Life is a malady whose one medicine is Death.

-Abu'l-'Ala¤   Al-Ma'arri
c.1000  Luzu'  miyya'  t, stanza 41 (translated by R  A Nicholson in Studies in Islamic Poetry,1921).

Consider every moment past A thread from life's frayed mantle cast.

-Abu'l-'Ala¤   Al-Ma'arri
c.1000  Luzu'  miyya'  t, stanza 57 (translated by R  A Nicholson in Studies in Islamic Poetry,1921).

Much in life cannot be affected†but must be borne†without complaint, because complaints are a bore†and undermine the serenity essential to endurance.

-Acheson, Dean Gooderham
Quoted in Gaddis Smith  American Secretaries of State (1972).

It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed† Great necessities call out great virtues.

-Adams, Abigail
  Letter to  John Quincy Adams,19  Jan.

The Answer to the Great Question Of†Life, the Universe and Everything†Is†Forty-two.

-Adams, Douglas Noe«  l
  The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, ch.27.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

-Adams, Henry Brooks
  The Education of Henry  Adams, ch.16.

One friend in a lifetime ismuch; two are many; three are hardly possible.Friendship needs a certainparallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

-Adams, Henry Brooks
  The Education of Henry  Adams, ch.20.

Thus I live in the world rather as a Spectator of mankind, than as one of the species, by which means I have made myself a speculative statesman, soldier, merchant, and artisan, without ever meddling with any practical part of life.

-Addison,Joseph
  In The Spectator, no.1,1 Mar.

People would rather sleep their way through life than stayawake for it.

-Albee, Edward Franklin, III
Quoted in  Joseph F McCrindle (ed) Behind the Scenes (1971).

Edward Hopper is the great painter of American hell in the 20th century, the limner-laureate of the beauty, poignance, eternityand bone-ache disquietude of life.

-Allen, Henry Southworth
 In the Washington Post, 25  Jun.

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.

-Allen,Woody pseudonym of  Allen Stewart Konigsberg
Quoted as epigraph in Eric Lax Woody  Allen and His Comedy (1975).

Irecently turned sixty.Practicallyathird of my life is over.

-Allen,Woody pseudonym of  Allen Stewart Konigsberg
Quoted in the Observer,'Sayings of the Week',10 Mar1996.

Life does not imitate art. It imitates bad television.

-Allen,Woody pseudonym of  Allen Stewart Konigsberg
  In The Guardian, 31 Dec.

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart; Girls aren't like that. See Byron181:73.

-Amis, Sir Kingsley
  'A Bookshop Idyll'.

   When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter.When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.

-Amis, Martin Louis
  The Moronic Inferno,'Kurt Vonnegut'.

   But we mustn't go too far back†in anybody's life† Because if we do†then nobody is to blame for anything, and nothing matters, and everything is allowed.

-Amis, Martin Louis
  London Fields, ch.10.

The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it histruth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced a falsehood.

-Anderson, Sherwood
  Winesburg, Ohio,'The Book of the Grotesque'.

Atfifteenlifehadtaught meundeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.

-Angelou, Maya originally MayaJohnson
  I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, ch.31.

Oh, the holiness of always being the injured party. The historically oppressed can find not only sanctity but safety in the state of victimization.When access to a better life has been denied often enough, and successfully enough, one can use the rejection as an excuse to cease all efforts.

-Angelou, Maya originally MayaJohnson
  Singin'and Swingin'and Getting Merry Like Christmas, ch.9.

Life loves the liver of it. Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise

-Angelou, Maya originally MayaJohnson
  Interview in Black Scholar,  Jan^Feb. Collected in Conversations with Maya  Angelou (1989).