I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of "work," because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.
- Andy Warhol
What do you miss about being alive?"
The sound of my mom singing, a little off-key. The way my dad went to all my swim meets and I could hear his whistle when my head was underwater, even if he did yell at me afterward for not trying harder. I miss going to the library. I miss the smell of clothes fresh out of the dryer. I miss diving off the highest board and nailing the landing. I miss waffles" - p. 272.
- Laurie Halse Anderson
Living Memory
I carry you with me into the world,
into the smell of rain
& the words that dance between people
& for me, it will always be this way,
walking in the light,
remembering being alive together
- Brian Andreas
The whole point of being alive is to evolve into the complete person you were intended to be.
- Oprah Winfrey
... but it's fun being alive, isn't it? I feel as if I'd only got to stretch up my hands to all those stars and catch as many of them as I want to.
- Elizabeth Von Arnim
To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
- Matthew Arnold
Maybe that's what being alive is about: so we can track down those movments that are dying.
- Muriel Barbery
What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place.
- Elif Batuman
Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.
- John Steinbeck
Being alive, if you had to define it, meant emitting a variety of smells
- Haruki Murakami
It's precisely because of the pain, the we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being aliveor at least a partial sense of it.
- Haruki Murakami
When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift. There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.
- Thornton Wilder
The business man who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. "Yes, I see, dear; it's about halfway between," Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.
- E M Forster
The businessman who assumes that his life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. 'Yes, I see, dear; it's about half-way between,' Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.
- E M Forster
I want to wake people up and make them care about being alive in this universe.
- Ray Bradbury
Being alive is gardening and cooking and birds and green and blue, at the very least.
- Charles Bowden
Once you lose that sense of wonder at being alive, you're pretty much on the way out..
- David Bowie
Jim Crow was king... and I heard a game in which Jackie Robinson was playing, and I felt pride in being alive.
- Lou Brock
The darkness is calling. A little danger, a little risk. Feel your heart race. Listen to it. That's the sound of being alive. It's your time, Nick. Your one chance to have fun before it's all stolen by them, the adults, with their cruelty and endless rules, their can't-do-this, and can't-do-that's, their have-tos, and better-dos, their little boxes and cages all designed to break your spirit, to kill your magic.
- Brom
That may be true," I thought, "But they don't have digital cable or Internet access, so really what's the point of being alive?" Civilized life, with all its threats and potential dooms, is too much to bear without the respite of three hundred channels. True, Osama bin Laden may very well send nuclear-bomb-filled suitcases on Amtrak trains into Penn Station, but until then: "I Love the 80s on VH1.
- Augusten Burroughs
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
Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.
- Joseph Campbell
We save the world by being alive ourselves.
- Joseph Campbell
We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.
- Joseph Campbell
I don't think people are really seeking the meaning of Life. I think we're seeking an experience of being alive...we want to feel the rapture of being alive
- Joseph Campbell
I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
- Joseph Campbell
People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances without own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
- Joseph Campbell
No one knows exactly where thought comes from, but it can be said that thought comes from the same place as whatever it is that beats our heart... it comes from being alive.
- Richard Carlson
Now every mortal has pain
and sweat is constant,
but if there is anything dearer than being alive,
it's dark to me.
We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing
(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth--
we call it life. We know no other.
The underworld's a blank
and all the rest just fantasy.
- Anne Carson
My benefactor told me that my father and mother had lived and died just to have me, and that their own parents had done the same for them. He said that warriors were different in that they shift their assemblage points enough to realize the tremendous price that has been paid for their lives. This shift gives them the respect and awe that their parents never felt for life in general, or for being alive in particular.
- Carlos Castaneda
The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.
- Carlos Castaneda
The art of being a warrior is to balance the wonder and the terror of being alive.
- Carlos Castaneda
That's what being alive is, Thing! It's being badly prepared for everything! Because you only get one chance, Thing!
- Terry Pratchett
In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the
cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat
could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.
- Terry Pratchett
I have inspiration and feelings of being alive most every day I live.
- Judy Collins
It is true that I have had heartache and tragedy in my life. These are things none of us avoids. Suffering is the price of being alive.
- Judy Collins
I wish I could have one without the other, but that's the problem with being alive. You don't usually get to choose the measure of suffering or the degree of joy you have.
- Ally Condie
You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down... some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.
- Aaron Copland
Rick feels almost the way he used to halfway through his third drink, his favorite moment, the way he wishes all moments in life could feel: heightened with the sense that anything could happen at any moment--that being alive is important, because just when you least expect it, you might receive exactly what you least expect.
