Life

There is only one way to be prepared for death: to be sated. In the soul, in the heart, in the spirit, in the flesh. To the brim.

If you bring curiosity to your work it will cease to be merely a job and become a door through which you enter the best that life has to give you.

To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.

There are books . . . which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

Years are only garments, and you either wear them with style all your life, or else you go dowdy to the grave.

Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn’t any.

To think and to be fully alive are the same.

I’ve never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for—whether it’s a field, or a home, or a country.

We take no delight in existence except when we are struggling for something.

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

Poetry is life distilled.

A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It’s concentrated, you carry it around with you, and it nourishes you when you need it.

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

Life is the funny thing that happens to you on the way to the grave.

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

Life is a near-death experience.

Life is a rainbow which also includes black.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Life is like a beautiful flirt, whom we love and to whom, finally, we grant every condition she imposes as long as she doesn’t leave us.

Growth is the only evidence of life.

I will offer here, as a sound maxim, this: That we can’t reach old age by another man’s road.

Life levels all men: death reveals the eminent.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.