Reflection on Life Quotes

At my age, 85, I'm at age where I can look back and derive some conclusions about my actions. My rule has been try to learn, try to understand what happened. Develop the lessons and pass them on.

One of these days I will be an old man in a rocking chair on a porch. Wouldn't it be nice to have my whole life there to read and kind of re-live it.

Make every decision based on your last years of life instead of your next 10.

In order to get new things to rap about, you've gotta live.

It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.

We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?

Maybe it's because I was too much reality, but I'm not interested in seeing too much reality anymore. I'd rather watch a Dean Martin concert and let the world go by.

My debut album is just a diary from a lonely 21-year-old. That's what it is.

There are not many regrets that I have. There are a few things that I wish I'd changed in my life, but they are not so dramatic that I'd go out of my way to change them. But I go back and think about my life so far periodically in my head.

As I look back over my life, I've been an active person - obviously I was self-absorbed for a period of time.

When I look back on my life, I don't have regrets about what I didn't do. If I'd become a musician, it could have ruined my life.

At the end of life thoughts hitherto impossible come to the collected mind, like good spirits which let themselves down from the shining heights of the past.

I shall be thirty-one next birthday. My youth is gone like a dream; and very little use have I ever made of it. What have I done these last thirty years? Precious little.

The last time I saw Dad alive, he was in the hospital. He was watching 'Hell Drivers,' a crummy B-movie about truckers, on TV and reading the 'Daily Record.' This seems scarcely believable, but I actually said, 'Dad, you've not got long to go - don't you think you should be imbibing the culture a bit more?'

There are a lot of parallels to the 'Sparkle' story and my story.

I love memoirs and autobiographies in general.

I sip the Dom P watching Gandhi til I'm charged - writing in my book of rhymes, all the words past the margin

We're both getting older, our children are starting to leave home. But I can say that I'm just as passionate a songwriter now in my 50s as I was in my 20s. But instead of talking about the general kind of angst that I felt as a teenager, I'm writing about more specific issues.

I think when I'm 80 years old, 85, hopefully, I'll be pushed around in a wheelchair by a red-headed nurse with panty outline. She'll make me little tequila sunrises and I'll read my complete works then. Then, I'll decide whether I think I've done something good or not. I'll reserve my judgment until then.

How shall I sum up my life? I think I've been particularly lucky. Does that have something to do with faith also? I know my mother always used to say, 'Good things aren't supposed to just fall in your lap. God is very generous, but he expects you to do your part first.' So you have to make that effort. But at the end of a bad time or a huge effort, I've always had - how shall I say it? - the prize at the end. My whole life shows that.

And indeed there will be time for the yellow smoke that slides along the street rubbing its back upon the window-panes; there will be time , there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; there will be time to murder and create, and time for all the works and days of hands that lift and drop a question on your plate; time for you and time for me, and time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of toast and tea.

I love 'A Mighty Wind.' Even though it's not a funny movie, I think that's kind of beautiful and sweet.

And in these last hours, the lifetime of this year passes before my eyes, and I face the inevitable question: Did I live it well? Will Jesus Christ, the righteous judge, say “Well done, good and faithful servant”?

I don't think my husband has any plans to pen his memoirs. There are enough people doing that for him.

The next thing most like living one's life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing.