All Quotes By Tag: Immortality

“I think there’s a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time.”

“The Pressure-Maybe one day,after centuries,we can become brilliant gemsin crystal cavesand we will be immortal after all.”

“No one is adequate to comprehending the misery of my lot! Fate obliges me to be constantly in movement: I am not permitted to pass more than a fortnight in the same place. I have no Friend in the world, and from the restlessness of my destiny I never can acquire one. Fain would I lay down my miserable life, for I envy those who enjoy the quiet of the Grave: But Death eludes me, and flies from my embrace. In vain do I throw myself in the way of danger. I plunge into the Ocean; The Waves throw me back with abhorrence upon the shore: I rush into fire; The flames recoil at my approach: I oppose myself to the fury of Banditti; Their swords become blunted, and break against my breast: The hungry Tiger shudders at my approach, and the Alligator flies from a Monster more horrible than itself. God has set his seal upon me, and all his Creatures respect this fatal mark!”

“For what blessing may a man hope for butAn immortality inThe loving vigilance of death.”

“But me They cannot touch, Old age and death. The strange And ignominious end of old Dead folk!”

“Men may perish, but the world will neither celebrate nor mourn. It will go on.’ His smile thinned. ‘Would you like to know how?”No.”Animals will swell to fill the void left by men,” he told her. ‘And over-swell it, perhaps. There will be other extinctions and other recoveries. The sky will clear, but those who see it will not marvel at its many colors. Those ruins will collapse, burying treasures like this-‘ He waved at the walls. ‘-and this-‘ He picked up the spoon from her coffee tray and tossed it down again with a clatter. ‘-forever, but the world will go on. Years become centuries so easily when no one is there to count them. Centuries become millennia. The forests will reclaim the lands that Men have razed. Rivers will carve canyons across the scars left by this fallen cities. Mountains will rise up, trapping seas to dry under and uncaring sun and leaving the bones of whales to bleach in the newborn deserts for no one to find, no one to be inspired by thoughts of giants and dragons. And still the worlds will go on, and I will go on with it through ages that can only be measured by the coming and going of glaciers. The stars themselves will shift in the heavens and no one will be there to invent names for their new alignments or remember the stories of the old ones, no one but me. In time, the sun itself will begin to cool. Here on Earth, the world goes on and on as its remaining life passes through its last changes and dies away. It will be quiet. And lonely.’ His mouth curved into a bitter line. ‘But I’ll live.”Stop it,’ Lan whispered through numb lips.’I read once that the sun will someday swell and engulf this world before it burns itself out. Perhaps I will finally die with it. Or perhaps I’ will continue to endure… my ashes pulled eternally apart through the frozen vacuum of space, and I with no more mouth to scream… still alive.”

“The battle with the gods thus hinges on our own mortality! Creativity is a yearning for immortality.”

“If they succeed, it will not matter if Man becomes immortal.He will have nothing to live for.”

“The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that ‘black hole’ is infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions—nothing but the fixity of the pensive gaze.With the gods gone, and Christ not yet come, there was a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur.”

“Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities.”

“The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.”

“In years past, a person died, and eventually all those with memories of him or her also died, bringing about the complete erasure of that person’s existence. Just as the human body returned to dust, mingling with atoms of the natural world, a person’s existence would return to nothingness.How very clean.Now, as if in belated punishment for the invention of writing, any message once posted on the Internet was immortal. Words as numerous as the dust of the earth would linger forever in their millions and trillions and quadrillions and beyond.”

“O, never from the memory of my heartYour dear, paternal image shall depart,Who while on earth, ere yet by death surprised,Taught me how mortals are immortalized;How grateful am I for that patient careAll my life long my language shall declare.”

“I love you now… I love you immortally, even if I die and there is nothing left of me.”

“While death and darkness girdle meI grope for immortality.”