Walter de La Mare Quotes

Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him.

Important thing is not the me that's lying here, but the me that's sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that's downstairs cooking supper, or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count. I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family.

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

I think at the prospect of bringing children into the world, your mortality comes very much to the forefront, absolutely.

For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.

Our life is made by the death of others.

You die, but most of what you have accumulated will not be lost; you are leaving a message in a bottle.

Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.

Having a child is sowing the seeds of your own obsolescence: birth is the fuse that leads to that other thing. You appear, you replace yourself, you die.

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.

Ultimately, I think, as humans, we all care deeply about our life's legacy, and contemplating our own mortality is the only real way to approach that question of legacy honestly.

Life and death are like inhalation and exhalation. They always exist together.

Dying doesn't end anything - it just changes where you are

Death is alive, they whispered. Death lives inside life, as bones dance within the body. Yesterday is within today. Yesterday never dies.

The love of posterity is the consequence of the necessity of death. If a man were sure of living forever here, he would not care about his offspring.

...with the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours.

Our last deed, like the young of the land crab, wends its way to the sea of cause and effect as soon as born, and makes a drop there to eternity.

Life and death are different sides of the same coin.

When we see the many grave-stones which have fallen in, which have been defaced by the footsteps of the congregation, which lie buried under the ruins of the churches, that have themselves crumbled together over them; we may fancy the life after death to be as a second life, into which man enters in the figure, or the picture or the inscription, and lives longer there than when he was really alive. But this figure also, this second existence, dies out too, sooner or later. Time will not allow himself to be cheated of his rights with the monuments of men or with themselves.

All men desire to be immortal.

Not all of me shall die.

Without death and decay, how could life go on?

E'en from the tomb the voice of nature cries, E'en in our ashes live their wonted fires.

Every new born being indeed comes fresh and blithe into the new existence, and enjoys it as a free gift: but there is, and can be, nothing freely given. It's fresh existence is paid for by the old age and death of a worn out existence which has perished, but which contained the indestructible seed out of which the new existence has arisen: they are one being.