- Douglas Coupland
If nothing else, we simply get used to being alive.
- Doug Coupland
By the time I got to the bottom, I understood what Guthrie ment when he shouted LIBERO! It was a celebration of being alive.
- Sharon Creech
when i reached the bottom, i finally understood what Guthrie meant when he shouted, "LIBERO!" It was a celebration of being alive
- Sharon Creech
I'm just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren't going to be alive forever - that bothered me.
- David Cronenberg
Just having the pain of being alive without anything else, whether it's good or bad. There's a lot of serious songs on the record, you know. That song is just about feeling like a fish out of water, feeling like you don't belong on the planet sometimes.
- Jon Crosby
By learning these eternal truths, not only will you prepare your family for a better future and change your family history forever, you will also gain all of the self-confidence you need. You'll wake up every day excited about being alive that day, and know that today is better than yesterday, and tomorrow will be even better than today. You will be linked to the chain of prosperity.
- Celso Cukierkorn
Unbeing dead isn't being alive.
- E E Cummings
If 180 million people want to be undead, that's their funeral, but I happen to like being alive.
- E E Cummings
That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody's whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that being alive is a crock of shit.
- Kurt Vonnegut
How's the patient?" asked Derby.
"Dead to the world."
"But not actually dead."
"No."
"How nice - to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
- Kurt Vonnegut
A plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive, at least a little bit...
- Kurt Vonnegut
But I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me, besides music, was all the saints I met, who could be anywhere. By saints I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society.
- Kurt Vonnegut
i didn't need a timequake to teach me being alive was a crock of shit. i already knew that from my childhood and crucifixes and history books.
- Kurt Vonnegut
What's the point of being alive," she said, "if you're not going to communicate?
- Kurt Vonnegut
I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did.
- Kurt Vonnegut
How nice-to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
- Kurt Vonnegut
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
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?
- John Green
Better to not know which moment may be your last. Every morsel of your entire being alive to the infinite mystery of it all.
- Johnny Depp
It's the same thing,' I told her.
'What is?'
'Being afraid and being alive.'
'No,' she said slowly, and now it was as if she was speaking a language she knew at first I wouldn't understand, the very words, not to mention the concept, being foreign to me. 'Macy, no. It's not.
- Sarah Dessen
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
She'll die.'
'Aye. That's a consequence of being alive.
- Ursula K Le Guin
That's the problem with being alive," she says, staring at the floor. "You've got to keep thinking of what to do.
- Glen Duncan
Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.
- Stephen Dunn
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
Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.
- Sebastian Faulks
One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people.
- Sebastian Faulks
Truth was, I didn't really want to die today. I was in the middle of a really good book, and being alive had always worked out for me..
- Jessica Fortunato
I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.
- John Fowles
I really love being alive. I love my family and my work. I love the opportunity I have to do things. That's what happiness is.
- Michael J Fox
Over the balustrade I could see the dark trees of Webster Groves and the more distant TV-tower lights that marked the boundaries of my childhood. A night wind coming across the football practice field carried the smell of thawed winter earth, the great sorrowful world-smell of being alive beneath a sky.
- Jonathan Franzen
Yeah, I really like being alive. But I definitely don't have any intentions as an artist.
- John Frusciante
This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don't you think so?
- Thomas Hardy
The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary.She knew how to hit to a hair's-breadth that moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint if day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty.It is then that the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions.
- Thomas Hardy
If you could jerk off to something else, like a hamburger, could you imagine the delight in being alive?
- Jonathan Goldstein
You're alive, Bianca. You still can't appreciate what it means, to be alive. It's better than being a vampire - better than anything else in the world. I remember a little of waht being alive was like, and if I could touch that again, even for a day, it would be worth anything in the world. Even dying again, forever. All the centuries I've known and all the marvels I've seen don't compare to being alive.
- Claudia Gray
My faith is whatever makes me feel good about being alive. If your religion doesn't make you feel good to be alive, what the hell is the point of it?
- Tom Robbins
If being alive is not a virtue, then there is little virtue in virtue.
- Tom Robbins
I acknowledge the privilege of being alive in a human body at this moment, endowed with senses, memories, emotions, thoughts, and the space of mind in its wisdom aspect.
- Alex Grey
I wonder if everyone who faces death hurts like this. It's as though for the first time I realize how much just being alive makes my body ache. But I don't want that ache to stop.
