I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like (13 page)

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

TRUMAN CAPOTE

Life is like a beautiful flirt, whom we love and to whom, finally,
we grant every condition she imposes as long as she doesn't leave us.

GIOVANNI GIACOMO CASANOVA

Life is a tragedy when seen in close up, but a comedy in long shot.

CHARLES CHAPLIN

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning
before we have learnt to walk.

CYRIL CONNOLLY

Life is an incurable disease.

ABRAHAM COWLEY

Cowley, who wrote this in the seventeenth century, may have inspired a popular twentieth-century spin-off: “Life is a sexually transmitted disease.” British psychiatrist R. D. Laing put a neat twist on that saying when he wrote: “Life is a sexually transmitted disease and there is a one-hundred percent mortality rate.”

 

Life is a sum of all your choices.

ALBERT CAMUS

Life is a crowded superhighway with bewildering cloverleaf exits
on which a man is liable to find himself
speeding back in the direction he came.

PETER DE VRIES

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