Gus Van Sant Quotes

Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.

I've worked very hard to become comfortable with how death works and why it happens. I now know that death isn't out to get me.

Death grows friendlier as we grow older.

We're the only species that can look into the future and know that we're going to die one day, and it causes all sorts of cognitive stress on your system.

In your teens and twenties, death doesn't exist. In your thirties, you glance down the road occasionally. But then in your forties, it becomes a full-time job looking the other way.

You get to a certain point in your life where you get closer to the end of your life than the beginning, and it colors your life, in a way.

Mortality applies to every aspect of life. The fear of death is the driving fear of life.

People assume that death hanging over my head would allow me to put things into perspective, but that's not how it works.

Now that I'm older, a real source of interest is the ages of the dead, the number; the day is off to an optimistic start when the departed are all older than I.

I'm kind of a morbid person. I'm very optimistic, but I also feel like I'm going to die at any moment. I feel very much aware of my mortality. I'm here, and then I'm not.

I think of dying every day... At a certain age, you should be prepared to go at any time.

No one can avoid death; it is inevitable. Therefore, I should create in my mind a kind of willingness and accepting for that event without any fear.

A 20-year-old is never going to give death a second thought, whereas someone in their late 50s is going to think about it... I don't know, 20 times a day.

When I was young, the early death of my father cast a shadow over me - and I was afraid to die before all my literary plans came true. But between 30 and 40 years of age my attitude to death became quite calm and balanced. I feel it is a natural, but no means the final, milestone of one's existence.

O what a thing is age! Death without death's quiet.

It doesn't take that many years for a kid to realise that they're going to die. It's always there in the back of their mind the rest of their lives.

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

You can't be scared of death. When that time comes, it comes.

As a culture, we are not comfortable with mortality. We do not accept it the way other cultures do. We cling to youth, and we don't want to die. It's like, 'Well, too bad, we do.'

Death is a distant rumor to the young.

Most of us harbour a significant amount of subconscious fear about death, and act out of this fear in our daily lives.

They say the death of a parent puts you in time because that means there's now no generation standing between you and ordinary death: you're next. I don't buy it.

I'm not afraid of death, but I resent it. I think it's unfair and irritating.

The subject of death is taboo. We feel, perhaps only subconsciously, that to be in contact with death in any way, even indirectly, somehow confronts us with the prospect of our own deaths, draws our own deaths closer and makes them more real and thinkable.

I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis.