Life Reflections Quotes

When a significant other - a spouse, a parent or someone you're close to - is dying, it forces you to think about your life, about what you feel about death. What I realized from my dad's dying was that I wasn't scared of dying. But I was terrified of regrets. I was terrified of getting to the end of my life with a lot of Why didn't I's.

We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art...what we are talking about and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

A man's age is something impressive, it sums up his life: maturity reached slowly and against many obstacles, illnesses cured, griefs and despairs overcome, and unconscious risks taken; maturity formed through so many desires, hopes, regrets, forgotten things, loves. A man's age represents a fine cargo of experience and memories.

I seem to have been everywhere in the last 30 years, maybe not in the epicenter but flying around the periphery of extraordinary events and equally extraordinary people.

At some point, your memories, your stories, your adventures, will be the only things you'll have left.

There's a lesson to be learned out of everything we go through in life.

That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.

Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]

Every day, every birthday candle I blow out, every penny I throw over my shoulder in a wishing well, every time my daughter says, 'Let's make a wish on a star,' there's one thing I wish for: wisdom.

My books are written from personal experience, from memories, and from stories that come to me from all places.

I feel I have to live a little longer before I write a sequel to my auto biography which covers my experiences up until October 1991.

I am my best work - a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.

The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.

Everybody's got stories. I don't want to not have stories.

I'm just singing about my own life. Singing about all the little stories in my life and the things I've been through.

I wouldn't trade the experiences I've had over the past 36 years for anything.

I'll be a story in your head. But that's OK. We're all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? Because it was, you know; it was the best.

Life is half spent before we know what it is.

I'm going to make music that reflects me and my life now. So I think people who like my music and who listen to me should appreciate change as well, because I've definitely evolved, and that's a great thing, to celebrate that is what music is all about.

In every life there comes a point when you have to make a decision about how you will live.

Those lessons that I got along the way are the ones that have shaped my life for the last 20 years.

Each story, good and bad, short or long-from that trip to the mall when you saw Santa, to a long, bad illness-they are all a line or a paragraph in our own life manuscript. Two thirds of the way through, even, and it all won't necessarily make sense, but at the end there'll be a beautiful whole, where every sentence of every chapter fits.

The other day, the way people [do] who are approaching their 80th birthday, I was thinking about all the last business - funerals and where do you want to be buried - and I thought if anything were to be inscribed on my tombstone, I said let it be that.

Although wisdom is built on life experiences, the mere accumulation of years guarantees nothing.