- Shannon Hale
It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
- Tom Stoppard
There is so much beauty in just existing. In being alive.
- Hannah Harrington
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
The other option you have is to come to terms with this fucking life, as you call it, and put up with the suffering it involves. Put up with the suffering we all have to endure, always, to get through that and find and enjoy the happiness and joy that it brings us as well, in spite of our being alive.
- Arnaldur Indridason
..he began drinking heavily and lived in a way which a friend described as making sense "only if he had no expectations of being alive much beyond Thursday".
- P D James
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
I was relying on Suliman being alive.THen when all that seemed to be left of him was Percival, I was so scared I had to go out and get drunk. And then you go and play into the Witch's hand!" "I'm the eldest!" Sophie shrieked. "I'm a failure!" "Garbage!" Howl shouted. "You just never stop to think!
- Diana Wynne Jones
Is there any real purpose in being alive if all we are going to do is get up every day and live only for ourselves?
Live your life to help others. Give & live selflessly.
- Joyce Meyer
Being alive means living fully extended. Like Orafoura's cousin, who is 2.5 inches tall, but has a five-inch penis. You can't say that's average, because how many people do you know whose penis is twice as long as they are?
- Jarod Kintz
I want to know--or understand something. I've been sick my whole life. What is the point of being alive if I never get to live?
- Erin Kellison
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
Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.
- Barbara Kingsolver
This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn't matter. You just live.
- Chuck Klosterman
Maybe I don't need a relationship after all, she thought. Maybe thinking about these conversations was just as good as having them. She could sit in her Honda in the dark and experience whatever kind of life she wanted. Sometimes you think, Hey, maybe there's something else out there. But there really isn't. This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn't matter. You just live.
- Chuck Klosterman
The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive.
- Chuck Klosterman
Ariel Gordon is superbly, supremely, a poet of the body. She finds words for the physicality of the forest, of the garden, of pregnancy. Hump speaks the erotics of being alive and being in love with being alive.
- Robert Kroetsch
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
What's it like to be really dead, I wonder. Tell me about it, won't you Dave?"
"It's like being alive", he replied. "Only different."
"What do you do for kicks?", she asked.
"No kicks", he replied, shaking her head.
- Tom Lichtenberg
Happiness ceases to be a normal condition of being alive, and becomes a goal.
- Jean Liedloff
There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessnesslike how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistakehe could no longer get at.
- Tao Lin
But, - and there it is, - we want to live and move, though we have no reason to, because it happens that it is the nature of life to live and move, to want to live and move. If it were not for this, life would be dead. It is because of this life that is in you that you dream of your immortality. The life that is in you is alive and wants to go on being alive forever. Bah! An eternity of piggishness!
- Jack London
It's his last thrill and his last sting of love, as fresh and painful as youth transplanted over time and an ocean. There is nothing left for him now except to die, but that will take a while because he is a creature of habit, and he has got into the habit of being alive.
- Ann Marie Macdonald
Being alive is sign of strength!
- Hiro Mashima
A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.
- Frances Mayes
Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.
- Colum Mccann
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.
- David Mccullough
The question of love is one that cannot be evaded. Whether or not you claim to be interested in it from the moment you are alive you are bound to be concerned with love because love is not just something that happens to you: It is a certain special way of being alive. Love is in fact an intensification of life a completeness a fullness a wholeness of life.
- Thomas Merton
I used to worry about what life was for - now being alive seems sufficient reason.
- Marion Milner
Gossip is never fatal until it is denied. Gossip goes on about every human being alive and about all the dead that are alive enough to be remembered, and yet almost never does any harm until some defender makes a controversy. Gossip's a nasty thing, but it's sickly, and if people of good intentions will let it entirely alone, it will die, ninety-nine times out of a hundred.
- Booth Tarkington
Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.'
Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.
- Toni Morrison
Is this freedom? Is it happiness? I don't know. I don't care anymore. It is different--it is being alive.
- Lauren Oliver
I feel good in my own skin because I've accepted the fact that I'm me. That's what's so great about being alive and being on this planet: Everybody's different.
- Kelly Osbourne
The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.
The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.
- Walker Percy
No, it's just like when you're dead and you try to remember being alive, it'll be like thinking of winter on the hottest day of the year. You'll know it's true, but you won't really believe it.
- Tom Perrotta
Because if I smashed anything, Team Jaiden would just get me into a behavior modification program, or maybe some doctor would put be on drugs for my ADD or bipolarism or depression or whatever they're calling being alive and feeling royally screwed these days.
