#w

But I needed this, Whit. I needed to pay him back. For stealing my life. For stealing our life together. - Celia ↗

— James Patterson

#james-pattereson #patterson #the-fire #whit #wisty

Life, said Samuel Butler, is like giving a concert on the violin while learning to play the instrument—that, friends, is real wisdom. ↗

— Saul Bellow

#life

For it can never be that war shall preserve life, and peace destroy it. ↗

— Thomas Hobbes

#philosophy #war #life

The whole story, paradoxically enough, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion into the preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#life

Do you like reading? It's the best thing that can happen to you in life. Writing has other implications. ↗

— Manuel Rivas

#writing #life

He thought moving to a small town would allow him to find a way to get along to some extent but people were just plain idiots. ↗

— Christine Feehan

#people-suck #small-town-life #life

Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: "Ports have names they call the sea." Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use -- high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject -- there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical. ↗

— Richard Rodriguez

#writing #life

I could hear the crickets and tree frogs starting their night song in the small, wooded area behind us. A faint smell of lilac filled the air. There was always lilac in this part of town. Where there were grandmothers, there was always lilac. ↗

— Laura Miller

#life

Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to, and it couldn't do it better. Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition. ↗

— Florida Scott-Maxwell

#better #container #destroys #does #else

The forest stretched on seemingly forever with the most monotonous predictability, each tree just like the next - trunk, branches, leaves; trunk, branches, leaves. Of course a tree would have taken a different view of the matter. We all tend to see the way others are alike and how we differ, and it's probably just as well we do, since that prevents a great deal of confusion. But perhaps we should remind ourselves from time to time that ours is a very partial view, and that the world is full of a great deal more variety than we ever manage to take in. ↗

— Thomas M. Disch

#life #perspective #view #life