Our Lives Quotes - Page 5

• the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.

  Penelope Lively

  Reality, Fiction, Endure

  Penelope Lively (2007). “Moon Tiger”, p.9, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Feelings take you into uncharted territory from time to time it's true, but you almost always benefit from the journey one way or the other. We tend to think of the rational as a higher order, but it is the emotional that marks our lives.

  Merle Shain

  Journey, Emotional, Thinking

  Merle Shain (1973). “Some Men Are More Perfect Than Others”

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• To hallow'd duty
  Here with a loyal and heroic heart,
  Bind we our lives.

  Frances Sargent Osgood

  Heart, Loyal, Heroic

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• Today's wars are about oil. But alternate energies exist now - solar, wind - for every important energy-using activity in our lives. The only human work that cannot be done without oil is war.

  Grace Paley

  War, Wind, Oil

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• As so often happens in marriage, roles that had begun almost playfully, to give line and shape to our lives, had hardened like suits of armor and taken us prisoner.

  Molly Haskell

  Marriage, Taken, Suits Of Armor

  Molly Haskell (2000). “Love and Other Infectious Diseases: A Memoir”, p.12, iUniverse

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• the unconscious forces that govern accessible memory are the most arbitrary of editors and the absolute masters of our lives.

  Helen McCloy

  Memories, Editors, Arbitrary

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• The discovery that it is in our power to change our lives by the thoughts we think is the first step toward spiritual mastery.

  Alice Hegan Rice

  Spiritual, Thinking, Discovery

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• No one betrays us as much in our lives as we betray ourselves.

  Barbara De Angelis

  Betray

  Barbara De Angelis (1995). “Real Moments”, Dell

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• What we employ in charitable uses during our lives is given away from ourselves; what we bequeath at our death is given from others only, as our nearest relations.

  Francis Atterbury

  Charity, Use, Life Is

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• We pass our life in deliberation, and we die upon it.

  Pasquier Quesnel

  Procrastination, Deliberation, Dies

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• The trouble with the new world we have watched being created over the past decade is that it sees no further than money. People have always been obsessed with money, of course - greed is as old as history. But when the institutions that govern all our lives forget there was ever anything else, then it gets dangerous.

  Anita Roddick

  Money, Past, People

  Anita Roddick (2001). “Take it personally: how to make conscious choices to change the world”, Conari Pr

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• Some of us are born with a sense of loss. It is not acquired as we grow. It is already there from the beginning, and it pervades us throughout our lives.

  Gloria Vanderbilt

  Loss, Born, Grows

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• It is so much easier to rest contented with what we have already acquired than to change ever so slightly those routine but profound habits of thought and feeling which govern our life, and by which we live so blissfully. This mental inertia is, perhaps, our greatest enemy. Insidiously it leads us to assume that we can renew our lives without renewing our habits.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Profound, Feelings, Enemy

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• [On the United States:] We are a wildly energetic people in our pursuit of pleasure, let alone in our pursuit of money, and we are very odd to look at as we go about our lives.

  Martha Gellhorn

  People, United States, Looks

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• Literature must spring from the deep and submerged humus of our life.

  Meridel Le Sueur

  Spring, Literature, Submerged

  Meridel Le Sueur, Elaine Hedges (1990). “Ripening: Selected Work”, p.31, Feminist Press at CUNY

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• The Troubles are a pigmentation in our lives here, a constant irritation that detracts from real life. But life has to do with something else as well, and it's the other things which are the more permanent and real.

  Brian Friel

  Real, Irritation, Trouble

  Brian Friel, Paul Delaney (2000). “Brian Friel in Conversation”, p.227, University of Michigan Press

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• when asked, most folks will gladly tell us about ourselves, who we are, what we're feeling, and where we should be heading. And if we don't honor ourselves by listening to our lives, we'll believe them.

  Susan L. Taylor

  Believe, Feelings, Listening

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• We speak naturally but spend all our lives trying to write naturally.

  Margaret Wise Brown

  Writing, Trying, Speak

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• In this way, we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) “the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.” We'd love to drop all and explore the world outside, we tell ourselves, but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place.

  Rolf Potts

  Order, Choices, Liberty

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• We must pay close attention to the signals our body sends - the aches and pains, digestions and indigestions, increased energies and exhaustions. Our body sends us signals about the correct 'spelling' of our lives. These sensations are the sum of complex inner computations that we must learn to interpret.

  Susan Collins

  Pain, Body, Pay

  Susan Collins (1996). “Our Children Are Watching: Ten Skills for Leading the Next Generation to Success”, Barrytown/ Station Hill Press

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• Poetry saves what is human in this world going gaudy & insane. In exploring small truths, something larger might turn up, adding dimension, insight, vision, recognition to our lives. We just might be more complete, more aware after a poem.

  Diane Glancy

  Poetry, Vision, Insane

  Diane Glancy (1996). “Claiming Breath”, p.83, U of Nebraska Press

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• We overlook how much in our lives is invisible; love, for instance; thought, God, the future, time, faith, hope and even the electricity that brings us light.

  Dorothy Gilman

  Light, Invisibility, Life Is

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• Prayer is essentially a process by which ideals are enabled to become operative in our lives. It may be more than this, but it is at least this.

  Georgia Harkness

  Prayer, May, Process

  Georgia Elma Harkness (1937). “The Recovery of Ideals”

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• Most of us have one big idea at some point in our lives. That Eureka! moment. It comes to us all in different ways, often by chance of serendipity.

  Peter James

  Ideas, Serendipity, Different

  Peter James (2008). “Not Dead Enough”, p.169, Pan Macmillan

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• A devotional book, which takes a Scripture text, and so opens it for us in the morning - that all day long it helps us to live, becoming a true lamp to our feet, and a staff to lean upon when the way is rough - is the very best devotional help we can possibly have. What we need in a devotional book which will bless our lives - is the application of the great teachings of Scripture - to common, daily, practical life.

  J.R. Miller

  Morning, Book, Teaching

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