The middle way is a view of life that avoids the extreme of misguided grasping born of believing there is something we can find, or buy, or cling to that will not change. And it avoids the despair and nihilism born from the mistaken belief that nothing matters, that all is meaningless.
If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.
I work very hard, and I play very hard. I'm grateful for life. And I live it - I believe life loves the liver of it. I live it.
I am grateful to be a woman. I must have done something great in another life.
I went to Ithaca, found the Grateful Dead and my life was changed.
You can't imagine how gratifying it is to have a reader come up to you and say, 'You changed my life.'
A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things. There will be sleeping enough in the grave.
Every man's road in life is marked by the graves of his personal liking.
I am very thankful that I have lived the life I have lived. I am thankful for my Graves' disease, and I tell people, if I had my whole life to live over, I would have it, because it has really made me into the person that I am.
I love graveyards. To some, it might sound morbid, but there's nothing dark about the natural cycles of life, really.
To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.
Meat is a big deal in my life. I do love breakfast food, but I don't think that's extraordinary. I'm a normal American. We love eggs and meat and potatoes and gravy.
Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
It felt to me like America was always wanting to resolve things too quickly, without thinking through what the costs and consequences would be and how that affects an individual living in that world. Then as I grew up and went about my life, I think I just got more and more interested in that gray area where things are not so easily quantified.
I've struggled with gender norms my whole life, always feeling like I wasn't black-and-white; I was in this gray area, and gray areas really scare people because you can't define them.
There is hardly a place on Earth where people do not log, pave, spray, drain, flood, graze, fish, plow, burn, drill, spill or dump. There is no life zone, with the possible exception of the deep ocean, that we are not degrading.
I believe we all have the capacity to be masters of many things, and there's nothing that we can't do. You can be a great actor and also be a great writer. There's so many things that all of us have the capacity to do. But somehow, life tries to convince us that we'd be lucky to do even one thing well, and I disagree.
The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.
Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record.
The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.
