Ethan Canin Quotes

I don't know if my work is a concerted effort to make kids sad! But life and death go hand in hand. It's our condition as human beings.

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

For we are born in other's pain, and perish in our own.

Life is an incurable disease.

Not to be born is, past all prizing, best.

God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle - or instruction.

My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition. Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them.

No man who believes that all is for the best in this suffering world can keep his ethical values unimpaired, since he is always having to find excuses for pain and misery.

We are misery-making machines! Homo sapiens has perfected the art of causing suffering. Pain is humankind's collective GDP.

The lot of man is to suffer and die.What's gone is of no consequence.

I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.

There is nothing alive more agonized than man / of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.

Men die and they are not happy.

For all mortals, birth is suffering, ageing is suffering, sickness is suffering.

I really have no idea where the darkness comes from. Other writers have said that there are two subjects worth writing about, love and death; and since I'm a complete flop when it comes to love, I chose death. Too, maybe because of where I came from, I do find it easy to empathise with and write about certain groups of damaged or downtrodden people: the poor, the addicted.

The lot of man-to suffer and die.

Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

For the world, I count it not an inn, but a hospital; and a place not to live, but to die in.

It's so unfair that we should die, just because we are born.

And so, irritants, it is with this that I leave you. You are spared so that you can think of what it really is to live in a world that engenders a pain for which there is no comfort. Here is your product! You have the rest of your lives to think of this. And I suggest you think quickly, for a long life is never a guarantee.

To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep No more; and by a sleep, to say we end The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die to sleep, To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the rub.

I'm not happy when I'm writing, but I'm more unhappy when I'm not.

Life itself is offensive and certainly does not apologize - in fact, it hurts considerably and, as we all know, is often very rude and troublesome, just as nature or art can be.

Death borders upon our birth, and our cradle stands in the grave.