Some Writers Think Life is Overrated

William Shakespeare wrote, “This life… is but a walking shadow; a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Songwriter K.D. Lang put it more simply, “Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.”

Some Writers Think Life is an Adventure

Joseph Campbell wrote, “The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.”

Susan Ryan said, “We get to show up. We get to step into this story.”

Some Writers Think Life is Simple

Songwriter John Lennon said, “When I was 5 years old, my mom always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy.’ They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”

Business writer Tom Peters said, “Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works.”

Some Writers Think Life is About Writing

Nobel-Prizewinning author Gabriel García Márquez wrote, “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.”

Anne Lamott, the author of Bird by Bird says, “Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.”

Some Writers Think Life is Transformative

Wes Jackson said, “If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.”

Studs Terkel wrote, “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

Some Writers Think Life is Service

Dr. Albert Schweitzer wrote, “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.”

Dave Wolverton said, “When you grow up, you have to give yourself away. Sometimes you give your life all in a moment, but mostly you have to give yourself away laboring one minute at a time.”

Some Writers Think Life is Contemplation

A Blackfoot warrior named Crowfoot wrote, “What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”

The Welsh hobo-poet W.H. Davies said, “What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?”

Some Writers Think Life is Connectedness

John Donne famously wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less… Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

My friend Vess Barnes has his own definition of our purpose in life, “To encourage, to comfort, to awaken, and to stretch those who find themselves riding this big ball as it screams thru time in the silence of space. To be a bridge, not a barricade. To be a link, not a lapse. To be a beacon and a bolster; not a bragger or a bummer. To help bring the corners of life’s lips to their...