iQuote – Life Is
Life is like a jigsaw puzzle but you don’t have the picture on the front of the box to know what it’s supposed to look like. Sometimes, you’re not even sure if you have all of the pieces. (from the book, A Whack on the Side of the Head)
- Life is easier if you dread only one day at a time. Charles M. Schulz
- Life is hard. Then you die. In between you are a volunteer. Unknown (This was my ‘mantra’ during all those years of being on Volunteer Boards!)
- Life is lumpy. And a lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat and a lump in a breast are not the same lump. One should learn the difference. Robert Fulghum (I collected quotes like this when our youngest child had cancer.)
- Life is so very simple when you have no facts to confuse you. Peg Bracken
- Life is tragic, but not necessarily serious. Unknown
- Life is short… ask directions. Unknown
- Life is an endless struggle full of frustrations and challenges, but eventually you find a hairstylist you like. Unknown
- It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another – it’s the same damn thing over and over. Edna St. Vincent Millay
- Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans. John Lennon
- Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen. Mark Twain
- Age lets you be the person you would have been, if you hadn’t been so busy being the person you were earlier in life. Margie
- The answer to the great question of… Life, the Universe and Everything…is… Forty-two. Douglas Adams
- Mid-life means that you become more reflective…You start pondering the “big” questions. What is life? Why am I here? How much Healthy choice ice cream can I eat before it’s no longer a healthy choice? Unknown
- We believe in the individual’s capacity to grow, develop and change throughout life; that life is the process of becoming, not simply being. CP/RA
- Life isn’t like a box of chocolates. It’s more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your butt tomorrow. Unknown
- Life isn’t a vicarious experience. You get it figured out and then one day life happens to you. You prepare yourself for grief and loss, arrange your ballast and then the wave swamps the boat. Garrison Keillor
- Winners expect to win in advance. Life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unknown
- Life itself is like an onion: it has a bewildering number of layers; you peel them off, one by one, and sometimes you cry. Carl Sandburg
- Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
(Note to regular readers Christine, Harper Faulkner, Steve at BRC, and Rick Brash – I’ve moved your comments (from the Page Life Is) to this post. Unfortunately, your Gravatar doesn’t follow your comment, so on this page, you look like me. Sorry about that – that’s Life!)
I’ve been thinking about “life” as well. I don’t have a quote, but maybe something just as long lasting. My next business venture…..thinking of calling it “The Good Life”. It will be an urban homestead that gathers together various experts to teach about what they do to promote health, happiness, creativity, better communities, food, fun, growing, etc. Any of the things that would help define, The Good Life.
Perhaps this Quote by Annie Dillard: There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
“Age lets you be the person you would have been, if you hadn’t been so busy being the person you were.”
I absolutely LOVE this quote! At 43 I am just starting to understand this and trying to figure out how to alter the “person I am” part before it becomes the “person you were” part. Great stuff!
The quote you like is actually mine, as far as I know… but I read a lot, and I have vivid dreams, so it is sometimes hard to tell where things actually come from.
It is a tricky task to alter who you are now. Much of that has to do with who you have to be for the people who depend on you. That is what is so good about life after the kids achieve independence. You have the freedom to invent a new self!
You’ve go lots of time – enjoy the journey!
Not upbeat, but two of my favorites:
“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.”
“On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”
And one from the movie, Con Air, uttered by an insane killer (in the movie, of course); However, I still like it: “What if I told you insane was working fifty hours a week in some office for fifty years at the end of which they tell you to piss off; ending up in some retirement village hoping to die before suffering the indignity of trying to make it to the toilet on time? Wouldn’t you consider that to be insane?”
I guess I like them because they keep this journey in perspective, a bit. HF
Hi Harper – Thanks for three sober reflections about the end of the road – makes me think we all need to work harder at enjoying the now!
I have carried with me, through almost 53 years of life TWO subtle quotes that really have meaning – at least for me anyway. Incidentally, I was amused to find this page on your volume and it made me happy. As a result I thought I’d share these with the readership, wherever and whoever that may be…
1. “Life is simply a collection of memories, and memories are like starlight, they go on forever”. Bill Fries
2. “You are what you think you are” . Robert G. Allen
Thank you for the contributions to the Life Is page. I think the list could go on forever too!
For some absurd, nonsensical reason, your post made me think of the opening of the wild and weird movie Trainspotting:
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family….
Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish brats you have spawned to replace yourself.
Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that?
I see you edited out all the ‘square’ words (that would be ‘swear’ words to us, but when my kids were little, they were ‘square’ words.)
I choose not to think about what life is going to be like near the end – do you?
Good point. It’s not death that bothers me; only the manner of dying.
Love this post, Margie – great collection of quotes. “Life is short… ask directions” is my favorite, I think, and so apropos for me right now. Thanks for a new mantra
I always think of men on a driving holiday when I read this quote – men often won’t ask for directions when they get lost!
Exactly! Fortunately, my husband has no problem asking
One of my favourite quotes – ” sometimes we need a few people in our lives who will calmly call our bluff” – Dr. Sun Wolf
That is an excellent observation – what I’d call a reality check!
Wonderful! Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for reading!
Great collection of quotes. Thanks.
I’ll keep adding to this list. It won’t be finished until my blogging life is finished!
Alfred E. Neuman said it best: “It’s crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide.” Learn it, live it.
I had to look that one up! It is British slang from Margery Allinghams’s crime novels, but was made famous by Mad Magazine. It’s crackers (madness) to slip a rozzer (policeman) the dropsy (packet of money) in snide (worthless — i.e. worthless or counterfeit money).
Mad Magazine – good memories!
Kudos for your efforts, Marge! Most people just chalk me up as a nut case and move on. I first read that as a teenager in Mad and it’s always lurking in the back of my mind.
By the way,as pertains to your post, the prescient yearbook editors at my high school chose the following caption to put under my picture: “Life is a jest that has just begun.” Thought you might like to know that my being a wise a – - is not something that occurred just recently.
Seems to me that you are more wise than ass…
You are my new favorite person in the whole world.
What a great list! In keeping with the wisdom of the great Alfred E. Neuman What, Me Worry?
I have figured that as long as there is no funeral having to be planned, it’s not the end of the world.
Your comment reminds me of the quotation from the movie ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’:
“Everything will be all right in the end… if it’s not all right then it’s not yet the end”.