- Stefan Petrucha
How do I explain a life that has lasted for billions of years? It is almost as if I must start with an apology for being alive when everyone I once knew is dead.
- Christopher Pike
Then she would wander through fields, over simple, poor land, looking carefully and keenly all round her, still getting used to being alive in the world, and feeling glad that everything in it was right for her for her body, her heart, and her freedom.
- Andrey Platonov
Don't you love being alive?" asked Miranda. "Don't you love weather and the colors at different times of the day, and all the sounds and noises like children screaming in the next lot, and automobile horns and little bands playing in the street and the smell of food cooking?"
"I love to swim, too." said Adam.
"So do I," said Miranda, "we never did swim together.
- Katherine Anne Porter
It is so easy to forget that this is good that we're alive. We should be enjoying this gift of being alive.
- Victoria Principal
Fashion is not frivolous. It is a part of being alive today.
- Mary Quant
I think dogs are the most amazing creatures;
they give unconditional love.
For me they are the role model for being alive.
- Gilda Radner
But survival means more than simply being alive. It's not just the body that must survive a jail term: the spirit and the will and the heart have to make it through as well. If any one of them is broken or destroyed, the man whose living body walks through the gate, at the end of his sentence, can't be said to have survived it.
- Gregory David Roberts
Whether we're a preschooler or a young teen, a graduating college senior or a retired person, we human beings all want to know that we're acceptable, that our being alive somehow makes a difference in the lives of others.
- Fred Rogers
The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one.
- Salman Rushdie
But I know I would not go out. I had taken this time to fall in love instead in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in 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 navigating the unknown.
- Alice Sebold
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 navigating the unknown.
- Alice Sebold
I attributed their behavior to the fact that they didn't have a TV, but television didn't teach you everything. Asking for candy on Halloween was called trick-or-treating, but asking for candy on November first was called begging, and it made people uncomfortable. This was one of the things you were supposed to learn simply by being alive, and it angered me that the Tomkeys did not understand it.
- David Sedaris
How long will this last, this delicious feeling of being alive, of having penetrated the veil which hides beauty and the wonders of celestial vistas? It doesn't matter, as there can be nothing but gratitude for even a glimpse of what exists for those who can become open to it.
- Alexander Shulgin
Being alive was all right then: he had not breathed like that for a long time.
- Leslie Marmon Silko
The problem and privilege we all have is being alive in this century and able to read this language. It makes any list meaningless except the list of an illiterate.
- John Sladek
Shut up. For the rest of this conversation, you don't say anything. When I tell you what you did wrong, you don't say you're sorry, because I already know you're sorry. And when you drive outta here alive, you don't thank me for being alive. And you don't even say goodbye to me.
- Neal Stephenson
If you couldn't tell the difference between what hurt and what didn't, you had no business being alive. You can't have any good times if you can't tell.
- Robert Stone
Like being alive one moment and dead the next.
- Courtney Summers
The wind blustered in from the sea, setting the horses' manes streaming sideways, and the gulls wheeled mewing against the blue-and-grey tumble of the sky; and Aquila, riding a little aside from the rest as usual, caught for a moment from the wind and the gulls and the wet sand and the living, leaping power of the young red mare under him, something of the joy of simply being alive that he had taken for granted in the old days.
- Rosemary Sutcliff
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
The reporter wrote with the hope that he would get a by-line in the Times, a testimony to his being alive on that day and all the tomorrows of microfilm.
- Gay Talese
I think how the world is still somehow beautiful even when I feel no joy at being alive within it.
- Loung Ung
We all long for someone with whom we are able to share our peculiar burdens of being alive.
- Salley Vickers
In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.
- David Foster Wallace
Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.
- David Foster Wallace
Blissa-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, consciouslies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
- David Foster Wallace
This is what being alive's all about, all those fucked up feelings. You've got to have them; when you stop, watch out.
- Irvine Welsh
Lucky for us, we can give meaning to each other for free. Just by being alive.
- Daniel H Wilson
I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.
- Richard Wright
I think it's really tragic when people get serious about stuff. It's such an absurdity to take anything really seriously... I make an honest attempt not to take anything seriously: I worked that attitude out about the time I was eighteen, I mean, what does it all mean when you get right down to it, what's the story here? Being alive is so weird.
- Frank Zappa
That, that right there. That's it, that feeling, that moment of breathlessness, that little surge in your chest, the prickle of heat along your skin and the low hot roll of your belly, that's what being alive is all about.
