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About this quote

What does it mean?
Dickinson reflects on the cost of living life, equating it to the total expenditure of one's existence.
In plain terms
Living life costs everything you have.
What can you take from it?
Life is an all-in investment.

Where it applies

  • valuing time
  • reflecting on life
  • decisions

Putting it to work

  • weigh life choices
  • acknowledge effort

Questions to consider

  • What did you pay to live your life?

Another view

The metaphor of a market price reduces life to a transaction.

More from Emily Dickinson

  1. The Pedigree of Honey Does not concern the Bee - A Clover, any time, to him, Is Aristocracy -

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  2. Upon the gallows hung a wretch, Too sullied for the hell To which the law entitled him. As nature's curtain fell The one who bore him tottered in, - For this w…

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  3. Who has not found the Heaven - below - Will fail of it above -

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