Al Purdy Quotes

If there's one thing I've written that could survive into posterity, I'd want that to be the poetry.

If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.

I'd like to think I've left something in the world. Without in any way trying to be morbid, but life is very short, and I'd like to think I'd leave some body of work that would inspire other musicians long after I've gone.

Years from now, after I'm gone, someone will listen to what I've done and know I was here. They may not know or care who I was, but they'll hear my guitars speaking for me.

Art is man's distinctly human way of fighting death.

I'm lucky. Usually you're dead to get your own museum, but I'm still alive to see mine.

The exact time of death, I think, is not something that matters so much at this moment for we will be reliving John Paul's life for many days and weeks and even years and decades and centuries to come.

I will die, but not retire.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

I condemn the dust of which I am made, this dust that speaks to you now. It can be persecuted, it can be brought to death. But I challenge the world to take from me that part of me which will live through the centuries and survive in the skies

I know nothing new except that Herr Gellert, the Leipzig poet, is dead, and has written no more poetry since his death.

I just hope that my films will survive me.

The fact that you can even make a record and leave a document that you were here, that's nothing to sneeze at.

I always think W.S. Merwin's poems will last of anyone writing today. If I had to bet on posterity I would bet Merwin. My poems could easily evaporate. So I don't know. If you find yourself as a writer thinking about posterity you should probably go out for a brisk walk or something.

If you feel you have a strong constituency among the young, you can really die happy, because the great unanswered question, the only valid value judgment is whether you're going to last, and that tells you that you are, for a bit at least.

Where are Shakespeare's imagination, Bacon's learning, Galileo's dream? Where is the sweet fancy of Sidney, the airy spirit of Fletcher, and Milton's thought severe? Methinks such things should not die and dissipate, when a hair can live for centuries, and a brick of Egypt will last three thousand years. I am content to believe that the mind of man survives, somehow or other, his clay.

I hope to leave behind a few poems it will be hard to get rid of.

they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead

Listen to me: die after me, all right? I don't care what else you do, where you go, how you screw up your life, just... survive. Outlive me, please.

Poems in a way are spells against death. They are milestones, to see where you were then from where you are now.

We can die by it, if not live by love, And if unfit for tombs and hearse Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; And if no peace of chronicle we prove, We'll build in sonnet pretty rooms; As well a well wrought urne becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs.

And in the wreck of noble lives Something immortal still survives.

Gentlemen, I would rather have written those lines than take Quebec tomorrow.