- Christine Zolendz
- Andy Warhol
What do you miss about being alive?"
The sound of my mom singing, a little off-key. The way my dad went to all my swim meets and I could hear his whistle when my head was underwater, even if he did yell at me afterward for not trying harder. I miss going to the library. I miss the smell of clothes fresh out of the dryer. I miss diving off the highest board and nailing the landing. I miss waffles" - p. 272.
- Laurie Halse Anderson
Living Memory
I carry you with me into the world,
into the smell of rain
& the words that dance between people
& for me, it will always be this way,
walking in the light,
remembering being alive together
- Brian Andreas
The whole point of being alive is to evolve into the complete person you were intended to be.
- Oprah Winfrey
... but it's fun being alive, isn't it? I feel as if I'd only got to stretch up my hands to all those stars and catch as many of them as I want to.
- Elizabeth Von Arnim
To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
- Matthew Arnold
Maybe that's what being alive is about: so we can track down those movments that are dying.
- Muriel Barbery
What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place.
- Elif Batuman
Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.
- John Steinbeck
Being alive, if you had to define it, meant emitting a variety of smells
- Haruki Murakami
It's precisely because of the pain, the we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being aliveor at least a partial sense of it.
- Haruki Murakami
When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift. There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.
- Thornton Wilder
The business man who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. "Yes, I see, dear; it's about halfway between," Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.
- E M Forster
The businessman who assumes that his life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. 'Yes, I see, dear; it's about half-way between,' Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.
- E M Forster
I want to wake people up and make them care about being alive in this universe.
- Ray Bradbury
Being alive is gardening and cooking and birds and green and blue, at the very least.
- Charles Bowden
Once you lose that sense of wonder at being alive, you're pretty much on the way out..
- David Bowie
Jim Crow was king... and I heard a game in which Jackie Robinson was playing, and I felt pride in being alive.
- Lou Brock
The darkness is calling. A little danger, a little risk. Feel your heart race. Listen to it. That's the sound of being alive. It's your time, Nick. Your one chance to have fun before it's all stolen by them, the adults, with their cruelty and endless rules, their can't-do-this, and can't-do-that's, their have-tos, and better-dos, their little boxes and cages all designed to break your spirit, to kill your magic.
- Brom
That may be true," I thought, "But they don't have digital cable or Internet access, so really what's the point of being alive?" Civilized life, with all its threats and potential dooms, is too much to bear without the respite of three hundred channels. True, Osama bin Laden may very well send nuclear-bomb-filled suitcases on Amtrak trains into Penn Station, but until then: "I Love the 80s on VH1.
- Augusten Burroughs
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
Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.
- Joseph Campbell
We save the world by being alive ourselves.
- Joseph Campbell
We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.
- Joseph Campbell
I don't think people are really seeking the meaning of Life. I think we're seeking an experience of being alive...we want to feel the rapture of being alive
- Joseph Campbell
I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
- Joseph Campbell
People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances without own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
- Joseph Campbell
No one knows exactly where thought comes from, but it can be said that thought comes from the same place as whatever it is that beats our heart... it comes from being alive.
- Richard Carlson
Now every mortal has pain
and sweat is constant,
but if there is anything dearer than being alive,
it's dark to me.
We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing
(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth--
we call it life. We know no other.
The underworld's a blank
and all the rest just fantasy.
- Anne Carson
My benefactor told me that my father and mother had lived and died just to have me, and that their own parents had done the same for them. He said that warriors were different in that they shift their assemblage points enough to realize the tremendous price that has been paid for their lives. This shift gives them the respect and awe that their parents never felt for life in general, or for being alive in particular.
- Carlos Castaneda
The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.
- Carlos Castaneda
The art of being a warrior is to balance the wonder and the terror of being alive.
- Carlos Castaneda
That's what being alive is, Thing! It's being badly prepared for everything! Because you only get one chance, Thing!
- Terry Pratchett
In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the
cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat
could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.
- Terry Pratchett
I have inspiration and feelings of being alive most every day I live.
- Judy Collins
It is true that I have had heartache and tragedy in my life. These are things none of us avoids. Suffering is the price of being alive.
- Judy Collins
I wish I could have one without the other, but that's the problem with being alive. You don't usually get to choose the measure of suffering or the degree of joy you have.
- Ally Condie
You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down... some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.
- Aaron Copland
Rick feels almost the way he used to halfway through his third drink, his favorite moment, the way he wishes all moments in life could feel: heightened with the sense that anything could happen at any moment--that being alive is important, because just when you least expect it, you might receive exactly what you least expect.
