Alfred de Musset Quotes

It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.

Yesterday I lived, today I suffer, tomorrow I die; but I still think fondly, today and tomorrow, of yesterday.

That's the purpose of old age... To give us a breathing space before we die, in which to see why we did what we did.

I know beginnings, I know endings too, and life-in-death, and something else I'd rather not recall just now.

You don't appreciate life until you get to the other side. Like lying in a hospital bed.

As I look back over my life, I've been an active person - obviously I was self-absorbed for a period of time.

Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.

Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.

What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.

Being human means losing everything we love best in the world," she murmured as she released me. "But would you ask to be anything else?

Kisten, please don't leave me," I begged, and his eyes opened. "I'm cold," he said, fear rising in his blue eyes. I held him tighter. "I'm holding you. It's going to be okay." "Tell Ivy," he said with a gasp, clenching in on himself. "Tell Ivy that it wasn't her fault. And tell her that at the end... you remember love. I don't think... we lose our souls... at all. I think God keeps them for us until we... come home. I love you, Rachel." "I love you, too, Kisten," I sobbed, and as I watched, his eyes, memorizing my face, silvered, and he died.

The book [The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane] is about the fact that living in this world means that your heart is necessarily going to get broken. But the book also says that's okay. That's the only way to live a truly human life - with your heart getting broken - and eventually getting flooded with love.

I don't know if you look back on your life and just see successes, but probably the first things that pop up are the regrets.

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

Sex, love and death are universal and timeless dramatic themes.

...as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.

As they croak, I see myself in the pistol smoke.

The first and foremost reality is that suffering and death are not only enemies of life, but a means of reminding us of life's twin realities, love and hate.

At sixty I look back on a life of deep disappointments, of withered hopes, of unlooked for suffering, of severe discipline.

If suddenly you do not exist, If suddenly you are not living, I shall go on living. I do not dare, I do not dare to write it, if you die. I shall go on living.

Love is not love that wounded bleeds And bleeding sullies slow. Come death within my hands and I Unto my love will go.

You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?

I know that I shall die struggling for breath, and I know that I shall be horribly afraid. I know that I shall not be able to keep myself from regretting bitterly the life that has brought me to such a pass; but I disown that regret. I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing.