by Mardy Grothe
De Vries also observed succinctly: “Life is a zoo in a jungle.”
Life is a great tapestry.
The individual is only an insignificant thread
in an immense and miraculous pattern.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
All life is an experiment.
The more experiments you make, the better.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Emerson wrote this in his journal in 1842. The physician and runner George Sheehan recently echoed the theme: “Life is the great experiment. Each of us is an experiment of one—observer and subject—making choices, living with them, recording the effects.”
Life is a game played on us while we are playing other games.
EVAN ESAR
For most men, life is a search for the proper manila envelope
in which to get themselves filed.
CLIFTON FADIMAN
The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement…
for life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain,
and competitors or adversaries to contend with.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Many have likened life to a game of chess, but it is helpful to remember that life is not a game—at least not literally. This is what Isaac Asimov meant when he said, “In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.”
When Life does not find a singer to sing her heart
she produces a philosopher to speak her mind.
KAHLIL GIBRAN
Gibran suggests here that the heart of life is best expressed in music and song. But when that is not possible, people turn to words and language. Philosophers who write about life, then, don’t sing her heart but rather speak her mind.
Life is a verb, not a noun.
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, written in 1904
In life, as in football, you won’t go far
unless you know where the goalposts are.
ARNOLD H. GLASGOW
Lewis Grizzard carried the metaphor further: “The game of life is a lot like football. You have to tackle your problems, block your fears, and score your points when you get the opportunity.”
Life has been compared to a race,
but the allusion improves by observing that the most swift
are usually the least manageable and the most likely
to stray from the course.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
Life is a quarry,
out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Life is the childhood of our immortality.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
If you believe in life after death, as Goethe did, your current life becomes the childhood of your immortal life.
Life is a journey that must be traveled
no matter how bad the roads and accommodations.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
Life is like a dog-sled team.
If you ain’t the lead dog, the scenery never changes.
LEWIS GRIZZARD
Life is made up of constant calls to action,
and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers.
LEARNED HAND
Life is like a blanket too short. You pull it up and your toes rebel,
you yank it down and shivers meander about your shoulder;
but cheerful folks manage to draw their knees up
and pass a very comfortable night.
MARION HOWARD
Fortunately, analysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts.
Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.
KAREN HORNEY
Horney (HORE-nye), a twentieth-century psychoanalyst, added: “Life as a therapist is ruthless; circumstances that are helpful to one neurotic may crush another.”
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
LANGSTON HUGHES, from the poem “Dreams”
A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
WILLIAM JAMES
Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
The basic idea here is that bitter things must be made palatable if people are to accept them. Gilt is a thin layer of gold or something simulating gold, and gilding is the process of applying gilt to a surface. The process gives a superficially attractive appearance to everyday materials, like wood, metal, or cloth. Now we might say, “Life is a bitter pill that must be sugar-coated before people will swallow it.”
Life is a great big canvas,
and you should throw all the paint on it you can.
DANNY KAYE
I compare human life to a large mansion of many apartments,
two of which I can only describe,
the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me.
JOHN KEATS
Life is a banquet,
and most poor sons-of-bitches are starving to death.
JEROME LAWRENCE & ROBERT E. LEE
This comes from the 1957 play Auntie Mame, adapted from Patrick Dennis’s 1955 novel. The line, which was delivered in an unforgettable way by Rosalind Russell in the role of Mame, does not appear in the book. In the 1958 film, the line was sanitized to “most poor suckers are starving to death.” It became a signature line for Russell, who titled her 1977 autobiography Life is a Banquet.
Life for most of us is full of steep stairs to go puffing up
and later, of shaky stairs to totter down;
and very early in the history of stairs
must have come the invention of banisters.
LOUIS KRONENBERGER
Kronenberger also wrote: “The trouble with us in America isn’t that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.”
I would rather think of life as a good book.
The further you get into it,
the more it begins to come together and make sense.
HAROLD S. KUSHNER
Life is like a sewer.
What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.
TOM LEHRER
Life is so largely controlled by chance
that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
Life is the garment we continually alter but which never seems to fit,
and we must make our adjustments as we go.
