William Peter Blatty Quotes

I still don't even know if the sheriff will let me see him. And suppose he did; what then? What do I say to him? Do I know what a man is? Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I'm still trying to find out how a man should live. Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never lived?

I don't know if my work is a concerted effort to make kids sad! But life and death go hand in hand. It's our condition as human beings.

Why should I ask the wise men: Whence is my beginning? I am busy with the thought: Where will be my end?

There are only three events in a man's life; birth, life, and death; he is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.

Life and death are important. Don't suffer them in vain.

We all know we're going to die one day, but who wants to think about it? What's sustainable is joy, pleasure and freedom.

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

Life and death have been lacking in my life.

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

It even feels absurd to be writing or singing a song at all - in the context of actual death, being alive feels absurd.

I don't think we're any more preoccupied by life and death or heaven and hell than anyone else, but it's fun to write about the inevitable - you're alive, and you're going to die.

From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.

life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

I'd like to end the book a lot of ways. Except I don't have any answers. Use your common sense. Be nice. This is the best I can do. All the trouble in the world is human trouble. Well, that's not true. But when cancer cells run amok and burst out of the prostate and take over the liver and lymph glands and end up killing everything in the body including themselves, they certainly are acting like some humans we know.

Through the window I can see Rooks above the cherry-tree, Sparrows in the violet bed, Bramble-bush and bumble-bee, And old red bracken smoulders still Among boulders on the hill, Far too bright to seem quite dead. But old Death, who can't forget, Waits his time and watches yet, Waits and watches by the door.

You will die not because you're ill, but because you're alive.

The meaning of life is that it stops.

How would you feel about life if Death was your older sister?

The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better? Only God knows.

Every life is punctuated by deaths and departures, and each one causes great suffering that it is better to endure rather than forgo the pleasure of having known the person who has passed away. Somehow our world rebuilds itself after every death, and in any case we know that none of us will last forever. So you might say that life and death lead us by the hand, firmly but tenderly.

Why was I born, if it wasn't forever?

Every fight could be my last.

You could wonder for hours what flowers mean, but for me, they're life itself, in all its happy brilliance. We couldn't do with out flowers. Flowers help you forget life's tragedies.