John Green Quotes

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

The marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one.

It's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living--we who have survived--understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices, You will not forget me -- will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.

I'm of an age when if I started to do eulogies, I'd be doing nothing else. You don't want to be remembered? I don't want them to be told to remember me.

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

Mourn for me rather as living than as dead.

Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.

To be remembered at all is an achievement of sorts.

Just to be remembered is good enough for me. Lots of people are forgotten.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

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

Nobody wants to be nameless. Nobody wanna be forgotten.

I always felt that one needs to be remembered long after one has gone.

If a woman is worth remembering,' said my grandmother, 'there is no need to have her name carved in letters.

Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?

People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.

Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.

We're not really afraid to die. We're only afraid of being forgotten. We know that we'll be forgotten, and the idea is unbearable, don't you agree? As time passes we become infrequent visitors in the minds of those left behind. The ones who clear out the house & divide up the belongings. Throw away the rubbish. And forget. If we knew that every evening someone lit a candle and sat down to think – thought about is if only for a few seconds – then we could depart this earth in peace. No-one will light a candle for me. Who would do that?

The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living.

In death, lie. In living, cry. Carry me home to remember to be remembered.

When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.

Only the forgotten are truly dead.

The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.

I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.

You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.