#life

it is as if i were dead, and this is the after-life, her in the sunlight, beyond the edge of the world, among the sons and daughters of the sea. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#life

Those were the best days in the life of Tancredi and Angelica, lives later to be so variegated, so erring, against the inevitable background of sorrow. But that they did not know then; and they were pursuing a future which they deemed more concrete than it turned out to be, made of nothing but smoke and wind. When they were old and uselessly wise their thoughts would go back to those days with insistent regret; they had been days when desire was always present because it was always overcome, when many beds had been offered and refused, when the sensual urge, because restrained, had for one second been sublimated in renunciation, that is into real love. ↗

— Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

#marriage #life

The whole construct of my universe was a cunning, entangled network of lies. I had to start over again. I knew that. And I had to begin by ceasing to loathe myself for my difference from the rest. ↗

— Pat Conroy

#life

The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life. ↗

— Betsy Lerner

#life

Youth is not wasted on the young, it is given to them, so they can build a lifetime of memories ↗

— C.H.Hamel

#life

The Gospel is not a mere message of deliverance, but a canon of conduct; it is not a theology to be accepted, but it is ethics to be lived. It is not to be believed only, but it is to be taken into life as a guide. ↗

— Alexander MacLaren

#gospel #life

In the political jargon of those days, the word "intellectual" was an insult. It indicated someone who did not understand life and was cut off from the people. All the Communists who were hanged at the time by other Communists were awarded such abuse. Unlike those who had their feet solidly on the ground, they were said to float in the air. So it was fair, in a way, that as punishment the ground was permanently pulled out from under their feet, that they remained suspended a little above the floor. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#gallows-humour #hanged #insult #intellectual #life

The other thing you can do is write a strong personal essay which lets admissions people inside your life, your heart, and your world. ... Anyway, it can be hard to figure out what to write about, so here are a few suggestions: ... 5. Reasons it's wrong to be racist even though it makes sense to you. ↗

— Eugene Mirman

#humor #racism #life

My sister stood up, trembling, and I must admit that I expected her familiar sneer to have taken its usual place on her face. But all I could find there was unhappiness and fear. Fear of my reaction, perhaps. But when a person has lived a life like hers, a life of promiscuity, rootlessness, and substance abuse, resentment and fear tend to replace all reasonable and proper emotions, and the world becomes your enemy. ↗

— J. Robert Lennon

#life

It often struck Nina that women who seemed capable of only limited mental tasks in most situations could retain information regarding other peoples weight for years, sometimes decades. Unlike genuine idiots savants, they couldn't tell you that December 13, 1972 had fallen on a Wednesday. But they could often tell you, within a pound or two, how much you'd weighed that week. ↗

— Marissa Piesman

#life #women #life