a reason age drained the pleasure out of life, slowly stripping away all the things you enjoyed or took for granted. It was so you wouldn't need convincing when the time came. You'd be ready, because everything good in life was gone.

Laura McHugh

#29. It is true that I had wanted to die , but that is peculiarly different from regretting having been born. Overwhelmingly, I was enormously glad to have been born, grateful for life, and I couldn't imagine not wanting to pass on life to someone else.

Kay Redfield Jamison

#30. Pure love was always difficult to witness. Why was that, she wondered? Because it was so rare? So beautiful? SO damned unattainable for most of the poor saps muddling through this life?

Lynda Sandoval

#31. Forced relations between two things that superficially appear foreign create a new, instantaneous state. Authentic poetry asks nothing more. A kinship completely nonexistent moments ago was created by the poet's authority, just as it might have been created in life by the authority of chance.

Odysseus Elytis

#32. The discovery of her life was that she herself didn't actually need money, apart from a little cash for those relationships with taxi drivers and officials of the Great Western Railway which can only be expressed financially.

Elizabeth Ironside

#33. That Mitt Romney, he is a master campaigner. This week he was introducing his wife, and he said, 'She is the heavyweight champion of my life. Which may explain why on the ride home, he was strapped to the roof of the car.

Bill Maher

#34. Rome had freed the Greeks, but on condition that both war and class war should end. Freedom without war was a novel and irksome life for the city-states that made up Hellas; the upper classes yearned to play power politics against neighboring cities, and

Will Durant

#35. Lif and Lifthrasir will have children. Their children will have children.
There will be life and new life, life everywhere on earth. That was the end; and this is the beginning.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#36. When the dream that was no longer can be, you have to dream a different dream.

Christina Rasmussen

#37. One woman came up to me at a lecture and observed that I was much fatter than on television; I think I look better onscreen than in real life. It's the lights.

Kate Williams

#38. Where'd the days go, when all we did was play? And the stress that we were under wasn't stress at all just a run and a jump into a harmless fall

Paolo Nutini

#39. The thought went through my mind that we should film ourselves in our sexual act, and project our frenzied copulation permanently onto the walls of the tea-room, as a lesson to wake up the boring people who drank tea here, and to show them what life was really all about.

Fiona Thrust

#40. At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.

Maya Angelou

#41. Love required sacrifice and making hard choices and doing things that were bigger than just you. It wasn't something you asked for, or could control or change. It was something you accepted. Love was a force of nature.

Kimberly Derting

#42. Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you're trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world.

Martin Amis

#43. Because in that moment, watching and listening, he was profoundly moved that God had seen fit to gift him, an ordinary man, an Indiana boy through and through, with these people in his life.

Kristen Ashley

#44. I wish I was a more religious person. I really admire Martin Sheen for his Catholicism. It's such a bedrock. I wish I had that in my life.

Rob Lowe

#45. What matters is at the end of life, when you're about to pass into oblivion, that you've at least scratched 'Kilroy was here,' on the last wall of the universe.

William Faulkner

#46. I have a recurring role on 'Person of Interest,' which is my husband's show. I play the love of his life. It was really fun to do that.

Carrie Preston

#47. When I was in my early twenties I didn't have a need to rub together, back when my life was a series of wants and whims. But recently I had felt overwhelmed by longings that seemed to lunge out of me in the most awkward situations.

Tyne O'Connell

#48. I was given baby doll toys myself, and they proved a stark reminder that my life was expected to revolve around childbearing - just as my mom's had before me, and her mom's had before her.

Beth Ditto

#49. To live was to be a fragment of the cosmere that was experiencing itself.

Brandon Sanderson

#50. I personally believe that I was ... a previous life or something ... a previous reincarnation, a bard of some sort, because most of the things I write about are descriptions of places I've never been to.

Marc Bolan

#51. I was rescued by librarians. It was librarians who said 'maybe you would like to read The Hardy Boys as well as Nancy Drew.' It is true for me, as for so many countless others, that librarians saved my life, my internal life.

Gloria Steinem

#52. I used to get really pissed off that my life was so dictated by when this Jesus guy was born and when he was dying every year. I felt really resentful that I couldn't get on with my own life because I was so busy with his.

Tori Amos

#53. A psychiatrist once told me early in treatment, "Stop trying to make me like you," and what a sobering and welcome smack in the face that statement was. Yet somehow, every day of my life is still a campaign for popularity, or better yet, a crowded funeral.

John Waters

#54. I was very similar at 19. I wanted something to happen in life, I wanted a bit more. I wanted to find someone who could challenge my ideas. So I definitely tapped into that.

Billie Piper

#55. I realize now, I was learning how to walk as well. I haven't mastered the steps, I fall too. But im on my path, my path ... and one day that path ... will take me to her.

Makoto Shinkai

#56. This was Shakespeare's form; who walked in every path of human life, felt every passion; and to all mankind doth now, will ever, that experience yield which his own genius only could acquire.

Mark Akenside

#57. They lived and laughed and they saw that it was good.

David Arnold

#58. I was doing that [ a collaboration with Kurt Cobain] to try to save his life. The collaboration was me calling up as an excuse to reach out to this guy. He was in a really bad place.

Michael Stipe

#59. you're entire life is going to change. you should try to accept that, because there's no possible way to avoid it. like it or not, fight it or don't, your old life is over. it was over long before you woke up here."
~caleb

C.J. Roberts

#60. Sometimes I felt like I was waiting for my life to begin and more than anything, in that moment, I wanted to force some kind of beginning. I wanted things to be different than usual. I wanted to bend reality.

Holly Black

#61. Whenever he was en route from one place to another, he was able to look at his life with a little more objectivity than usual. it was often on trpis that he thought most clearly, and made the decisions that he could not reach when he was stationary.

Paul Bowles

#62. I think we live in a unique time - the verbs that make up our online and mobile lives haven't been completely invented or imagined for us. That was kind of a life path I was on.

Mark Pincus

#63. There were many ways to lie without saying something that wasn't true. I was learning that the hard way.

H.M. Ward

#64. Had music not delivered Richard, too, on more than one occasion, from a life he'd believed himself trapped in? The tempos had changed, but that almost didn't matter. The point, now as then, was to tune in to something bigger than yourself, and to feel around you others who felt as you did.

Garth Risk Hallberg

#65. The Democratic party is one that I've always observed. I have struggled greatly in life from the day I was born, and I am honored to be a part of something that focuses on working class citizens and molds them into a proud specimen.

Joan Crawford

#66. I grew up very poor in a fractured family that was dysfunctional on both sides, but I sort of put up these reflectors to most of the negative things that have occurred in my life. I don't carry around much baggage.

Keith Stanfield

#67. I knew Rick Pitino was going to make them play that outbreak, monkey defense. He's been doing it all his life.

Shaquille O'Neal

#68. Every man needs an obsessio in order to enjoy life, and it was so much the better if that obsession was constructive.

Louis De Bernieres

#69. It is flat-out strange that something-that anything-is happening at all. There was nothing then a Big Bang, then here we all are. This is extremely weird.

Ken Wilber

#70. I do think that people who are now in their sixties and their seventies are living a different kind of life than their grandparents led, even in these tough times. A lot of them are more active, a lot of them are still working, which was not the case when our grandparents were in their sixties.

Anna Quindlen

#71. My father was an atheist, absent. He was a salesman; I was four years old when he told me that the end of life was death.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

#72. That was madness. You're never going to bring one of those down with a handgun.

Sean Penn

#73. I've been a foodie most of my life. I started when I lived for a year in Germany in my early 20s, and here was this new food environment, and I decided I needed to make sense of it. And I found it was the rules of economics that do the best job. Food is a capitalist product of supply and demand.

Tyler Cowen

#74. I'm John Lee Hooker in the sense that he was a blues man and he played blues his whole life. I'm a rock guy and I'm going to play rock music my whole life.

Sammy Hagar

#75. I really know right from wrong and apply that to my life. At home, I was the oldest of three. My role was to be the responsible one.

Elisha Cuthbert

#76. If life was like a body of water, she had asked that she be allowed to walk again in its shallows; instead she had been abruptly seized by strong currents and pushed into deep water.

Dorothy Gilman

#77. A writer's life suits me. It's fairly, well, other people might think it was actually rather dull, but that's fine because I feel that my imagination is enough to kind of keep me happy.

