David Ebershoff Quotes

I like things that are just about to go. Everything's leaving. Death is never far away from me. When you make something, death can't help but be in it.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Sleep is not, death is not; Who seem to die Live. House you were born in, Friends of your spring-time, old man and young maid, Day's toil and it's guerdon, They are all vanishing, Fleeing to fables, Cannot be moored

Jump to the day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won't know we ever happened.

When I die, and people realize that I will not be resurrected in three days, they will forget me. That is the way it should be.

Death is feared as birth is forgotten.

I think that's what we're all most terrified about: that we'll just die and disappear and we'll leave no trace.

Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.

eventually, everything goes away.

When the race is ended, and the play is either won or lost, and ye are in the utmost circle and border of time, and shall put your foot within the march of eternity, all the good things of your short nightdream shall seem to you like ashes of a blaze of thorns or straw.

Here I am...wanting to accomplish something and completely forgetting it must all end--that there is such a thing as death.

No one loses any other life than the one he now lives, nor does one live any other life than that which he will lose.

He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.

I realized people would soon forget me once I was dead. I couldn't even say that this was hard to stomach; really, there's no idea to which one doesn't get acclimatized in time.

Some things are forgotten, some things disappear, some things die.

Birth was the death of him.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Who could look on these monuments without reflecting on the vanity of mortals in thus offering up testimonials of their respect for persons of whose very names posterity is ignorant?

As Beckett said, it's not enough to die, one has to be forgotten as well.

We will all, someday, experience death, and become obsolete as a dead leaf falling from a tree, crushed by passersby to ashes underlying the earth.

Each instant of life is a step toward death.

In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die.

Even at our birth, death does but stand aside a little. And every day he looks towards us and muses somewhat to himself whether that day or the next he will draw nigh.

Everything that gets born dies.