Life Defining Moments Quotes

1. "Row, row, row your boatGently down the stream.Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,Life is but a dream.I lie in bed beside my little sister, listening to the singing in the yard. Life is transformed, by these voices, by these presences, by their high spirits and grand esteem, for themselves and each other. My parents, all of us, are on holiday. The mixture of voices and words is so complicated and varied it seems that such confusion, such jolly rivalry, will go on forever, and then to my surprise—for I am surprised, even though I know the pattern of rounds—the song is thinning out, you can hear the two voices striving.Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,Life is but a dream.Then the one voice alone, one of them singing on, gamely, to the finish. One voice in which there is an unexpected note of entreaty, of warning, as it hangs the five separate words on the air. Life is. Wait. But a. Now, wait. Dream."
Author: Alice Munro

2. "I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss."
Author: Amor Towles

3. "You couldn't erase the past. You couldn't even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right."
Author: Ann Brashares

4. "Outing someone is like ripping a butterfly from its cocoon. You can damage them for life and rob them of THEIR life changing experience of liberation. For a successful emergence THEY have to struggle through the cocoon of fear and shame. THEN they can fly."
Author: Anthony Venn Brown

5. "Sissy had two great failings. She was a great lover and a great mother. She had so much of tenderness in her, so much of wanting to give of herself to whoever needed what she had, whether it was her money, her time, the clothes off her back, her pity, her understanding, her friendship or her companionship and love. She was mother to everything that came her way. She loved men, yes. She loved women too, and old people, and especially children. How she loved children! She loved the down-and-outers. She wanted to make everybody happy. She had tried to seduce the good priest who heard her infrequent confessions because she felt sorry for him. She thought he was missing the greatest joy on earth by being committed to a life of celibacy."
Author: Betty Smith

6. "The two most important things in life are good friends and a strong bullpen."
Author: Bob Lemon

7. "When tadpole was born, I spent a sleepless night on the maternity ward gazing intently into her inky, newborn eyes, grappling to come to terms with the indisputable fact that this was an actual person looking back at me, not just a version of Mr Frog, or me, or both, in miniature. From the outset she seemed to know what she wanted, and I realised I could have no inkling of the paths she would choose to follow. But if I watch her life unfold carefully enough, perhaps I will see clear signposts pointing to who or what she will become.Because when I look backwards, ransacking my own past for clues with the clarity that only hindsight can bring, several defining moments do stand out. Moments charged with significance; snapshots of myself which, if I were to join the dots together, lead me unswervingly to where I stand today."
Author: Catherine Sanderson

8. "Our Lord does not promise to change life for us; He does not promise to remove difficulties and trials and problems and tribulations; He does not say that He is going to cut out all the thorns and leave the roses with their wonderful perfume. No; He faces life realistically, and tells us that these are things to which the flesh is heir, and which are bound to come. But He assures us that we can so know Him that, whatever happens, we need never be frightened, we need never be alarmed."
Author: D. Martyn Lloyd Jones

9. "In time, most children stop being puzzled in this way. They settle in. The world around them, as it becomes familiar and daily, becomes ordinary. But for writers, like children who have never quite grown up, life retains a quality of strangeness; it remains a matter of questions for which there are no satisfactory answers, of hidden motives, displaced explanations, subtle concealments and mysteries. Eavesdropping of one kind or another, keeping an eye open and an ear cocked, even in public places, for the giveaway facial expression or gesture, the revealing word, becomes a settled habit for the writer, a necessary part of his professional equipment: the laying down of small scraps of information, of observation or experience, for future use."
Author: David Malouf

10. "The more you communicate love in your relationship, you breathe new life into it."
Author: Elizabeth Bourgeret

11. "The night has a thousand eyes,And the day but one; Yet the light of the bright world dies With the dying sun. The mind has a thousand eyes, And the heart but one: Yet the light of a whole life dies When love is done."
Author: Francis William Bourdillon

12. "I guess you just have to trust your kids, trust that their innate interest in life will win out in the end, don't you think?"
Author: George Saunders

