life
The basic question here is whether you think life is a wonderful condition, or not. I don’t, particularly. Amazingly enough, it’s not entirely to my liking.
“The Mind’s Eye” by Calvin Tomkins, in The New Yorker, December 11, 2006, 76-85.
Life is a ball of yarn that someone got all tangled. It would make sense if it were rolled up tight, or if it were unrolled and completely stretched out. But such as it is, life is a problem without shape, a confusion of yarn leading nowhere.
The Book of Disquiet (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 287.
Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.
Herzog (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 237.
Members of some ancient tribe or other had the custom of placing either a black or a white pebble into a jar at the end of every day, depending on whether the day had been bad or good. A sensible custom. At the end of someone’s life his jar was turned upside down and it could then be seen if it had been a happy or unhappy life. Instead of that stone ritual, I could write in this exercise book at the end of every day: life is beautiful, or miserable, or difficult, or delightful, or whatever. I’ll do that for a whole month. Very curious to see how it will turn out.
Thursday, August 7, 1941 entry, in Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum: 1941–1943 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 78.
Being alive is so extraordinary I don’t know why people limit it to riches, pride, security—all of those things life is built on. People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the house. And they have to get a car. You can’t see anything from a car. It’s moving too fast. People take vacations. That’s their reward—the vacation. Why not the life?
“Jack Gilbert, The Art of Poetry No. 91,” interviewed by Ted Widmer, in Issue 175 of The Paris Review, Fall/Winter 2005.
I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 169.
We don’t really know it, but we sense it: there is a sister ship to our life which takes a totally different route.
“The Blue House,” in Selected Poems 1954–1986 (New York: The Ecco Press, 1987), 166.
Every one of us lives a life we did not expect to live. We begin with passions and dreams and with the basic conviction that all will turn out for the good, more or less. Some of it does turn out for the good. Most of it, though, is a startling combination of the unexpected and the inconceivable. Every door we walk through introduces us to a strange land, and then we set about seeing if this is a place where we can grow. For me, New York City has been the great opened door.
A New York Memoir (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2010), introduction, xii.
There’s been a few times of flying through the air in a Mercedes upside down and hitting the ground three times where you do kind of sort of get the hint that maybe this is it. But if it ain’t it, then you just carry on with life, right? I mean…we all bump into death at one time or another, honey.
“The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards Looks Back At Life,” Fresh Air, NPR, October 25, 2010.
Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks:
Birth, and copulation, and death.
I’ve been born, and once is enough.
“Fragment of the Agon,” Sweeney Agonistes in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1952), 80–81.
Do you realize that all great literature—Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlet Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, The Bible, and “The Charge of the Light Brigade”—are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? (Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that?)
A Man Without a Country (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 8-9.