- Douglas Coupland
If nothing else, we simply get used to being alive.
- Doug Coupland
By the time I got to the bottom, I understood what Guthrie ment when he shouted LIBERO! It was a celebration of being alive.
- Sharon Creech
when i reached the bottom, i finally understood what Guthrie meant when he shouted, "LIBERO!" It was a celebration of being alive
- Sharon Creech
I'm just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren't going to be alive forever - that bothered me.
- David Cronenberg
Just having the pain of being alive without anything else, whether it's good or bad. There's a lot of serious songs on the record, you know. That song is just about feeling like a fish out of water, feeling like you don't belong on the planet sometimes.
- Jon Crosby
By learning these eternal truths, not only will you prepare your family for a better future and change your family history forever, you will also gain all of the self-confidence you need. You'll wake up every day excited about being alive that day, and know that today is better than yesterday, and tomorrow will be even better than today. You will be linked to the chain of prosperity.
- Celso Cukierkorn
Unbeing dead isn't being alive.
- E E Cummings
If 180 million people want to be undead, that's their funeral, but I happen to like being alive.
- E E Cummings
That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody's whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that being alive is a crock of shit.
- Kurt Vonnegut
How's the patient?" asked Derby.
"Dead to the world."
"But not actually dead."
"No."
"How nice - to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
- Kurt Vonnegut
A plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive, at least a little bit...
- Kurt Vonnegut
But I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me, besides music, was all the saints I met, who could be anywhere. By saints I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society.
- Kurt Vonnegut
i didn't need a timequake to teach me being alive was a crock of shit. i already knew that from my childhood and crucifixes and history books.
- Kurt Vonnegut
What's the point of being alive," she said, "if you're not going to communicate?
- Kurt Vonnegut
I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did.
- Kurt Vonnegut
How nice-to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
- Kurt Vonnegut
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
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?
- John Green
Better to not know which moment may be your last. Every morsel of your entire being alive to the infinite mystery of it all.
- Johnny Depp
It's the same thing,' I told her.
'What is?'
'Being afraid and being alive.'
'No,' she said slowly, and now it was as if she was speaking a language she knew at first I wouldn't understand, the very words, not to mention the concept, being foreign to me. 'Macy, no. It's not.
- Sarah Dessen
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
She'll die.'
'Aye. That's a consequence of being alive.
- Ursula K Le Guin
That's the problem with being alive," she says, staring at the floor. "You've got to keep thinking of what to do.
- Glen Duncan
Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.
- Stephen Dunn
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
Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.
- Sebastian Faulks
One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people.
- Sebastian Faulks
Truth was, I didn't really want to die today. I was in the middle of a really good book, and being alive had always worked out for me..
- Jessica Fortunato
I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.
- John Fowles
I really love being alive. I love my family and my work. I love the opportunity I have to do things. That's what happiness is.
- Michael J Fox
Over the balustrade I could see the dark trees of Webster Groves and the more distant TV-tower lights that marked the boundaries of my childhood. A night wind coming across the football practice field carried the smell of thawed winter earth, the great sorrowful world-smell of being alive beneath a sky.
- Jonathan Franzen
Yeah, I really like being alive. But I definitely don't have any intentions as an artist.
- John Frusciante
This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don't you think so?
- Thomas Hardy
The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary.She knew how to hit to a hair's-breadth that moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint if day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty.It is then that the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions.
- Thomas Hardy
If you could jerk off to something else, like a hamburger, could you imagine the delight in being alive?
- Jonathan Goldstein
You're alive, Bianca. You still can't appreciate what it means, to be alive. It's better than being a vampire - better than anything else in the world. I remember a little of waht being alive was like, and if I could touch that again, even for a day, it would be worth anything in the world. Even dying again, forever. All the centuries I've known and all the marvels I've seen don't compare to being alive.
- Claudia Gray
My faith is whatever makes me feel good about being alive. If your religion doesn't make you feel good to be alive, what the hell is the point of it?
- Tom Robbins
If being alive is not a virtue, then there is little virtue in virtue.
- Tom Robbins
I acknowledge the privilege of being alive in a human body at this moment, endowed with senses, memories, emotions, thoughts, and the space of mind in its wisdom aspect.
- Alex Grey
I wonder if everyone who faces death hurts like this. It's as though for the first time I realize how much just being alive makes my body ache. But I don't want that ache to stop.
