16 Powerful Quotes About Life By Authors With May Birthdays
When I was a kid, I took printouts of quotes from offbeat books and used them to give my wall an indie touch. Even though my aesthetic sense has changed over the years, I have not yet outgrown the habit of collecting quotes. Here is a list of powerful quotes about life from my collection, by authors born in the month of May.
May 1
“Be glad you’re even alive. Be furious you’re going to die.” —Joseph Heller, Author of Catch 22
“Sometimes, making the wrong choice is better than making no choice. You have the courage to go forward, that is rare. A person who stands at the fork, unable to pick, will never get anywhere.” —Terry Goodkind, Author of Wizard’s First Rule
May 5
“I’ve always had the feeling that nothing is impossible if one applies a certain amount of energy in the right direction. If you want to do it, you can do it.” —Nellie Bly, Author of Ten Days in a Mad-House
May 7
“If I can’t make it through one door, I’ll go through another door—or I’ll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.” —Rabindranath Tagore, Author of Gitanjali
May 8
“It’s darn today, damn tomorrow, and next week it’ll be goddamn.” —Louise Meriwether, Author of Daddy was a Number Runner
May 9
“The world’s perverse, but it could be worse.” —Mona Van Duyn, Author of Firefall
May 11
“For me, remembrance of things past has always been a waste of time, and what’s the point of tears? I don’t know. I’ve always been focused on today. Yesterday and tomorrow hold no interest for me. What had to happen, did, and what will happen, will.” —Saadat Hasan Manto, Author of Mottled Dawn
May 12
“You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.” —Jiddu Krishnamurti, Author of Freedom from the Known
May 15
“Don’t you love being alive? Don’t you love weather and the colors at different times of the day, and all the sounds and noises like children screaming in the next lot, and automobile horns and little bands playing in the street and the smell of food cooking?” —Katherine Anne Porter, Author of Pale Horse, Pale Rider
“He told you not to cry, but tears keep leaking out of your eyes. And you’re glad, because those tears belong to you. They’re yours. Your tears. He can’t have them. He can’t touch them. They’re all yours.” —Norma Fox Mazer, Author of The Missing Girl
May 18
“I wondered why so much had been written about love’s pain and so little about the glorious relief of being delivered from love’s pain.” —Irene Hunt, Author of Up a Road Slowly
May 19
“What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications.” —Nora Ephron, Author of I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections
May 21
“It was either live in the shadow of the fear all our lives or, once and for all, break free of it and have all the things we wanted. That was the whole of it. We had to be free of the fear so that we could think of tomorrow, a tomorrow we had been afraid to look into because it looked so much like yesterday.” —Harold Robbins, Author of A Stone for Danny Fisher
May 22
“When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions—such as merit, such as past, present, and future—our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.” —Peter Matthiessen, Author of The Snow Leopard
May 23
“In this modern world where activity is stressed almost to the point of mania, quietness as a childhood need is too often overlooked. Yet a child’s need for quietness is the same today as it has always been—it may even be greater—for quietness is an essential part of all awareness. In quiet times and sleepy times a child can dwell in thoughts of his own, and in songs and stories of his own.” —Margaret Wise Brown, Author of The Noisy Book
May 25
“I have met many young men, who have the skeletons of the old covered by the garb of youth. On the other hand, I have met many elderly people who are weighed down by age but beneath the cloud there lies the glorious sun of youth.” —Kazi Nazrul Islam, Author of Mrityukshuda