Ronald Frame

#78. I keep waiting for the roof to cave in. I was raised to follow the Golden Rule, you know, treat people the way you wish to be treated. That's kind of the way I live my life. Maybe someone up there likes me for that.

Matt LeBlanc

#79. I was always taught as a kid that if there's anything you want in life, you've got to work towards it. I guess that sort of stayed with me, really. But also, for me, from the time I was, like, 10 years old, all I ever wanted to do was be in a band and make music.

Paul Weller

#80. Everything around us that we call life was made up by people that are no smarter than you.

Ashton Kutcher

#81. She smiled into his mouth. "That was ... wow."
"It's always wow. You're wow. I'll never get enough of you, Lydia. Not after ten years in dreams; not after forever in real life.

Dianna Hardy

#82. We have laid the foundation for a better life. Things that were unimaginable a few years ago have become everyday reality. I belong to the generation of leaders for whom the achievement of democracy was the defining challenge.

Nelson Mandela

#83. He'd tried fishing, dancing, gambling and drink, allegedly four of life's greatest pleasures, and wasn't sure that he saw the point. Food he was happy with - Death liked a good meal as much as anyone else.

Anonymous

#84. When I as reading and writing, I was in that exhilarating place where the life of the imagination is more real than the tiles and soil and rock under my feet.

Deborah Lawrenson

#85. I had gone through life thinking that I was better than everyone else and at the same time, being afraid of everyone. I was afraid to be me.

Dennis Wholey

#86. The saddest thing about ephemerals was that their little lives rarely held time enough for love.

Robert A. Heinlein

#87. The probability that the Earth was created with such a perfect combination to sustain life seems almost impossible. So, in the grand scheme of the Universe, you might be one insignificant pin-prick, but with all things considered, you're also nothing short of a miracle

Becki Tedford

#88. The cake had a trick candle that wouldn't go out, so I didn't get my wish. Which was just that it would always be like this, that my life could be a party just for me.

Janet Fitch

#89. The years roll on and life seems like this more and more, that choices don't really exit in the way I thought they would when I was a child and expected the regal power of adulthood to provide clarity and insight.

Scott Turow

#90. Inside this new love, die. Your way begins on the other side ... . Die, and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign that you've died. Your old life was a frantic running from silence. The speechless full moon comes out now. - RUMI

Tim Farrington

#91. Who can explain just how he became the person he is? It does not happen this day or that one. It is a gradual evolution that happens largely unheralded. He simply was who he now was.

David Anthony Durham

#92. He was becoming unstuck, he was sure of that - his bones were no longer wrapped in flesh but in clouds of dust, in hummingbirds, dragonflies, and luminous moths - but so perfect was his equilibrium that he felt no fear. He was vast, he was many, he was dynamic, he was eternal.

Tom Robbins

#93. I believe that this world was set about for us to enjoy and to love and to experience and to have it all be, to a certain extent, unpredictable. Ever since I was a child I have believed that my life has been guided.

Judith Jamison

#94. Something was nagging at me that I was trying to resist. Was it then or was it later that the thought came to me: if God really does exist, and is not just a myth, it must have a consequence for the whole of life. It was not a comfortable thought.

Jennifer Worth

#95. My river of words and her silence seemed to demonstrate that my life was splendid but uneventful, which left me time to write to her every day, while hers was dark but full

Elena Ferrante

#96. When I was 17, I had an experience that I later learned could be called a 'mystical experience.' It was almost violent. No faces, voices, nothing like that. It is like the world burst and flamed into life all around me. That is not a great image, but it is as good as I will ever do.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#97. Chain of envy linked them, showing each what was lacking in life, but offering also the consolation that happiness was present right next door, in the life of a neighbour, an element of the same society.

Aravind Adiga

#98. She had kept well behind the safety barrier her entire life, but now she was standing there at the edge of the precipice for the very first time, fumbling blindly with the realization that there were other ways to live, at how intense and rich life could be.

Katarina Bivald

#99. I had complete faith that this was a man who would keep his promises, who would always be there when I needed him, who would always have my best interests at heart. Together we would be able to face anything in life.

Rosemary K. West

#100. If it all just happens like this for the rest of my life, it's going to be one endless Groundhog Day. I determined that I was not prepared to submit to this regime, so I thought I had to do something about it.

Bruce Dickinson