The colour of the magpie, her father was saying, was symbolic of creation. The void, the mystery of that which had not yet taken form. Black and white, he said. Presence and absence.

Perhaps the whole life is merely a long preparation for the moment when we part with it.

During that time, The Mouth came by to pray with us, and my dad began to spend his evenings sitting in the yellow lawn chair and staring at the highway, or down in the basement with his isotope...

And what have you been up to? she asked.Oh, I don't know really, I said. Not much. Learning how to be a good loser.

I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss

Wouldn't take nothing for my journey now.

If you're going to look back on something and laugh about it, you might as well laugh about it now... Things are almost never as bad as they first seem. Loosen up, girlfriend... you could giggle more...

So, let me get this right... the big whoop about being human is that you get to die?

If we had directions, it wouldn't be life. It would be an assignment. Grunt work.

If life were a movie, we'd have had what they call a "meet cute".

Seize what's been handed you. Make smart decisions. Make decisions because life is a temporary situation.

Just because life is hard, and always ends in a bad way, doesn't mean that all stories have to

Here's a nice image for a life in balance, she said. You're juggling these four balls that you've named work, family, friends, spirit. Now, work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it bounces back. The...

Im a girl who has been tamping down her emotions and keeping them tightly guarded her whole life. And that works really well for me... And now I felt like my shell had a dangerous crack in it. Without...

Being a good person, or a better person, or whatever it is you're worried about and trying to fix? It shouldn't change who you are. It means you become more like yourself.

I believe it's never too late to change. I'm eighty-one years old, but I still think I can be a better person tomorrow than I am today. And that's what I'll believe until I run out of tomorrows.

Life with God is an individual matter, and general formulas do not easily apply.

I have done so many things in my life," she said to the mirror. "Evil things, perhaps. But never unattentively, never wastefully...was I wrong?

Art like life is an open secret.

Is Life itself a dream, I wonder?

Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.

Live all you can: it's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?

Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great...

Are you what is called a lucky man? Well, you are sad every day. Each day has its great grief or its little care...Hardly one day in a hundred of unbroken joy and sunshine. And you are of that small...

His life was still too short, to know that there is no more imminent thing than the impossible, and that what we must always foresee is the unexpected.

Let every man be master of his time.

I have set my life upon a cast,And I will stand the hazard of the die.

It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves

Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to...