#l

When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#reading #life

First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find the meaning of life no doubt. But in the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for "finding himself." If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. You cannot tell me who I am and I cannot tell you who you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you? ↗

— Thomas Merton

#identity #self #life

Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things...as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value. ↗

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

#life

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come ↗

— William Wordsworth

#soul #life

Pointless, needless suffering and pain? I don’t suppose it would help if I told you that was the way life is. The good suffer, the evil flourish, and all that is mortal passes away. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#life

We love that s why life is full of so many wonderful gifts. ↗

— Rumi

#life

I'd spend about an hour, my room darkening around me, wondering what the hell happened to make me so unsure of who I even was. Because who you are is supposed to be the easiest question in the world to answer, right? Only for me it hadn't been easy for a very long time. ↗

— Jennifer Brown

#self-awareness #suicide #life

The life I walk binds my hands it makes me take things that I don’t understand I walk this dark world unknowing of what they hold true, forgetting the me I once knew, until you. The life I walk eternally was all I knew nothing more held me here to this earth until you. I feel the pain of every heart I take I feel the desire to replace all that I have grown to hate Darkness holds me close but the light still draws my empty soul The emptiness where I used pain to fill the hole no longer controls me, no longer calls me because of you. ↗

— Abbi Glines

#life

There's a hard life for every silver spoon. There's a touch of gray for every shade of blue. That's the way I see life. If there was nothing wrong... Then there'd be nothing right. ↗

— Shinedown

#music #right #shinedown #wrong #life

He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: “Only God knows how much I loved you ↗

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

#life