Harold Kushner Quotes

I could still be forgotten when I'm dead. I don't really care what happens when I'm dead.

He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.

Oh, I'll be forgotten too, don't worry.

As Beckett said, it's not enough to die, one has to be forgotten as well.

Oblivion is the rule and fame the exception, of humanity.

Mortality applies to every aspect of life. The fear of death is the driving fear of life.

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

My biggest fear in life is to be forgotten.

When I die, and people realize that I will not be resurrected in three days, they will forget me. That is the way it should be.

I think about death every day - what it would be like, why it would happen to me. It would be humiliating to be afraid.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

I don't care much whether people remember me or not. If people remember, well and good. If they don't remember, it's alright - I'm dead anyway.

We all go to our grave thinking that we will never be forgotten, and we are forgotten ten minutes later.

When I have fears that I may ceace to be, Before my pen has gleaned my teaming brain".

One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breath, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives - transitoriness and oblivion.

Jump to the day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won't know we ever happened.

We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.

To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!

To be forgotten, is to die a little.

I think about death most of the day, every day. We can't escape death, and choosing to ignore it only makes it more scary.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

I've been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.

But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?

Most of us harbour a significant amount of subconscious fear about death, and act out of this fear in our daily lives.