Edwin Hubbel Chapin Quotes

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

I miss all of my old friends who have passed away. Sometimes you just don't understand why they were taken so soon. I loved and miss Johnny Cash. I miss my old buddy Johnny Paycheck, who happens to be buried in an area of the cemetery that I bought for my family.

As soon as the dirt is hitting the casket, it'll all be forgotten.

At death our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us and are found out, or depart farther from us and are forgotten. Friends are as often brought nearer together as separated by death.

as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?

A terrible thing about getting oldish is that your friends start dying, and in the last ten years I have lost seven or eight of my closest.

I'm one of those who cut off seeing people after a certain time, when the weight is gone and they sound like the dementia is very advanced - I don't want to see that. I don't even go in to look at the body. That's not my last memory.

I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place.

I admit that death is not just about you, it's also about the people who love you.

The common denominator of all my friends is that they're dead.

Now, I'm the only living member of that group. There was the six of us originally and they're now all gone.

I had a friend, Melissa, who was 28 years old. She was my best friend's wife, and she was my wife's best friend. She died of breast cancer. When she passed away back in 2004 was the last time I cried.

Nothing endears so much a friend as sorrow for his death. The pleasure of his company has not so powerful an influence.

This has been harder for my friends. I know I'm going to die.

I don't believe in the afterlife, so I do think when somebody passes, it's worthy of note.

I think that nothing teaches you more about life than death and dying.

The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.

Of my friends I am the only one left.

We die as often as we lose a friend.

It's very inconvenient because every time I finish, let's say, a chapter of a book, I think I'm going to ring Richard and then realize: Oh, Christ, I've buried him. I buried him last year.

Going through an illness and then death of a close friend has changed my attitudes to friendship enormously.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.

Losing a parent makes you realize how temporary everything is - you're looking through someone's whole life in a drawer, and they're very simply gone.