Own Life Quotes

1. "I'm a teenager, but I'm independent - I have my own apartment, I have my own life. And I think I have learned more than any of those teenagers have in school. I learned to be responsible, leaving my family and coming here alone."
Author: Adriana Lima

2. "I know, I know…there's something cliché about that. The heroine initially wanting to clobber a protagonist male, but later realizing that he's grown on her and she actually really likes him. Technically, I'm not supposed to find that appealing. But maybe real life is a lot more cliché than anyone wants to admit. Or maybe there's just a fine, subjective line between the cliché and the poetic."
Author: Angela N. Blount

3. "Peg came over with dinner tonight and told me about this dumb schmaltzy poem she heard someone read at an AA meeting.  It got me thinking.  It was about how while we are on earth, our limitations are such that we can only see the underside of the tapestry that God is weaving.  God sees the topside, the whole evolving portrait and its amazing beauty, and uses us as the pieces of thread to weave the picture.  We see the glorious colors and shadings, but we also see the knots and the threads hanging down, the think lumpy patches, the tangles.  But God and the people in heaven with him see how beautiful the portraits in the tapestry are.  The poem says in this flowery way that faith is about the willingness to be used by God wherever and however he most needs you, most needs the piece of thread that is your life.  You give him your life to put through his needle, to use as he sees fit."
Author: Anne Lamott

4. "Sunflowers, Not Facing the Sun (A Poem) I stand tall As gracious as one could be Blooming to my bestAs slender as it touches my being Everyone else is facing the sun Bending towards its unfathomable galore They and I are both undoubtedlyGrown on the benevolence of life's essence The brighter side mercilessly feeding desires unboundBy daunting the "courage to know" with each spin Though, I am not able to face the sun the way they do Yet, I learn from the knowledge bred within me Beyond achievement markers, but an adverse ability An opportunity to exercise my special selfFrom the cherubic attire of my blessed soul To the unfathomable mystery the drape of this world hides That I, by not facing the sun Hunt the gems in the milieu of the human existence"
Author: Annie Ali

5. "My father raised me to think independently and follow my own path in life."
Author: Antony Garrett Lisi

6. "I think it's a sin to sit down and let your life go without making a try for it."
Author: Ayn Rand

7. "The poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word twat in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The work was Pippa Passes, written in 1841 and now remembered for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world." But it also contains this disconcerting passage: Then owls and batsCowls and twatsMonks and nuns in a cloister's moods,Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!Browning had apparently somewhere come across the word twat--which meant precisely the same then as it does now--but pronounced it with a flat a and somehow took it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns. The verse became a source of twittering amusement for generations of schoolboys and a perennial embarrassment to their elders, but the word was never altered and Browning was allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think of a suitably delicate way of explaining his mistake to him."
Author: Bill Bryson

8. "The loneliest place to spend eternity is your own life after you can't change it anymore."--Lucifer from Kevin"
Author: Bruce Jenvey

9. "Sometimes, there was no getting over it. Sometimes, you lived with the empty place inside of you until you imploded on it, loss as singularity, or until the empty place expanded and hollowed out the rest of you so thoroughly you became the walking dead, a ghost in your own life."
Author: Caitlin Kittredge

10. "Is it really love to tell someone that if it came down to picking between them and every other life on the planet, you'd pick them? Is that — I don't know, is that a moral sort of love at all?""Love isn't moral or immoral," said Clary. "It just is.""I know," Simon said. "But the actions we take in the name of love, those are moral or immoral."
Author: Cassandra Clare

11. "Maybe I can put it another way... Life, Charlie Brown, is like a deck chair.""Like a what?""Have you ever been on a cruise ship? Passengers open up these canvas deck chairs so they can sit in the sun... Some people place their chairs facing the rear of the ship so they can see where they've been... Other people face their chairs forward... They want to see where they're going! On the cruise ship of life, Charlie Brown, which way is your deck chair facing?""I've never been able to get one unfolded..."
Author: Charles M. Schulz

12. "When we search for "ourselves" in the eyes of others, we have imprisoned our own-selves in believing that our self-worth is nothing unless others validate who we are. Unless we approve of whom we are, what we are, and what we are capable of doing as an individual, only then we will have released "ourselves" from our own imprisonment. We are in charge of our own life's destiny and what we do and become can only be validated by our accomplishments and failures; not by what others may think of us."
Author: Dahveed

