Who says life is fair, where is that written?
Life is never quite like the brochure.
We search the world for truth; we cull The good, the pure, the beautiful, From all old flower fields of the soul; And, weary seeker of the best, We come back laden from out quest, To find that all the sages said Is in the Book our mothers read.
Bad things will happen and good things too. Your life will be full of surprises. Miracles happen only where there has been suffering. So taste your grief to the fullest. Don’t try and press it down. Don’t hide from it. Don’t escape. It is life too. It is truth. But it will pass and time will put a strange honey in the bitterness. That’s the way life goes.
And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
You think that way as you begin to get grayer and you see pretty plainly that the game is not going to end as you planned.
When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.
If life's not funny, then it's just true - and that would be unacceptable.
The realities of life do not allow themselves to be forgotten.
The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.
When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains.
To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher "reality" of long, warm, pleasant summers. But summer, it turned out, was no more real than the snow that melted in wintertime.
It is one of life's bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting.
To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?
No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.
Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.
ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.
