William Saroyan Quotes

I gotta feel alive, even if it kills me. Promise to always give you me, the real me.

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

Don't be afraid to feel as angry or as loving as you can, because when you feel nothing, it's just death.

You're alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it?

Live. Love. Smile. Hug. Laugh. Dream. Do. Create. Have fun. Be intense. Be audacious. Be unreasonable. Act impeccably. Breathe. Be you. Be different.

Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

I don't want to die. Damn death. Long live life.

We are all born to die—the difference is the intensity with which we choose to live.

Yes, I know what passion would fill me with all its power. Before, I was too young. I got in the way. Now I know that acting and loving and suffering is living, of course, but it’s only living insofar as you can be transparent and accept your fate, like the unique reflection of a rainbow of joys and passions which is the same for everyone.

I'm not dead. I mean, I may be getting older, but I'm not dead!

I have seen slower people than I am and more deliberate... and even quieter, and more listless, and lazier people than I am. But they were dead.

How soon will we accept this opportunity to be fully alive before we die? (88)

When you are in anger, in passion, violent, aggressive, you feel a crystallized ego within you. Whenever you are in love, in compassion, it is not there.

That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.

What I fear and desire most in this world is passion. I fear it because it promises to be spontaneous, out of my control, unnamed, beyond my reasonable self. I desire it because passion has color, like the landscape before me. It is not pale. It is not neutral. It reveals the backside of the heart.

I didn’t go up there to die. I went up there to live.

Almost dead yesterday, maybe dead tomorrow, but alive, gloriously alive, today. -- Mat Cauthon

I contemplate the body, dead and diseased as well as alive and healthy.

The next time you are contemplating a decision in which you are debating whether or not to go for the gusto, ask yourself this important question: "How long am I going to be dead?" With that perspective, you can now make a free, fearless choice to do just about any goddamned sneaky thing your devious little mind can think up. Go ahead. Have your fun. You're welcome. Go on. See you in hell.

you're never more alive than when you're almost dead.

Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death

The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sunstruck hills every day.

I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.

There’s an old Ritadarion saying. You’re never more alive than when you walk hand in hand with death. (Syn)