13. "She looked out at the other trees, and she realised that her life was one of thousands, any one of which could have been her, she had grown wherever her life had taken her, she had drifted wherever the wind had blown her."
Author: Dave McKean

14. "It's so important for girls to respect themselves and not put themselves down and say, 'Oh, my life is horrible,' and 'I'm not pretty enough.' How do you know? There's this energy people give off that people can be drawn to."
Author: David Archuleta

15. "You will feel the full force of the law and if you are old enough to commit these crimes you are old enough to face the punishments. And to these people I would say this: you are not only wrecking the lives of others, you are potentially wrecking your own life too."
Author: David Cameron

16. "As he entered her, as the piston of lovemaking grew slick with her clear oils, she thought about beingcrushed to death in his arms, and she - thought how odd it was for her to consider such a thing, and howmuch stranger still to consider it without fear and with something very like desire, a melancholy longing, acuriously pleasant anticipation, not a death wish but a sweet resignation,and she knew that Dr. Cauvelwould say this was a sign of her sickness, that now she was preparedto surrender even her ultimateresponsibility(the fundamental responsibility for her own life, for deciding whether or not she wasworthy of life), and he would say that she needed to rely more on herself and less on Max, but she didn'tcare, didn't care at all; she just felt the power, Max's power, and began to call his name, dug her fingersinto his unyielding muscle and surrenderedwillingly."
Author: Dean Koontz

17. "All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on the black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates,. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel....Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay."
Author: Diane Setterfield

18. "They had started speaking of "women and children"—that phrase that exempts the male from sanity when it has been repeated a few times. Each felt that all he loved best in the world was at stake, demanded revenge, and was filled with a not unpleasing glow, in which the chilly and half-known features of Miss Quested vanished, and were replaced by all that is sweetest and warmest in private life. "But it's the women and children," they repeated, and the Collector knew he ought to stop them intoxicating themselves, but he hadn't the heart."
Author: E.M. Forster

19. "Bakersville was never going to be the same. She'd been to other small towns where the residents all thought serial killers looked like monsters, that no member of their community could hide such dark desires. Once upon a time, she'd lived in one.And the monster there had ripped her life apart."
Author: Elizabeth Heiter

20. "Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists."
Author: Eudora Welty

21. "And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life--not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living."
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

22. "He put his ear to his own chest and listened to the heart. How could the pulse go on, beat after beat, for all of life? No machine could run that long without a stumble. Ask not if the beating cranks are going to jam, but when."
Author: Giulio Tononi

23. "It me birthday and nobody came...Bigfoot decide do something nice for self for big day and sneak in they house at night and pick out own present and blow out flickering candle of life in they brains. Make a wish, jerks."
Author: Graham Roumieu

24. "We've also evolved the ability to simply "pay it forward": I help you, somebody else will help me. I remember hearing a parable when I was younger, about a father who lifts his young son onto his back to carry him across a flooding river. "When I am older," said the boy to his father, "I will carry you across this river as you now do for me." "No, you won't," said the father stoically. "When you are older you will have your own concerns. All I expect is that one day you will carry your own son across this river as I no do for you." Cultivating this attitude is an important part of Humanism--to realize that life without God can be much more than a series of strict tit-for-tat transactions where you pay me and I pay you back. Learning to pay it forward can add a tremendous sense of meaning and dignity to our lives. Simply put, it feels good to give to others, whether we get back or not."
Author: Greg M. Epstein

25. "They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!""
Author: Jack Kerouac

26. "Someone real," I hear myself saying. "Someone who never has to pretend, and who I never have to pretend around. Someone who's smart, but knows how to laugh at himself. Someone who would listen to a symphony and start to cry, because he understands music can be too big for words. Someone who knows me better than I know myself. Someone I want to talk to first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Someone I feel like I've known my whole life, even if I haven't."
Author: Jodi Picoult

