Gore Vidal Quotes

The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.

Life was given to me as a favor, so I may abandon it when it is one no longer.

Life is wasted on the living.

You don't waste your entire life waiting to go back to dust.

You realize that however much you don't think about death - or think that's for other people - you're just an organism living from day to day. I'm just grateful I'm here.

But I am not going to live for ever. And the more I know it, the more amazed I am by being here at all.

It is only in the light of the inescapable fact of death that a person can adequately engage and enter upon the mysterious fact of life.

We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.

Death is nothing, nor life either, for that matter. To die, to sleep, to pass into nothingness, what does it matter? Everything is an illusion.

Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man - yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hairsbreadth of time assigned to thee, live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it.

Believe me, if a man doesn't know death, he doesn't know life.

Don't fear your mortality, because it is this very mortality that gives meaning and depth and poignancy to all the days that will be granted to you.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

First our pleasures die - and then our hopes, and then our fears - and when these are dead, the debt is due dust claims dust - and we die too.

Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order.

If we don't know life, how can we know death?

You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

I'm just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren't going to be alive forever - that bothered me.

There are only three events in a man's life; birth, life, and death; he is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.

You've gotta know what death is to know life!

Life and death. They are somehow sweetly and beautifully mixed, but I don't know how.

Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority.

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