Brendan Gill Quotes

Everyone has to die someday. I'd rather die after doing something worthwhile.

I pray-for fashion's word is out And prayer comes round again- That I may seem, though I die old, A foolish, passionate man.

I am an old man who will live until I die," Anselmo said.

Growing old beats the alternative - dying young.

Striving toward a goal puts a more pleasing construction on our advance toward death.

It's as if we spend our entire lives avoiding Jell-O but it is always there at the end, waiting.

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 latter. She had a good run, Sook said, doing a little shrug. It was his usual response to death at Mapleshade, and it was a safe bet that he felt that way about himself. Like most twice-widowed, Korea-vet, nature-loving, gun-enthusiast, bilingual, weed-connoisseur great grandfathers of five, he'd lived a full life.

You know you're old when you get a lifetime achievement award. It's a message you've been around too long.

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.

The best advice about getting older? Just be thankful you're not dead!

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.

Old men must die, or the world would grow mouldy, would only breed the past again.

Fifty years seems like a good anniversary. Even after I'm dead, how much better could I get than this? I mean, it's great, I'm not dead, so I get to see it.

I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.

In the end, we'll all become stories.

At the end of the day, we're all judged by those we leave behind.

Remember this. Bear Bryant retired at age 69, and he died 28 days after he stopped coaching. If you don't have something, and a purpose in your life, you're gonna die.

I'd rather die than fade away

I like to think that when I fall, A rain-drop in Death's shoreless sea, This shelf of books along the wall, Beside my bed, will mourn for me.

Our worst fear isn't the end of life but the end of memories.

I'll be happy if the last thing they say about me after I die is that I made a difference.

Stop whining about getting old. It's a privilege. A lot of people who are dead wish they were still alive.

We do not start as dust. We do not end as dust. We make more than dust. That's all we ask of you. Make more than dust.

There is no place in which to hide when Age comes seeking for his bride.