27. "Over the past 8 years, I have stripped my life down. I don't need as much as I thought I did. It was hard at first to make that change. I had to have faith and patience. And so, I did. Now, I have God and great people in my life. Everything else just seems to follow. Sometimes we don't understand about the need to live more simply. We can make appointments all day long, 7 days a week. We can even schedule and plan for our deaths. I was fortunate to be freed to really be myself again, while there is still time and something left of me. And now, up here, there's nothing but me (and Kilo) and the sky and a million billion stars. And once again, I am free to dream..."
Author: José N. Harris

28. "(on grief) And you do come out of it, that's true. After a year, after five. But you don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life."
Author: Julian Barnes

29. "We were outside the world, we didn't even own things -- some clothes. . . . This arrangement resembles the prehistoric way to live, and it therefore feels right to us, because our brains recognize it from 3 millions of years practicing it. In essence our brains grew to their current configuration in response to the realities of that life. So as a result people grow powerfully attached to that kind of life, when they get the chance to live it. It allows you to concentrate your attention on the real work, which means everything that is done to stay alive, to make things, or satisfy one's curiosity, or play. That is utopia."
Author: Kim Stanley Robinson

30. "The more you sense the rareness and value of your own life, the more you realize that how you use it, how you manifest it, is all your responsibility. We face such a big task, so naturally we sit down for a while."
Author: Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi

31. "I'm glad that when I was on the sidewalk on the square in town with you and Casey all those years ago, I decided for the first time in my life not to play it safe.""I'm glad too, Ivey, seriously fuckin' glad you took a chance on me."
Author: Kristen Ashley

32. "James often wondered at the chain of flukes it must have taken to bring him through with his own life and limbs intact. Once he might have believed it to be the work of Providence but it seemed to him now that to thank God for his life would be to suggest God had shrugged off all the others flicked them away like cigarette butts by the thousands and that seemed like abominable conceit. James Dorsey took no credit for being alive. His higher power these days was Chance."
Author: Laini Taylor

33. "It's called being in love. It's more frightening than confronting your deepest fear and opens you to being hurt beyond the physical plane." He placed a hand over his heart. "It might seem as though it's a weakness to you but it is proof that we are more than numbers, experiments, or whatever else Mercile intended us to be. It takes bravery and strength to feel such strong emotions for one person when we were denied from birth the chance to ever care about anything or anyone. I'm not saying it's easy or painless. It is probably one of the most complex things I've experienced. Jessie is my life. My heart beats for her and I will admit to all that I wouldn't want to go on if I lost her. The unmated ones don't understand and are currently looking confused or horrified. I'm hopeful they'll know the ups and downs of falling in love one day. It's a gift and a curse at times but everyone should experience it. It's a part of life and we are survivors."
Author: Laurann Dohner

34. "Joliffe, watching him over the rim of his own bowl, felt for his discontent. In his own life there were other things he could have been besides a player---several other things he had been besides a player--but at least he had had choices and made them. He doubted this fellow had ever seen anything else to be but what he was. Or else he had refused other choices if they ever came. but staying with what you were born to was a choice, too, and the one that most people made--a choice that Joliffe could have made, too, upon a time, but had not and of that he was still glad."
Author: Margaret Frazer

35. "It happens to all of us," I concluded that Easter Sunday morning. "God simply keeps reaching down into the dirt of humanity and resurrecting us from the graves we dig for ourselves through our violence, our lies, our selfishness, our arrogance, and our addictions. And God keeps loving us back to life over and over."
Author: Nadia Bolz Weber

36. "The shape does not change. There was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. you may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are like snowflakes - forming patterns we have seen before, (...) but still unique."
Author: Neil Gaiman

37. "We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization...In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system...It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us.This is no defeatism...The declaration of our own nature and the attempt to build up an enclave of organization in the face of nature's overwhelming tendency to disorder is an insolence against the gods and the iron necessity that they impose. Here lies tragedy, but here lies glory too...All this represents the manner in which I believe I have been able to add something positive to the pessimism of...the existensialists. I have not replaced the gloom of existence by a philosophy which is optimistic in any Pollyanna sense, but...with a positive attitude toward the universe and toward our life in it."
Author: Norbert Wiener

