John Banville Quotes

All around me darkness gathers, Fading is the sun that shone, We must speak of other matters, You can be me when I'm gone Flowers gathered in the morning, Afternoon they blossom on, Still are withered in the evening, You can be me when I'm gone.

The present is the funeral of the past, And man the living sepulchre of life.

...with the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours.

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.

All came from, and will goe to others.

The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains.

Oh, I'll be forgotten too, don't worry.

Oblivion is the rule and fame the exception, of humanity.

Man appears for a little while to laugh and weep, to work and play, and then to go to make room for those who shall follow him in the never-ending cycle.

The individual man is transitory, but the pulse of life and of growth goes on after he is gone, buried under a wreath of magnolia leaves.

When I die there is nobody to take my place.

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.

Thus the sum of things is ever being reviewed, and mortals dependent one upon another. Some nations increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and like runners pass on the torch of life.

Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his natural life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

We just want to be remembered before something is set in stone.

Perhaps grief is not about empty, but full. The full breath of life that includes death. The completeness, the cycles, the depth, the richness, the process, the continuity and the treasure of the moment that is gone the second you are aware of it.

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

We will all be gone one day. Not as a negative thing - as a positive thing, too, you know, and we should leave something behind ourselves.

We all go to our grave thinking that we will never be forgotten, and we are forgotten ten minutes later.

Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

You live you die and death not ends it.

If we one day cease to exist, what will be remarkable is that we were ever here at all.

I'll not always be here on guard. The stars twinkle in the Milky Way and the wind sighs for songs across the empty fields of a planet a Galaxy away. You won't always be here. But before you go, whisper this to your sons and their sons - "The work was free. Keep it so.