Anna Quindlen Quotes

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

How can we live and die and never know the difference?

So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and for what purpose he had been placed in the word.

Most men have no purpose but to exist, Abraham; to pass quietly through history as minor characters upon a stage they cannot even see

I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

Death isn't sad. The sad thing is: most people don't live at all.

If the sun is shining, stand in it- yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass- they have to- because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centred. What you are pursuing is meaning- a meaningful life... There are times when it will go so wrong that you will be barely alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.

Does life have any meaningful purpose?

Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death that awaits me does not undo and destroy?

Everything has a purpose, even this, and it's up to you to find it.

Existence is not itself a good thing, that we should spend a lifetime securing its necessaries: a life spent, however victoriously, in securing the necessaries of life is no more than an elaborate furnishing and decoration of apartments for the reception of a guest who is never to come. Our business here is not to live, but to live happily.

You're not living until it doesn't matter a tinker's damn to you whether you live or die. At that point you live. When you're ready to lose your life, you live it.

The aim of life is to be fully born, though its tragedy is that most of us die before we are thus born.

How do I know that loving life is not a delusion? How do I know that in hating death I am not like a man who, having left home in his youth, has forgotten the way back?

The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.

The function of man is to live, not to exist.

Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting - the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

But whate'er I am, nor I nor any man that but man is, With nothing shall be pleased 'til he be eased With being nothing.

If life has no meaning, why don't we create a meaning for it?

I finally did not understand if we are living to survive or we are living to die!

She believed, of course ... because without something to believe in, life would be intolerable.

The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning.

Merely to breathe freely does not mean to live.

There's not a drug on earth can make life meaningful