38. "There is a sacred calling on your life, and the question is: Will you spend your life flittering and fluttering about or take the time and really heed that call and create your own path to your highest good?...You cannot let other people define your life for you. You are the author of your own life...Real power is when you are doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing, the best it can be done. Authentic power. There's a surge, there's a kind of energy field that says, "I'm in my groove, I'm in my groove." And nobody has to tell you, "You go, girl," because you know you're already gone."
Author: Oprah Winfrey

39. "It is true that I have known Straussians almost all my life. And the one thing I was taught about them from the earliest age is that they are wrong."
Author: Robert Kagan

40. "If you don't own a dog, at least one, there is not necessarily anything wrong with you, but there may be something wrong with your life."
Author: Roger Caras

41. "Rachel snorted derisively. "You don't seriously buy into all her prophetess hocus-pocus, do you?""I do, actually," Notak said, frowning. "She is the augur, Rachel.""She's exasperating!""She is eccentric," Notak corrected. "And you would be too if you had lived the life she had.""She's a whore!" Rachel spat, ignoring him.Notak looked at her, plainly puzzled. "I am fairly certain that she is a virgin, actually."
Author: S.G. Night

42. "Mother to SonWell, son, I'll tell you:Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.It's had tacks in it,And splinters,And boards torn up,And places with no carpet on the floor -Bare.But all the timeI'se been a'climbin' on,And reachin' landin's,And turnin' corners,And sometimes goin' in the darkWhere there ain't been no light.So boy, don't you turn back.Don't you set down on the steps'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.Don't you fall now -For I'se still goin', honey,I'se still climbin',And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.- Langston Hughes (112)"
Author: Sapphire

43. "I'm not the only kidwho grew up this waysurrounded by people who used to saythat rhyme about sticks and stonesas if broken boneshurt more than the names we got calledand we got called them allso we grew up believing no onewould ever fall in love with usthat we'd be lonely foreverthat we'd never meet someoneto make us feel like the sunwas something they built for usin their tool shedso broken heart strings bled the bluesas we tried to empty ourselvesso we would feel nothingdon't tell me that hurts less than a broken bonethat an ingrown lifeis something surgeons can cut awaythat there's no way for it to metastasizeit does"
Author: Shane Koyczan

44. "Elyon was restoring the Great Romance. Teeleh had stolen his first love, but now Justin had reclaimed her. The price had been his own life. He'd taken her disease on himself and he'd drowned with it, inviting them to embrace his invitation to the Romance by following him into the lake to drown with him. To live as his bride!"
Author: Ted Dekker

45. "When you are a young person, you are like a young creek, and you meet many rocks, many obstacles and difficulties on your way. You hurry to get past these obstacles and get to the ocean. But as the creek moves down through the fields, it becomes larges and calmer and it can enjoy the reflection of the sky. It's wonderful. You will arrive at the sea anyway so enjoy the journey. Enjoy the sunshine, the sunset, the moon, the birds, the trees, and the many beauties along the way. Taste every moment of your daily life."
Author: Thích Nhất Hạnh

46. "...[W]e should be mucking about all the time, because mucking about is enjoying life for its own sake, now, and not in preparation for an imaginary future. It's obvious that the mirth-filled man, the cheerful soul, the childish adult is the one who has least to fear from life."
Author: Tom Hodgkinson

47. "Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last instant of soft, deep, death-padded life, with the earth's green see-saw now above, now below, and the voluptuous crucifixion, as you stretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body's obliteration in the Lap of the Lord."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

48. "The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair."
Author: Walker Percy

49. "People told me to give up trying to be special and settle down to a regular life. There ain't nothing wrong with a regular life, and that's the Lord's truth...But it wasn't for me, because I wanted to be something special...I knew how easy it was for a dream to die. I seen that all around me. You could let it die by just looking the other way—you know, some of those Asian people say they don't kill nothing, but they'll take a fish out of water and lay it on the ground and then say it just died on its own—you can do that with a dream, too. And sometimes you can get so frustrated, you feel so bad about your dream, that you go on and kill it yourself. When you do that, you're killing a piece of yourself, too." —Mr. Cephus"
Author: Walter Dean Myers

50. "Fight not for your own abundance, but for the abundance of others & you'll see how your life will turn around."
Author: Ziad K. Abdelnour

Own Life Quotes Pictures