Life Quotes

The big one. What it means, how to live it, and why it's worth the effort.

22520 quotes

"You know what? We're all just making it up as we go along."
Philip Roth
"We are much more the victims of habit than we realize."
Philip Roth
"We are all victims of circumstance."
Philip Roth
"Aging is not for the faint of heart."
Philip Roth
"We are always trying to escape ourselves."
Philip Roth
"We spend our whole lives running from or toward something."
Philip Roth
N
"Being a woman is worse than being a man. It's harder."
Norman Mailer
N
"The most horrible thing about modern life is the meaninglessness of it."
Norman Mailer
J
"I hate it when somebody gets killed in a movie, especially when it's somebody real nice."
J.D. Salinger
W
"Life is like a cut-up novel."
William S. Burroughs
W
"I'm like a man who has never had sex before."
William S. Burroughs
A
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked"
Allen Ginsberg
A
"Die when you must, not when you can"
Allen Ginsberg
"What a terrible waste my life has been."
Kurt Vonnegut
"Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life."
Kurt Vonnegut
J
"Somewhere along the line you know you'll have to make a decision about how you're going to live."
Jack Kerouac
J
"Your life is something opaque, not to be seen through, but to be lived."
Jack Kerouac
J
"My life is a blur of railroad trains and blank towns and faces."
Jack Kerouac
J
"Live hard, die young."
Jack Kerouac
J
"All of it a swoon, a blur."
Jack Kerouac
J
"He was still alive and therefore still able to die."
Joseph Heller
J
"The purpose of life is not to be happy; it is to be significant."
Joseph Heller
J
"We are all dying, but only some of us are alive."
Joseph Heller
J
"Life is a banquet and most people are starving."
Joseph Heller
W
"Habit is the great deadener."
William S. Burroughs
W
"The whole human race is a mass of walking contradictions."
William S. Burroughs
W
"The point of no return is always when you think you can go back."
William S. Burroughs
W
"To be alive is to be challenged."
William S. Burroughs
N
"Life is not a problem to be solved but an experience to be lived."
Norman Mailer
J
"The central conceit of the work is that all the things that make modern life difficult are also the things that make it valuable."
J.D. Salinger