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by e e cummings
Tag: life
Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.
—V. E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
You’d Sing Too
You’d sing too
if you found yourself
in a place like this
You wouldn’t worry about
whether you were as good
as Ray Charles or Edith Piaf
You’d sing
You’d sing
not for yourself
but to make a self
out of the old food
rotting in the astral bowel
and the loveless thud
of your own breathing
You’d become a singer
faster than it takes
to hate a rival’s charm
And you’d sing, darling
You’d sing too
He was sure that even to folks who lived a hundred years—as he hoped to do—it seemed like not much more than a summer afternoon.
—Stephen King, The Colorado Kid
He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.
—Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Span of Life
by Robert Frost
The old dog barks backwards without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.
The Laughing Heart
your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (Excerpt)
by T. S. Eliot
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
—Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
That Book Broad 