Life Paradox Quotes

And this is the strangest of all paradoxes of the human adventure; we live inside all experience, but we are permitted to bear witness only to the outside. Such is the riddle of life and the story of the passing of our days.

Life is unfair. And it's not fair that life is unfair.

I have been a hundred times on the point of killing myself, but still was fond of life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our worst instincts. What can be more absurd than choosing to carry a burden that one really wants to throw to the ground? To detest, and yet to strive to preserve our existence? To caress the serpent that devours us, and hug him close to our bosoms till he has gnawed into our hearts?

This, indeed, is one of the eternal paradoxes of both life and literature-that without passion little gets done; yet, without control of that passion, its effects are largely ill or null.

If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.

When we pray for death we really desire a fuller life.

Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.

You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing.

... I started to die 36 hours before I was born, so dying was a way of life for me.

The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.

Will our life not be a tunnel between two vague clarities? Or will it not be a clarity between two dark triangles?

I was diagnosed with full-body cancer. I am the healthiest person you know. You know I do it all. I take vitamins. I grew my own food. I do everything. And it didn't fit, and it was so awful.

I didn't have to scramble up and down the ladder from despair to euphoria anymore, trying to convince myself that life was either painful and terrible or joyous and wonderful. The simple truth was that life was both. p 214

Everything is ultimately peculiar and ultimately ridiculous.

You will die not because you're ill, but because you're alive.

Life is a forced state! I am surprized that we live, rather than that our friends die.

We push time from us, and we wish him back; * * * * * * Life we think long and short; death seek and shun.

My life has been one gigantic comic book, and on the other hand, it's been one gigantic book of laurels and amazing accomplishments, and on the other hand, it's been a book full of horror stories. It's a big book.

He had come to believe that life was a series of ironic ambushes. - Doctor Sleep

Life sucks, but in a beautiful kind of way.

Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.

You can't be happy that fire cooks your food and be mad it burns your fingertips.

How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?

Just as we have two eyes and two feet, duality is part of life.

... good and evil are so interwoven in life that every good, traced up far enough, is found to involve evil. This is the great mystery of life.