Harold Brodkey Quotes

Certainly people have a lot tougher situations than I've had to deal with. But I will say we are all dying from the moment we are born. This is not just rehearsal.

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

Life is an incurable disease.

Give us a religion that will help us to live—we can die without assistance.

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

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.

Every religion implies that it treats the problem of being and nonbeing, life and death. Their languages are different, but they speak about the same things.

Why do people embrace God? In my opinion, belief in God and an afterlife is a necessary extension of man's need to feel that this life does not end with what we call death.

Unless you're flat out dead, you have to think of some other questions like: what's on the other side? It brings up issues of God, or no God. How does he play into this? Or he, or she, or it? How does it all play into this?

Life will end in death and unhappiness, but we do it anyway.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

Acquisition means life to miserable mortals.

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.

I would love to have faith. When you take God out of the universe, there is no-one taking care us - we are just parcels of meat, collections of atoms - we have a little flowering on Earth, and then we're gone.

Mortality defines the human condition.

How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.

It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.

Life - and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison - is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

Ultimately life is disease, death and oblivion. It's still better than high school.

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

God and death kind of resemble each other, because the only time a lot of people will try and talk to God is when someone's died.

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

If you haven't understood that if you are born you die, you scarcely deserve to be able to be alive.

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