Tobias Wolff Quotes

Life is an incurable disease.

Man is never always happy, and very often only a brief period of happiness is granted him in this world; so why escape from this dream which cannot last long?

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.

Life will end in death and unhappiness, but we do it anyway.

Acquisition means life to miserable mortals.

Mortality defines the human condition.

Not to be born is, past all prizing, best.

Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

Who apart from the gods is without pain for his whole lifetime's length?

I'm dying always.

There is some suffering that awaits us all.

Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end.

We have this wild life experience that is full of fantastic minutiae and banal, huge events at the same time. Yet, all of it shrinks in the shadow of death. It's hard to argue with death as a game-changer.

Everything passes away-suffering,pain, blood, hunger,pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the Earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes toward the stars? Why?

For the world, I count it not an inn, but a hospital; and a place not to live, but to die in.

Humans may be the only creatures on Earth who spend significant time thinking about the fact that someday their lives will end.

If you haven't understood that if you are born you die, you scarcely deserve to be able to be alive.

It is only in the light of the inescapable fact of death that a person can adequately engage and enter upon the mysterious fact of life.

World's use is cold, world's love is vain, world's cruelty is bitter bane; but is not the fruit of pain.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle - or instruction.

To continue living, we have to die. That's the story of humanity - generation after generation - that we are going to die. There's nothing dramatic about death except that one loses one's life.

We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.