- Shannon Hale
It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
- Tom Stoppard
There is so much beauty in just existing. In being alive.
- Hannah Harrington
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
The other option you have is to come to terms with this fucking life, as you call it, and put up with the suffering it involves. Put up with the suffering we all have to endure, always, to get through that and find and enjoy the happiness and joy that it brings us as well, in spite of our being alive.
- Arnaldur Indridason
..he began drinking heavily and lived in a way which a friend described as making sense "only if he had no expectations of being alive much beyond Thursday".
- P D James
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
I was relying on Suliman being alive.THen when all that seemed to be left of him was Percival, I was so scared I had to go out and get drunk. And then you go and play into the Witch's hand!" "I'm the eldest!" Sophie shrieked. "I'm a failure!" "Garbage!" Howl shouted. "You just never stop to think!
- Diana Wynne Jones
Is there any real purpose in being alive if all we are going to do is get up every day and live only for ourselves?
Live your life to help others. Give & live selflessly.
- Joyce Meyer
Being alive means living fully extended. Like Orafoura's cousin, who is 2.5 inches tall, but has a five-inch penis. You can't say that's average, because how many people do you know whose penis is twice as long as they are?
- Jarod Kintz
I want to know--or understand something. I've been sick my whole life. What is the point of being alive if I never get to live?
- Erin Kellison
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
Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.
- Barbara Kingsolver
This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn't matter. You just live.
- Chuck Klosterman
Maybe I don't need a relationship after all, she thought. Maybe thinking about these conversations was just as good as having them. She could sit in her Honda in the dark and experience whatever kind of life she wanted. Sometimes you think, Hey, maybe there's something else out there. But there really isn't. This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn't matter. You just live.
- Chuck Klosterman
The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive.
- Chuck Klosterman
Ariel Gordon is superbly, supremely, a poet of the body. She finds words for the physicality of the forest, of the garden, of pregnancy. Hump speaks the erotics of being alive and being in love with being alive.
- Robert Kroetsch
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
What's it like to be really dead, I wonder. Tell me about it, won't you Dave?"
"It's like being alive", he replied. "Only different."
"What do you do for kicks?", she asked.
"No kicks", he replied, shaking her head.
- Tom Lichtenberg
Happiness ceases to be a normal condition of being alive, and becomes a goal.
- Jean Liedloff
There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessnesslike how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistakehe could no longer get at.
- Tao Lin
But, - and there it is, - we want to live and move, though we have no reason to, because it happens that it is the nature of life to live and move, to want to live and move. If it were not for this, life would be dead. It is because of this life that is in you that you dream of your immortality. The life that is in you is alive and wants to go on being alive forever. Bah! An eternity of piggishness!
- Jack London
It's his last thrill and his last sting of love, as fresh and painful as youth transplanted over time and an ocean. There is nothing left for him now except to die, but that will take a while because he is a creature of habit, and he has got into the habit of being alive.
- Ann Marie Macdonald
Being alive is sign of strength!
- Hiro Mashima
A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.
- Frances Mayes
Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.
- Colum Mccann
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.
- David Mccullough
The question of love is one that cannot be evaded. Whether or not you claim to be interested in it from the moment you are alive you are bound to be concerned with love because love is not just something that happens to you: It is a certain special way of being alive. Love is in fact an intensification of life a completeness a fullness a wholeness of life.
- Thomas Merton
I used to worry about what life was for - now being alive seems sufficient reason.
- Marion Milner
Gossip is never fatal until it is denied. Gossip goes on about every human being alive and about all the dead that are alive enough to be remembered, and yet almost never does any harm until some defender makes a controversy. Gossip's a nasty thing, but it's sickly, and if people of good intentions will let it entirely alone, it will die, ninety-nine times out of a hundred.
- Booth Tarkington
Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.'
Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.
- Toni Morrison
Is this freedom? Is it happiness? I don't know. I don't care anymore. It is different--it is being alive.
- Lauren Oliver
I feel good in my own skin because I've accepted the fact that I'm me. That's what's so great about being alive and being on this planet: Everybody's different.
- Kelly Osbourne
The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.
The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.
- Walker Percy
No, it's just like when you're dead and you try to remember being alive, it'll be like thinking of winter on the hottest day of the year. You'll know it's true, but you won't really believe it.
- Tom Perrotta
Because if I smashed anything, Team Jaiden would just get me into a behavior modification program, or maybe some doctor would put be on drugs for my ADD or bipolarism or depression or whatever they're calling being alive and feeling royally screwed these days.
- Stefan Petrucha
How do I explain a life that has lasted for billions of years? It is almost as if I must start with an apology for being alive when everyone I once knew is dead.
- Christopher Pike
Then she would wander through fields, over simple, poor land, looking carefully and keenly all round her, still getting used to being alive in the world, and feeling glad that everything in it was right for her for her body, her heart, and her freedom.
- Andrey Platonov
Don't you love being alive?" asked Miranda. "Don't you love weather and the colors at different times of the day, and all the sounds and noises like children screaming in the next lot, and automobile horns and little bands playing in the street and the smell of food cooking?"
"I love to swim, too." said Adam.
"So do I," said Miranda, "we never did swim together.
- Katherine Anne Porter
It is so easy to forget that this is good that we're alive. We should be enjoying this gift of being alive.
- Victoria Principal
Fashion is not frivolous. It is a part of being alive today.
- Mary Quant
I think dogs are the most amazing creatures;
they give unconditional love.
For me they are the role model for being alive.
- Gilda Radner
But survival means more than simply being alive. It's not just the body that must survive a jail term: the spirit and the will and the heart have to make it through as well. If any one of them is broken or destroyed, the man whose living body walks through the gate, at the end of his sentence, can't be said to have survived it.
- Gregory David Roberts
Whether we're a preschooler or a young teen, a graduating college senior or a retired person, we human beings all want to know that we're acceptable, that our being alive somehow makes a difference in the lives of others.
- Fred Rogers
The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one.
- Salman Rushdie
But I know I would not go out. I had taken this time to fall in love instead in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in 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 navigating the unknown.
- Alice Sebold
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 navigating the unknown.
- Alice Sebold
I attributed their behavior to the fact that they didn't have a TV, but television didn't teach you everything. Asking for candy on Halloween was called trick-or-treating, but asking for candy on November first was called begging, and it made people uncomfortable. This was one of the things you were supposed to learn simply by being alive, and it angered me that the Tomkeys did not understand it.
- David Sedaris
How long will this last, this delicious feeling of being alive, of having penetrated the veil which hides beauty and the wonders of celestial vistas? It doesn't matter, as there can be nothing but gratitude for even a glimpse of what exists for those who can become open to it.
- Alexander Shulgin
Being alive was all right then: he had not breathed like that for a long time.
- Leslie Marmon Silko
The problem and privilege we all have is being alive in this century and able to read this language. It makes any list meaningless except the list of an illiterate.
- John Sladek
Shut up. For the rest of this conversation, you don't say anything. When I tell you what you did wrong, you don't say you're sorry, because I already know you're sorry. And when you drive outta here alive, you don't thank me for being alive. And you don't even say goodbye to me.
- Neal Stephenson
If you couldn't tell the difference between what hurt and what didn't, you had no business being alive. You can't have any good times if you can't tell.
- Robert Stone
Like being alive one moment and dead the next.
- Courtney Summers
The wind blustered in from the sea, setting the horses' manes streaming sideways, and the gulls wheeled mewing against the blue-and-grey tumble of the sky; and Aquila, riding a little aside from the rest as usual, caught for a moment from the wind and the gulls and the wet sand and the living, leaping power of the young red mare under him, something of the joy of simply being alive that he had taken for granted in the old days.
- Rosemary Sutcliff
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
The reporter wrote with the hope that he would get a by-line in the Times, a testimony to his being alive on that day and all the tomorrows of microfilm.
- Gay Talese
I think how the world is still somehow beautiful even when I feel no joy at being alive within it.
- Loung Ung
We all long for someone with whom we are able to share our peculiar burdens of being alive.
- Salley Vickers
In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.
- David Foster Wallace
Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.
- David Foster Wallace
Blissa-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, consciouslies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
- David Foster Wallace
This is what being alive's all about, all those fucked up feelings. You've got to have them; when you stop, watch out.
- Irvine Welsh
Lucky for us, we can give meaning to each other for free. Just by being alive.
- Daniel H Wilson
I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.
- Richard Wright
I think it's really tragic when people get serious about stuff. It's such an absurdity to take anything really seriously... I make an honest attempt not to take anything seriously: I worked that attitude out about the time I was eighteen, I mean, what does it all mean when you get right down to it, what's the story here? Being alive is so weird.
- Frank Zappa
That, that right there. That's it, that feeling, that moment of breathlessness, that little surge in your chest, the prickle of heat along your skin and the low hot roll of your belly, that's what being alive is all about.
- Christine Zolendz
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