You can be mad as a mad dog at the way things went. You can swear and curse the Fates. But when it comes to the end you have to let go. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button 2009 starring Brad Pitt & Robert Towers & Peter Donald Badalamenti & Tom Everett & Spencer Daniels & Chandler Canterbury & Cate Blanchett & Elle Fanning & Julia Ormond & Taraji P Henson et al, director David Fincher
But life being what it is – a series of intersecting lives and incident out of anyone’s control. ibid.
If there is a nobleness in continuing to live, it is a nobleness of suffering, not a nobleness of reforming and transforming the world. Philip Edwards, Tragic Balance in Hamlet
On his deathbed Maurice Zelig tells his son that Life is a meaningless nightmare of suffering and the only advice he gives him is to save string. Zelig 1983 starring Woody Allen & Mia Farrow & Patrick Horgan & John Buckwalter & Susan Sontag & Saul Bellow & Bruno Bettelheim & Irving Howe & John Morton Blum & Ada Bricktop Smith et al, director Woody Allen
What’s life worth without a giggle? Ken Loach, The Wednesday Play: Up the Junction, woman in factory, BBC 1965
We live somewhere between life and death. Waiting to move on. And in the end we accept it. We shake hands with devils and we walk past them. Peaky Blinders s4e6, Polly, BBC 2017
Every day’s a grind. If it begins to feel like a countdown – this way in the morning, that way at night – then one day it’s done with: Life. The Commuter 2018 starring Liam Neeson & Vera Farmiga & Patrick Wilson & Jonathan Banks & Sam Neill & Elizabeth McGovern & Killian Scott & Shazad Latif & Andy Nyman & Clara Lago et al, director Jaume Collet-Serra, bloke on train to Michael
Britain is divided: the rich live far longer than the poor. And it’s getting worse: the life expectancy gap is widening. Panorama: Get Rich or Die Young, BBC 2018
The most common factor is low income. Having less money limits your choices. ibid.
I first went into a boxing gym as a child … I didn’t like to get punched in the head, man. My father didn’t give a fuck. My dad wanted me to be a boxer because he was trying vicariously to live life through me. Losers I:The Miscast Champion ***** Michael Bentt, Netflix 2019
Someone did not give Jerry Jones the fucking script [Lost KO1]. The most singular humiliating thing to a boxer is getting knocked out in public, man. My father was present. He went ballistic … I had never encountered like that kind of darkness before, that self-hatred, self-loathing. ibid.
Tommy Morrison v Michael Bentt: ‘And a good right by Bentt and Tommy Morrison is down in the first round!’ … Morrison down again … ibid. US fight commentary
You can have all the talent in the world but if you’re not brought along the right way, if you don’t have someone who’s looking out for your best interests, you’re fucked. ibid. Mickey Rourke
96 hours I was out for. And I see a light … I was always in conflict in like why I fought in the first place. ibid. Bentt
Most of us don’t prepare ourselves for failure. ibid. Freddy Roach
And I wrote a piece, Anatomy of a Knockout. ibid. Bentt
You gotta be smart. Keep your head down. Plan an escape. Sometime somehow it will go wrong. Spotless s1e3, Martin to Jean
She whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain. Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, closing words
Jesse: One day pretty much bleeds into the next …
Moderator: So it’s sort of Kafkaesque. Breaking Bad s3e9: Kafkaesque, AMC 2010
Nobody dies a virgin ... Life fucks us all. Kurt Cobain
Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. Stella Adler
Tell me not, in mournful numbers
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Psalm to Life 1838
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled dreams, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave. ibid.
Trust no Futures, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, – act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God overhead! ibid.
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time. ibid.
Let us, then, be up and going,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labour and to wait. ibid.
Count it the greatest sin to prefer mere existence to honour, and for the sake of life to lose the reasons for living. Juvenal, Satires bk 8
We can’t all be happy, we can’t all be rich, we can’t all be lucky – and it would be so much less fun if we were … Some must cry so that others may be able to laugh the more heartily. Jean Rhys, ‘Good Morning, Midnight’, 1939
The perpetual hunger to be beautiful and that thirst to be loved which is the real curse of Eve. Jean Rhys, The Left Bank, 1927
Only the hopeless are starkly sincere and … only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy. ibid.
Why is someone deliberately trying to ruin my life? Trading Places 1983 starring Dan Aykroyd & Eddie Murphy & Ralph Bellamy & Don Ameche & Denholm Elliott & Jamie Lee Curtis & Paul Gleason & Kristin Holby & Frank Oz et al, director John Landis, Winthorpe
Just be yourself, sir. Whatever happens they can’t take that away from you. ibid.
Stay hungry. Stay foolish. Steve Jobs
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. Steve Jobs
What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears. Seneca
Tired of knocking on Preferment’s door. Matthew Arnold, The Scholar-Gypsy, 1853
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn. Matthew Arnold, Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, 1855
For he that expects nothing shall not be disappointed, but he that expects much – if he lives and uses that in hand day by day – shall be full to running over. Edgar Cayce
The abbreviation of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life. Edward Gibbon, 1737-94, Memoirs of My Life, 1796
What is Life? Life is the nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the nation. Adolf Hitler
Plenty to see and hear and feel yet. Feel live warm beings near you. They aren’t going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm full blooded life. James Joyce, Ulysses
The so-called normal families that I studied in the course of this work – it was like walking into carbon monoxide gas chambers. People induced their children to adjust to life by poisoning themselves to a level of subsistence existence that they called life. R D Laing, psychiatrist
I live in it too, and I just don’t feel that way. I feel like a stranded dinosaur. Because all the values I’ve lived by now count for nothing. If this is what it was all going to lead to, one need not have bothered. Keith Vaughan, artist