concept

being alive Quotes

52 of the best book quotes about being alive
01
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“To be alive at all is to have scars.”
John Steinbeck
author
The Winter of Our Discontent
book
being alive
scars
pain and suffering
concepts
02
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“I change into the clothes he brought me. A pair of khakis, a white T-shirt, some slippers. They’re warm and soft and they feel good. I almost feel human.”
03
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“‘Everybody wants to talk about how Khalil died,’ I say. ‘But this isn’t about how Khalil died. It’s about the fact that he lived. His life mattered. Khalil lived!’ I look at the cops again. ‘You hear me? Khalil lived!’”
Starr Carter
Khalil Harris
characters
04
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“Are we then to call no man happy while he lives, and, as Solon would have us, look to the end? And again, if we are to maintain this position, is a man then happy when he is dead?”
05
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“You’re still alive. And that means you’ll love and be loved...and in the end, nothing else really matters.”
06
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“Better to stay alive,” I said. “At least while there’s a chance to get free.”
07
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“Being alive and being a woman is all I got but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven’t conquered yet”
08
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“I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it.”
09
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“San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run but no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were here and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.”
10
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“Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is youer than you.”
11
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How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
12
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“The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.”
13
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“Everyone’s afraid of something, Jemma. It doesn’t mean you’re weak. It means you’re alive. It takes real courage to feel that fear and do it anyway.”
14
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“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.”
15
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“Even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.”
16
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“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.”
17
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“The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”
18
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“The pain means you’re alive. The scars mean you’ve survived.”
19
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“You’re still alive, and so is your little sister, somewhere. I know it. You saved her. And together we’ll find her, yes? I promise. We’ll find her and bring her home.”
20
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“She’d felt ragingly alive in the dream, but now she’s as inert as the eggs cooling on a plate. Ther’s a mirror her in the bedroom, too, but she chooses not to look at it, just in case her hunch is true and she’s invisible.”
21
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“Pain is the price we pay for being alive. Dead cells—our hair, our fingernails—can’t feel pain; they cannot feel anything.”
22
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“Halla!Halla! Is it not a great day to be alive?”
23
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“Discovering more joy does not, I’m sorry to say, save us from the inevitability of hardships and heartbreaks. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily, too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreak without being broken.”
24
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“The greatest miracle is to be alive. We can put an end to our suffering just by realizing that our suffering is not worth suffering for! How many people kill themselves because of rage or despair? In that moment, they do not see the vast happiness that is available.”
25
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“Such amusing fiction, these stories they tell. It always comes to this. If they really had a desire to live, they would’ve been more aware of how easy it is to die, would’ve chosen their actions more wisely. In these moments, you can tell they’re not regretting having hurt you, they regret doing it to your face.”
26
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“Anything that is alive is in a continual state of change and movement. The moment that you rest, thinking that you have attained the level you desire, a part of your mind enters a phase of decay. You lose your hard-earned creativity and others begin to sense it.”
27
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“We think you’ll find that every woman in her heart of hearts longs for three things: to be romanced, to play an irreplaceable role in a great adventure, and to unveil beauty. That’s what makes a woman come alive.”
28
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“Her soul is Alive. And we are drawn to her.”
29
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“When the handbill says ‘dead or alive’, the rest of us just shoot you in the back from up on top a perch somewhere and bring you in dead over a saddle. But when John Ruth ‘The Hangman’ catches you... You hang!”
30
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″ And now suddenly, the whole place, the whole garden seemed to be alive with magic.”
31
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“Omri sat up sharply in bed and peered into the dark corners. Suddenly he saw him. But he wasn’t on the shelf anymore, he was in the bottom of the cupboard. And he wasn’t standing upright. He was crouching in the darkest corner, half hidden by the front of the cupboard. And he was alive.”
32
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“It is a brutal arithmetic. But I - I am alive. You are alive. As long as we breathe, we can see and hear. As long as we remember, all those gone before are alive inside us.”
33
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“The bush was alive with excitement. Mrs Koala had a brand new baby, and the news spread like wildfire.”
34
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“The Twelves are alive, having been endowed by their four genii (the literary Bronte children) with incredible abilities: to think, speak, behave and regenerate their lives at will! ”
35
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“Still methinks there is an air comes from her. What fine chisel could ever yet cut breath? Let no man mock me, for I will kiss her.”
36
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“No wonder; for the statue was indeed Hermione herself, the real, the living queen.”
37
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“To be alive is to be in a perpetual state of revolution. Whether I like it or not, pain is the fuel of revolution.”
38
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“Alfie sees the little boy all the way over by the parking lot. He is alive! He is all by himself, watching the big boys play.”
39
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“So why do I need to get to know her as if she were still a girl? You act like she’s alive.”
40
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″ ‘When I was alive and had a human heart,’ answered the statue, ‘I did not know what tears were, for I lived in the Palace of Sans-Souci, where sorrow is not allowed to enter.’ ”
41
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“Look, when you’re breathing, you’re alive aren’t you? Everything is. And when you stop breathing, your heart stops, and then you’re dead.”
42
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“Amá just shakes her head. “You know, Julia, maybe if you knew how to behave yourself, to keep your mouth shut, your sister would still be alive. Have you ever thought about that?” She finally says it. She says what her big, sad eyes were telling me all along.”
43
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“This is the way I used to feel in Barbados, Kit thought with surprise. Light as air somehow. Here I’ve been working like a slave, much harder than I’ve ever worked in the onion fields, but I feel as though nothing mattered except just to be alive right at this moment.”
44
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“The strong Terralba constitution had pulled him through. Now he was alive and half a man.”
45
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“This is all dead, and we’re alive.”
46
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″‘They weren’t ghosts,’ I cried eagerly. ‘They were real, quite alive like you and me.‘”
47
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“Susan found it difficult not to believe that most things were alive. She thought the windows of houses were eyes, and she was particularly fond of cottages in Scatterbrook because they nearly all had thatched eyebrows.”
48
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“I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”
49
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“It doesn’t matter where or how far you go - the farther commonly the worse - the important thing is how alive you are. Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.”
50
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“As long as you are alive, you will either live to accomplish your own goals and dreams or be used as a resource to accomplish someone else’s.”
51
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“You had dinner here last night and woke up alive this morning.”
52
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“She knows it isn’t rational, but she feels that the war, the Germans, her country’s capitulation to the Nazis- none of it would have happened if he were alive.”

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