James Russell Lowell Quotes

You could be laughing one day about the same issues that you're crying about the next day, so that's life.

It was a weird mix of emotions. One day, your best friend could be killed. The day before, you could be celebrating him getting a brand-new bike.

I've never been a depressive, but I felt quite close to the edge at times. But you never know what's around the corner. Mercifully, what's around the corner is joy.

Little solace comes to those who grieve when thoughts keep drifting as walls keep shifting and this great blue world of ours seems a house of leaves moments before the wind.

There is no harbor of peace from the changing waves of joy and despair.

There’s always going to be ups and downs in life and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t feel the pain. Pain is good. It makes you stronger in time. You will realize how great the ‘great’ really is. Life is about ups and downs. You just have to be able to ride the waves.

We do not live an equal life, but one of contrasts and patchwork; now a little joy, then a sorrow, now a sin, then a generous or brave action.

And that's how things are. A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there. . . . And at the end of your life, your whole existence has the same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.

the old alone have finality. What is true of the young today may be false tomorrow. They are enveloped in emotion; and emotion as a state of being is fluent and evanescent.

You could miss someone, but it did no good to fixate on loss. I wished I had the ready words of a Breeder or the ability to comfort with a soft touch. I didn't. Instead I had daggers and determination. That would have to do.

If I love you Wednesday, What is that to you? I do not love you Thursday - so much is true.

These things happen. One day you run everything, and the next day you run like a dog.

If you're going through difficult times today, hold steady. It will change soon. If you are experiencing smooth sailing and easy times now, brace yourself. It will change soon. The only thing you can be certain of is change.

If you're strong enough on the inside, you can handle anything that comes at you on the outside.

It seems to me that life is always undoing for us something that we have just laboriously done.

Everything is in constant flux on this earth. Nothing keeps the same unchanging shape, and our affections, being attached to things outside us, necessarily change and pass away as they do. Always out ahead of us or lagging behind, they recall a past which is gone or anticipate a future which may never come into being; there is nothing solid there for the heart to attach itself to. Thus our earthly joys are almost without exception the creatures of a moment.

It's very rare that people let me hop off the crazy wagon.

Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety. ... One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day in a hundred of real joy and bright sunshine.

This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.

It's those changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes nothing remains quite the same. With all of our running and all of our cunning, if we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane.

You can always expect tragedy as well as adventure; that's just how it goes.

Hope for the Best. Expect the worst. Life is a play. We're unrehearsed.

Sorrows must die with the joys they outnumber.

But nothing in life was set in stone and nothing in life is promised us. Not happiness, not joy, not love. Everything was variable and mutable and inconstant.

There's a war on. We don't know how anything's going to end. We just have to grasp each fleeting moment of joy as it whizzes by.