13. "Oh my God, but art is long / and our life is fleeting."
Author: Ghadirian

14. "You can suck the life out of someone without ever touching a drop of their blood. --Raphael Sinclair"
Author: Helen Maryles Shankman

15. "F*ck, Cassie. What do you want to hear? How much I hate myself for getting drunk that night and losing the only girl in my life I've ever trusted and truly loved? How I called Dean fifty times a day for weeks begging him to tell me how I could get you back? Do you want to hear how fucking weak and pathetic I think I am for not being able to tell her no that night, when I knew what was at stake? His eyebrows pinched together and his jaw tensed as his emotions spilled out into the night air. "Do you want to hear how I tried to talk her out of keeping this baby so that it wouldn't fuck everything up? How I begged her not to keep it, told her I'd pay for everything, I'd drive her there and give her money after it was all over, just to please not to this to me. And then how much of an asshole I felt after that too? Who tells someone that?"
Author: J. Sterling

16. "It probably wouldn't last. It never does. But it would come back around again. That's how life works. And that's why it's important to treasure the peaceful times-so you can persevere through the other kind."
Author: Jean Ferris

17. "I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not."
Author: Jeanette Winterson

18. "It's taken me longer still to realize what a short span there is between those life experiences and the rest of your life. That's a job for the people who lived through it."
Author: Jeremy Northam

19. "The sight of Fos and Opal coming down the street together absolutely tickled him. The idea of two such strangely unremarkable yet lovable people could have found and met each other reaffirmed his waning faith in anything remotely optimistic about mankind and seemed to be a more convincing proof than all the gospel shit flown from the pulpits of Knox County that life could, in fact, distribute happy endings."
Author: Marianne Wiggins

20. "Bad news has no limits. We often feel it should, like a rainstorm that can't possibly get any heavier. But a storm can always worsen, & the burdens of life can too."
Author: Mitch Albom

21. "For the first few years of my life my mom used to cut my hair so there were a lot of bowl-cut hair styles."
Author: Ne Yo

22. "But how did you know that it was Stacy?""There wasn't a green light flashing, that's for sure," he said. "Mostly, I felt I'd met a person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. That I didn't need to look any further."""But how can you be sure?" I persisted."You can't. There's not just one person in the world who's your type. There's a whole group with the same likes and dislikes. But you want to spend your whole life looking for all of them? You just feel that everything's right. You're at peace with yourself."
Author: Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

23. "Intent and dreaming is nice but its not, will never be enough. If you want something bad enough in life then you must fight for it or go after it. Life doesn't just come to you."
Author: R.M. Engelhardt

24. "After a subsequent interview at Brooklyn Poly, I was hired, and life as a fully independent researcher began."
Author: Rudolph A. Marcus

25. "The last best hope of life is that at some point during living it, all that you did wrong will suddenly teach you to do right."
Author: Thomas H. Cook

26. "In other words, Hitler's soul life was not mature enough at that moment to maintain an awareness of himself and his surroundings when this alien entity entered him. During the following six months during a series of irregular meetings and discussions with Hitler, Walter Stein was to witness a maturing soul development in this enigmatic character through which he became more and more a conscious and responsive tool of the world-shattering purposes of the demonic Spirit which overshadowed him. 'I move like a sleep-walker where Providence dictates,' said Adolf Hitler at a press interview."
Author: Trevor Ravenscroft

27. "Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small."
Author: Virginia Woolf

28. "I saw a moving sight the other morning before breakfast in a little hotel where I slept in the dusty fields. The young man of the house shot a little wolf called coyote in the early morning. The little heroic animal lay on the ground, with his big furry ears, and his clean white teeth, and his little cheerful body, but his little brave life was gone. It made me think how brave all living things are. Here little coyote was, without any clothes or house or books or anything, with nothing to pay his way with, and risking his life so cheerfully — and losing it — just to see if he could pick up a meal near the hotel. He was doing his coyote-business like a hero, and you must do your boy-business, and I my man-business bravely, too, or else we won't be worth as much as a little coyote."
Author: William James

Life Defining Moments Quotes Pictures