Quotes in category: “Life”:

If you ever doubt the power of language, listen more closely. Witness the magic the first time someone whispers "i love you." Watch a woman put on head phones, close her eyes, and have her life changed by a lyric. See a bad moment flipped upside down by a well timed joke. Words propel us, empower us, make us human and more than human. We constantly struggle to say what we mean and mean what we say. To "wrestle with words and meanings." that's what t.s. eliot calls it. But as we whisper and shout, stutter and spin, we create order out of the chaos around us. We are built of words, and we live by them, too. 

If your presence doesnt make any difference, your absence wont either.

But what I've always liked best is when he talks about having no memory. No memory of things he'd done just a second before. Good or bad. Because memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.

I was stuck. I was in this place, in between my future and my past and I wasn't sure which one I wanted more. But I guess it was only natural, you know? To dream of a summer love from long ago or nights you spent with your friends you used to know. These people had long since gone and part of you wanted them back and God, you hated to admit it. That was the funny part — like admitting you missed people or things or times long ago made you weak or something, but it didn't. And sometimes, I would curl up by my window and stare off into the stars, dreaming of my future; the love and friends I had yet to come. Part of me just wanted to throw myself into the future and the other part wanted me to hurl myself into my past.

There's a reason we evolved the feeling of awkwardness; it tells us not to talk about things. 

Hindsight is 20/20... Knowing now what we didn't know then, realizing we can never fix things, and giving up what's hopelessly lost.

Change the way you look at things, and the thing you look at changes.

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

People are nice to other people because people are good, decent and caring. Either that, or people are cowards. If I’m mean to you, you’ll be mean to me. Mutually assured destruction.

These are my words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create that fact.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

Everybody does stupid things, it shouldn't cost them everything they want in life. 

How am I supposed to recover when I don’t even understand my disease? 

No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice. None of this matters. We're just warming up.

You can't go back to how things were. How you thought they were. All you really have... is now.

We do not do what we want, and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact. Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.

But the worst thing the truth can do? Is when you finally tell it, it doesn't set you free... but locks you away, forever. 

The big reason why folks leave a small town, he used to say, is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out. He meant that no one is happy, anywhere.

You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions. 

When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.

There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.

And then it came. The happiness at getting what you want is not usually commensurate with the worry leading up to it. Relief is a short-lived emotion, passive and thin. The agony of doubt disappears, leaving little memory of how it really felt. Life aligns behind the new truth.

The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be.

When we are struck at without reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should- so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.