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Favorite Trivia – LIFE (RAISON D’ÊTRE)
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| “I don’t think this life is for hibernating and getting ready for the next one. I think you are given it for a purpose and that is to live it. Live while you are alive!”
Malcolm S. Forbes |
| “The meaning of life is that it stops.”
Franz Kafka |
| “Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.”
Danny Kaye |
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There was the day when I began to doubt Vladimir Nabokov – Pale Fire (Canto Two) |
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“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” Mae West |
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“Surgeons must be very careful Emily Dickinson |
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“Life is too important to take seriously.” Oscar Wilde |
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“. . . the one real requirement of life: an openness to what is lovely among among all the rest that isn’t.” [November 29, 1956] “If I can learn to create lives, stories, and excitement out of myself without depending on external stimuli as shots-in-the-arm, but rather as provocative-yet-dispensable additions to a life already whole and rich in itself, then I will be surer that I am maturing in the direction I want to do.” [August 30, 1954]
Sylvia Plath – Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, ed. by Aurelia Schober Plath |
“What adds up to life is nothing more than the accumulation of small daily moments.” Alice Steinbach – Without Reservations
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“We live each day as if it were merely a rehearsal for the next.”
Renée (Elegance of the Hedgehog – Muriel Barbery)
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“Actutum Fortunae solent mutarier: varia est vita.”: “Circumstances are apt to change in an instant. Life is full of uncertainties.” Platus
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“That’s the best part of life . . . always looking ahead, but living in the present.” Elizabeth Yates (Spanning Time: A Diary Keeper Becomes A Writer) |
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“I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine.” Neil Armstrong |
| “Learn to live well that thou mayst die so too. To live and die is all we have to do.”
Sir J. Denham (Translations of Mancini) – The Book Lover’s Anthology, ed. by R.M. Leonard |
| “Life is a gift we have only by giving it back again.”
Wendell Berry (Some Further Words) |
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“We have such lovely hours together . . . We read, discuss poems we discover, talk, analyze—we continually fascinate each other. It is heaven to have someone like Ted who is so kind and honest and brilliant—always stimulating me to study, think, draw and write. He is better than any teacher, even fills somehow that huge, sad hole I felt in having no father. I feel every day how wonderful he is and love him more and more. My whole life has suddenly a purpose.” [November 29, 1956]
Sylvia Plath – Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, ed. by Aurelia Schober Plath |
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“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” Mark Twain |
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“Life is not an exact science, it is an art.” Samuel Butler |
| Kovrin: “What is the object of eternal life?”
The Black Monk: “The same as of all life—enjoyment. True enjoyment is knowledge, and eternal life offers numberless and inexhaustible sources of knowledge.”
Anton Chekhov – The Black Monk |
| adolescence: The time between pigtails and cocktails – Dan Bennett
Webster’s Unafraid Dictionary: Defiant Definitive Put-Downs – Leonard Louis Levinson |
| “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
George Bernard Shaw |
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Amy Spencer: “What do you remember most about your father [Lloyd Bridges]?”
Jeff Bridges: “He had this joy. He really enjoyed being alive. I remember having a conversation with him, maybe a year or two before he died [in 1998]. I said, ‘Dad, I want to let you know that I feel like we’re in a relay race: You’re handing me the baton, and I’m gonna got out and do your work, everything that you taught me.’ But I also remember, I would say, ‘Dad, you’ve gotta live each moment, each moment’s gotta be fresh!’ “And he said, ‘You know, that’s a wonderful thought, but it’s bullshit. We’re habitual creatures. It’s all about developing good or bad habits.’ “And this is a theme in my life, melding those two things: living in the moment, but at the same time, behavior has results.” Parade Magazine, June 12, 2022 |
| “Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.”
Emily Dickinson |
| “Hope fondly cheers our days of aching sorrow, And always promises a brighter morrow.” Albius Tibullus |
| “Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, Before we too into the Dust Descend; Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie, Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer and—sans End!” The Rubaiyát Of Omar Khayyám, trans. by Edward Fitzgerald |
| “‘Well, scientifically speaking, human beings fear the unknown. so, whatever’s freaking you out, grab it by the balls and say hello,’ he said [Justin’s father] . . . ‘I’m saying if something’s scaring you out, don’t run from it. Find out everything you can about it. Then it ain’t the unknown anymore and it ain’t scary.’ He paused, ‘Or I guess it could be a shitload scarier. Mostly the former, though.'”
Justin Halpern – I Suck at Girls |
| “Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.”
Truman Capote |
| “When we have a why to live we can bear almost any how.”
David Baird – A Thousand Paths to Long Life |
| “Life can suck one up, sap his energies, submerge him, take away his self-control, give so much new experience so quickly that he will burst; make him stick out among others, emerge onto dangerous ground, load him up with new responsibilities which need great strength to bear, expose him to new contingencies, new chances. Above all there is the danger of slip-up, an accident, a chance disease, and of course of death, the final sucking up, the total submergence and negation.”
Ernest Becker – The Denial of Death |
| “All experience is an arch, to build upon.”
Henry Brooks Adams – The Education of Henry Adams |
| “You get so full, you have to give some or you’ll burst. That’s what life is: you either give or you take. I hope I don’t take too much from life. I hope I give more.” Katherine ‘Sandy’ Martino, a.k.a., Mom |
| “The birth of his son opened Theobald’s eyes to a good deal which he had but faintly realized hitherto. He had had no idea how great a nuisance a baby was. Babies come into the world so suddenly at the end, and upset everything so terribly when they do come; why cannot they steal in upon us with less of a shock to the domestic system? . . . Theobald had never liked children. He had always got away from them as soon as he could, and so had they from him; oh, why, he was inclined to ask himself, could not children be born into the world grown up? . . . if people could buy ready-made children at a shop of whatever age and sex they liked, instead of always having to make them at home and to begin at the beginning with them.”
