Life is "a party: one arrives long after it's started, and one's going to leave long before it's over," said the late English actor Robert Morley. It's one in a list of 14 metaphors for life that Futility Closet compiled.
- "A theater in which the worst people often have the best seats." — Aristonymus
- "A hospital in which every patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed." — Charles Baudelaire
- "A maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk." — Cyril Connolly
- "A garish, unrestful hotel." — Joseph Conrad
- "Like eating artichokes — you've got to go through so much to get so little." — Tad Dorgan
- "For most men … a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed." — Clifton Fadiman
- "A library owned by an author. In it are a few books which he wrote himself, but most of them were written for him." — Harry Emerson Fosdick
- "An onion, and one peels it crying." — French proverb
- "The only riddle that we shrink from giving up." — W.S. Gilbert
- "Life is something like this trumpet. If you don't put anything in it, you don't get anything out." — W.C. Handy
- "A succession of frontispieces. The way to be satisfied is never to look back." — William Hazlitt
- "A long headache in a noisy street." — John Masefield
- "A foreign language: all men mispronounce it." — Christopher Morley