#life

Now," my mother sniffled, "WERE you abducted? Kidnapped?" "You mean did somebody snatch me?" "Yes. Well?" "Why would anybody wanna snatch ME?" "Megin. Just DID they?" "Did who? Who's THEY?" ANYBODY! Snatch you?" I laughed. "Jeez no!" And she grabbed me again and we cried some more. ↗

— Jerry Spinelli

#life

Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on. ↗

— David Malouf

#fiction #literature #life

To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability…. [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random particles. ↗

— Francis Collins

#life #religion #the-universe #life

Inexplicably, I felt drops of icy sweat dripping up my back. I am aware that icy and sweat are contradictory by their very nature and should not be able to coexist in the same freakish bead of ICK WHAT IS THAT falling up my back. I am also aware things are not supposed to fall up. For that matter, criminals aren’t supposed to get it on with crimefighters. Yet here we were: Catwoman, Batman, icy, sweat, dripping, up. Sometimes life is like that. ↗

— Chris Dee

#irony #life

Two months in Shanghai, and what does she have to show for herself? She had been full of plans on the plane ride over, had studied her phrase book as if cramming for an exam, had been determined to refine her computational model with a new set of data, expecting insights and breakthroughs, plotting notes for a new article. Only the time has trickled away so quickly. She has meandered through the days chatting with James instead of gathering data. At night, she has gone out to dinners and bars. [James'] Chinese has not improved; her computational model has barely been touched. She does not know what she has been doing with herself, and now an airplane six days away is waiting for her. ↗

— Ruiyan Xu

#time #work #life

When I think of existence, I cannot help but wonder, "What is life, anyway?" Where do I fit in the grand scheme of life? What is the point of it, anyway? Is this a test—and if so, am I passing it? ↗

— C.J. Sinclair

#life #mystery #purpose #life

Stories don't care who takes part in them. All that matters if that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#life

When you're conscious of what you're permitting to germinate inside you, the weeds in your life will wither away of their own accord. ↗

— Lawrence Shorter

#non-fiction #life

An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered, was her conclusion. A condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right and wrong almost incidental. ↗

— Richard Russo

#morality #life

I swiftly discovered that there are few things in DIY (and possibly life) that can't be solved with a large mallet, a bag of ten-centimetre nails and some swearing. ↗

— Monty Halls

#humour #life