Dale Earnhardt Jr. Quotes

Anyone who loses a parent, you have to find those parts of yourself that your parent held true in themselves, especially if they're supportive parents.

It is community and respect, of course, but the dead have more claims on you than what you might want to admit or even what you might know about and them claims can be very strong indeed. Very strong indeed.

It's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living--we who have survived--understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices, You will not forget me -- will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.

Parents remain our touchstones, fellow travelers, even after death. They are both missing and present.

The body is the one thing you have to say goodbye to. You can hold on to your memories. You can hold on to the spirit. That's part of the package that you love and the part that comforts you.

I'll never forget the first time I saw someone who had died. It was my grandfather. And I knelt next to his coffin. And all I could do was eye level was look at his hands. They were enormous hands. And all I could think was, 'Those hands dug freedom for me.'

Our dad was a great guy and we will never forget him.

I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story.

The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.

I miss all of my old friends who have passed away. Sometimes you just don't understand why they were taken so soon. I loved and miss Johnny Cash. I miss my old buddy Johnny Paycheck, who happens to be buried in an area of the cemetery that I bought for my family.

My death is incidental, and I worry very much about my loved ones and, you know, would like to make it as easy as possible for them. Or wish I could will away whatever, you know, the sadness they will feel when I die. But for me, nothing. The world goes on.

I know a lot of people who are not here anymore, and I wonder why I'm still here... Not a day goes by that I don't think about Sam Cooke. His presence is so strong and so convincing to me, a true artist, a true talent, who never talked down to people.

When my father died, those years when he was working on the Hubble came back to me, and it seemed fitting to imagine him as having somehow merged with the large mystery that the universe represents.

When someone important to you, someone that's played a big role in your life, when they're gone... When you write about them or pay tribute to them, you want to do it in a way that's thoughtful.

Joan Didion's 'The Year of Magical Thinking' comes to mind as an example of a piece of media that I really respect and would hope to emulate: just her courage in looking at her husband's death and the attentiveness that she has in how she looks at it, and the unflinching gaze that she communicates from looking into death.

The loss of my father will always sting. But now, everything that I do is in honor of him and celebrates his life.

Death, vicious death, Leave a green branch for love.

In death, lie. In living, cry. Carry me home to remember to be remembered.

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.

There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. […] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself.

And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.

When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.

The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.

With every friend I love who has been taken into the brown bosom of the earth a part of me has been buried there; but their contribution to my being of happiness, strength and understanding remains to sustain me in an altered world.

A remembrance can mean nothing to the one remembered; it can only remind the ones left behind how little they did while you were still alive.