DAVID MCCORD
In life, as in restaurants, we swallow
a lot of indigestible stuff just because it comes with the dinner.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
This is from The Neurotic’s Notebook (1960). In The Second Neurotic’s Notebook (1966), McLaughlin wrote, “Life is a mixed blessing, which we vainly try to unmix.”
Life is a dead-end street.
H. L. MENCKEN
Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
Life is like a very short visit to a toy shop between birth and death.
DESMOND MORRIS
Life is the only art that we are required
to practice without preparation,
and without being allowed the preliminary trials,
the failures and botches, that are essential for training.
LEWIS MUMFORD
Human life is but a series of footnotes
to a vast, obscure, unfinished manuscript.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
This comes from Nabokov’s 1962 novel Pale Fire, where he also writes, “Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
EUGENE O’NEILL
Life is a series
of collisions with the future;
it is not a sum of what we have been but what we yearn to be.
JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET
Life always spills over the rim of every cup.
BORIS PASTERNAK
Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
CESARE PAVESE
Life is like a cobweb, not an organization chart.
H. ROSS PEROT
Life is little more than a loan shark:
it exacts a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes.
LUIGI PIRANDELLO
Life is full of internal dramas, instantaneous and sensational,
played to an audience of one.
ANTHONY POWELL
Life is the game that must be played.
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
I’ve learned that life is like a roll of toilet paper,
the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes.
ANDY ROONEY
Eating, loving, singing, and digesting are, in truth,
the four acts of the comic opera known as life,
and they pass like the bubbles of a bottle of champagne.
Whoever lets them break without having enjoyed them is a complete fool.
GIOACHINO ANTONIO ROSSINI
I long ago came to the conclusion that all life is six to five against.
DAMON RUNYON
This comes from Runyon’s 1934 short story “A Nice Price.” The line may have inspired Tom Stoppard, who wrote in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967): “Life is a gamble at terrible odds—if it was a bet, you wouldn’t take it.”
Life is a magic vase filled to the brim,
so made that you cannot dip from it nor draw from it;
but it overflows into the hand that drops treasures into it.
Drop in malice and it overflows hate; drop in charity and it overflows love.
JOHN RUSKIN
Lives are like rivers;
eventually they go where they must, not where we want them to.
RICHARD RUSSO
This comes at the beginning of the 2005 HBO film Empire Falls. Russo wrote the screenplay as well as the 2001 novel, but the line does not appear in the book.
Life is like an onion:
You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
CARL SANDBURG
This is the way you will find this quotation in numerous books and scores of Web sites. So far, though, I have not found it in any of Sandburg’s writings. The closest I’ve seen comes from his 1948 novel Remembrance Rock. In a chapter titled “Life Is an Onion You Peel,” a character quotes his grandmother as saying, “Life is an onion—you peel it year by year and sometimes cry.”
The scenes of our life are like pictures done in rough mosaic.
Looked at close-up they produce no effect.
There is nothing beautiful to be found in them,
unless you stand some distance off.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
This warning about the folly of focusing on the details of life comes from an 1851 essay. The admonition is to step back, see the big picture, and put things into perspective.
Life is a shit sandwich and every day you take another bite.
JOE SCHMIDT
Schmidt, a linebacker for the Detroit Lions from 1953 to 1965, may not have authored this saying, but he helped popularize it. The point is that life is an unpleasant affair that must be endured, like eating a sandwich made of feces. In recent years, the concept has been extended to the business world, as in “I was forced to eat a shit sandwich.” Here it describes a critical remark sandwiched between two positive comments. Jonathan Winters offered this variation: “Life is a shit sandwich. But if you’ve got enough bread, you don’t taste the shit.”
In the book of life, the answers aren’t in the back.
CHARLES M. SCHULZ, Charlie Brown speaking
Life is like a play: it’s not the length,
but the excellence of the acting that matters.
SENECA, in Letters to Lucilius
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, in All’s Well That Ends Well
You cannot learn to skate without being ridiculous….
The ice of life is slippery.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another
is the stage of the disease at which he lives.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Life is like a cash register, in that every account,
every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.