Samuel Butler – The Way of All Flesh |
| “I give a lecture in New Jersey. Half the women claim having a child is more wonderful than anything else. The other half claim that it ruined their lives.” [December 2, 1977]
Phyllis Chesler – With Child: A Diary of Motherhood |
| “If life is distasteful to us, let us leave it as calmly as though we were leaving the theatre.” [De Finibus., I, 15.]
Cicero |
| “While fashion strives to make us all the same, life succeeds in making sure we’re all different.”
David Baird – A Thousand Paths to Tranquillity |
| “The clock of life is wound just once.”
Victoria Abbott Riccardi (author’s father) – Untangling Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto |
| “Life is a sum of all your choices.”
Albert Camus |
| “I hold that life’s pleasures are to be enjoyed in moderation. Let me but be free from squalor, and I shall be just as happy sailing on life’s sea in a small as in a large ship.” [Epistles, II. II.]
Horace: Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. by H. Ruston Fairclough |
| “The gods gave you beauty, the gods gave you wealth, and the art of enjoyment. For what more would a fond nurse pray for her sweet ward, if he could think aright and utter his thoughts—if favour, fame, and health fall to him richly, with a seemly living and a never failing purse? Amid hopes and cares, amid fears and passions, believe that every day that has dawned is your last.” [Epistles, IV.]
Horace: Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. by H. Ruston Fairclough |
| Ester Harriott: “So one of your great assets is that you have an extraordinary amount of energy, compared to people of any age.” Stanley Kunitz: “That’s what my young friends say.” [Laughs]
Ester Harriet: “Do you attribute that energy to good genes or discipline or to being so engaged with your work and with the world?” Stanley Kunitz: “I don’t think of it as a matter of discipline. My mother lived to the age of eighty-six and was wonderfully alert until her death. But I think my love for language and for the natural world is all part of the picture. And I keep going because of unfinished business. There’s still work for me to do. For anyone who has a poem to write or a garden to cultivate, the days are never long enough. And I have a world of friends, mainly young people.” Esther Harriott: “… He [Rollo May] said that you wrote your poems out of a rage against death.” Stanley Kunitz: “. . . I think, it was the idea of being mortal that offended me most. Perhaps it’s still at the root of my persistence in staying alive. I want to outwit the enemy.” Esther Harriott – Writers and Age: Essays on and Interviews with Five Authors |
| (A child is playing with a book on the floor and rips it) Child’s mother: “Oh, Stephen (she tuts in a non-serious way). Do be careful. (She takes the book off the child and puts it back on the shelf)” Bookseller: “Excuse me?” Child’s mother: “Yes?” Bookseller: “Your son just ripped the head off the tiger who came to tea.” Child’s mother: “I know. Children, eh?” Bookseller: “Yes, but we can’t sell that book now. It’s damaged.” Child’s mother: “Well I don’t know what you expect me to do about it.” Jen Campbell – Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores |
| “I don’t know how to live without clutter.”
Patty Martino Alspaugh |
| “Day 87. As of this week, Julie and I have officially been trying to be fruitful and multiply for a year. Still no luck. Se we’ve decided to take radical measures. We’re going to try in vitro fertilization . . . It helps that my new insurance plan covers it. And it helps, too, that we have a family connection to the procedure. My cousin David—now twenty-three—was the very first test-tube baby in New York State, and he got his little technologically assisted face on the cover of the Daily News. He seems to have turned out all right . . .
“IVF is a startlingly complicated process. The buildup to the actual fertilization involves forty days of shots, pills, alcohol swabs, and a fearsome array of syringes. Granted, I get the better half of the deal. Julie actually has to be poked by a needle every day. But I do have to be her RN, mixing together white powders and sterile water in what seems the most stressful chemistry experiment of my life. “The first night, a Russian-accented nurse came to our apartment to show me how to inject my wife. She asked Julie to drop her pants and lean over. ‘It’s just like throwing a dart,’ the nurse told me. Though with this dart, you miss, and the target starts bleeding. “‘Each night, you alternate cheeks—first right, then left, right, left.’ And, she advised, you have to make sure the needle hits the sweet spot of the upper butt. I don’t like vagueness. So I opened a drawer, took out a green magic marker, and requested the nurse to draw me the exact location of these ‘sweet spots’ on Julie’s butt. Which she did. And which helps me enormously. But not Julie. She complains that whenever she wears white paints, everyone can see two green orbs on her butt.” [November 26, 2005] A. J. Jacobs – The Year of Living Biblically |
| “I experienced no fear during this semi-shipwreck and felt no delight at being saved. It is better to leave life while one is young than to be evicted from it by time.”
François-René de Chateaubriand – The Memoirs of Chateaubriand |
| “Your life may seem fine, But some greet each day with dread. They just rise and whine.” John S. Crosbie – Crosbie’s Book of Punned Haiku |
| “Life is filled with detours, the secret is to enjoy the scenery.”
David Baird – A Thousand Paths to Tranquillity |
| PREGNANCY:
“PROS
Lauren Slater – Love Works Like This: Travels Through a Pregnant Year |
| “The Soul transcends death, and we’re reincarnated. That’s what I believe. We’re learning so that eventually we can become a Buddha, reach Heaven, or enter into union with the Divine. To be here for fifty to eighty years only to be annihilated at the end just doesn’t make sense. Nothing else in the universe is that inefficient. We have to be here to learn; otherwise our difficulties are truly meaningless.
Ram Dass – Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying |
| “Young person worry: ‘What if nothing I do matters?’
Old person worry: ‘What if everything I do does?'” Weather – Jenny Offill |
