Betty Smith Quotes

The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.

It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.

Spending practically every minute of your day on pure survival is an absolutely boring life.

Most people are living lives of sort of survival. And constantly posing an existential crisis, either through fantasy or oblivion, really has been pretty much explored in rock and roll. At least in the western version of rock n' roll.

I've done the most awful rubbish in order to have somewhere to go in the morning.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.

Hurried and worried until we're buried, and there's no curtain call, Lifes a very funny proposition after all.

What's the point of our life? Everything seems absurd until we die, and then it makes sense.

What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.

Are people crazy? People waited all their lives. They waited to live, they waited to die. They waited in line to buy toilet paper. They waited in line for money. And if they didn't have any money they waited in longer lines. You waited to go to sleep and then you waited to awaken. You waited to get married and you waited to get divorced. You waited for it to rain, you waited for it to stop. You waited to eat and then you waited to eat again. You waited in a shrink's office with a bunch of psychos and you wondered if you were one.

Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation

Through the ages, man's main concern was life after death. Today, for the first time, we find we must ask questions about whether there will be life before death.

We all die at the end, but does that nullify everything? Would most people rather say, "I wish I hadn't been born?" Once you're born you'll have to die, now is that funny or sad?

As the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what? Ever more people have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.

You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they're ever going to be.

Like many people, I have no religion, and I am just sitting in a small boat drifting with the tide. I live in the doubts of my duty.... I think there is dignity in this, just to go on working.... Today we stand naked, defenseless, and more alone than at any time in history. We are waiting for something, perhaps another miracle, perhaps the Martians. Who knows?

Life would be as insupportable without the prospect of death, as it would be without sleep.

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

He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.

Give me boredom. At least I know where I'm going to eat and sleep tonight.

That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...

I walked down the hall and saw that [she] was sitting on the floor next to a chair. This is always a bad sign. It's a slippery slope, and it's best just to sit in chairs, to eat when hungry, to sleep and rise and work. But we have all been there. Chairs are for people, and you're not sure if you are one.

Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

After a certain age - and for some of us that can be very young - there are no new people, beasts, dreams, faces, events: it has all happened before.

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.