FULTON J. SHEEN
There are chapters in every life which are seldom read.
CAROL SHIELDS
Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for awhile and then act our part in it.
JONATHAN SWIFT
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit
being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
JOHN UPDIKE
Life is thick sown with thorns,
and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them.
The longer we dwell on our misfortunes,
the greater is their power to harm us.
VOLTAIRE
Life is a game of whist. From unseen sources
The cards are shuffled, and the hands are dealt.
I do not like the way the cards are shuffled,
But yet I like the game and want to play.
EUGENE F. WARE
Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.
EDITH WHARTON
Life is a process of burning oneself out
and time is the fire that burns you.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
Williams said this in a 1958 interview. In his 1953 novel Camino Real, he had a character offer another thought on the subject: “Life is an unanswered question, but let’s still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.”
Life is a lot like a marathon.
If you can finish a marathon, you can do anything you want.
OPRAH WINFREY
Life is so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
It’s a powerful image—and a stark reminder that we’re safe only if we can stay on the thin stretch of pavement. The abyss is always there, just beyond the edge.
Life is a rainbow which also includes black.
YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO
chapter 7
A Relationship Is Like a Shark
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was one of twentieth-century Europe’s most fascinating figures. Born in 1900 to aristocratic parents who had fallen on hard times, he attended Jesuit schools in Switzerland and France. A poor student as well as a discipline problem, he was drifting through adolescence when he became fascinated with the new world of flight. In 1921, he joined the French Army, and a year later he was commissioned as a pilot in the nation’s newly established Air Force. When he finished military service in 1926, he became a commercial pilot, initially flying airmail routes from France to Morocco and West Africa, and eventually to South America. He was also a test pilot for Air France, where his fearlessness made him a legend in his profession.
These days, Saint-Exupéry is best remembered as a writer. In the decades before World War II, he authored several books that celebrated the fancy of flight and the bravery of aviators. After the fall of France in 1940, he fled to the United States, where he produced his two most famous books, Letter to a Hostage, a call for French resistance to the Nazis, and the wildly successful The Little Prince, a child’s fable for adults. Shortly after both books were published in 1943, he joined the allied forces in North Africa and was presumably killed when his plane crashed at sea in 1944. Saint-Exupéry was a stylish and imaginative writer, penning many spectacular observations. One of my favorites appeared in his 1942 boo
k Flight to Arras:
Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied.
This is a triple threat of a metaphor, immediately provoking a host of visual images and a flurry of associations. The first is about people tying the knot, a popular metaphor for marriage. In ancient times, however, it was an actual practice—a priest or family patriarch would symbolize the marital union by tying together the garments of the bride and groom. We can easily pursue the metaphor further:
Like the knot of a shoelace or rope around a cargo container, relationships can be well tied or poorly tied. When tied skillfully and effectively, knots as well as relationships somehow hold together, even through periods of turbulence. But when they are tied carelessly—or poorly by people who lack the essential skills—even the most precious cargo is not secure.
We could take the same approach with the web and mesh metaphors. Reflecting on the interpersonal world, a web of relationships seems an appropriate way to describe one of life’s most persistent realities—we are most deeply affected by people who are close to us, but are often keenly aware of things that happen to those on the outskirts of our lives. While mesh is a word that is used infrequently, almost everyone is familiar with what happens when the gears of a machine—or the personalities of two people—don’t mesh. And in my mind, the popular psychological concept of being enmeshed always evokes the image of a fish snared in the mesh of a fishing net (technically, the term means being entangled or hopelessly caught up in a relationship or other vexing situation).
When people create metaphors, they find similarities between things that, on the surface, are dissimilar. A good metaphor is like a bridge that links two territories that have been separated by a body of water or a deep canyon. Once the bridge is connected, people can travel freely back and forth. In her 1982 book Anatomy of Freedom, Robin Morgan expressed it this way:
Metaphor is the energy charge that leaps between images,
revealing their connections.
While many relationship metaphors are serious, others are comedic. In the 1977 film Annie Hall, Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) says to Annie (Diane Keaton):
A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know?