Randy Pausch Quotes

You don't have free will when you have lung cancer.

Everything happens to me. I've never had a streak of luck in my life.

Cancer doesn't care if you have suffered before.

I detest that saying 'Everything happens for a reason'; it's nonsense.

My early life was a bit of a mess but it was no one's fault. It was just how it was.

If I had a nickel for every time I said 'Why me?' I'd have probably said 'Why me?' more often.

From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent.

One of my friends, picture of health, worked out his whole life, never had a weight problem. Calls me up one day and says, 'I have pancreatic cancer.' Gone. I've lost too many friends.

Ever since my colorectal cancer in 1999, I have been followed by the N.I.H. That was very lucky for me because they detected my pancreatic cancer at a very early stage.

Sometimes, it's just your turn to go through hard times.

Life is mortal. There are all these rewards and consequences. Sometimes you embrace them, and sometimes they knock you over.

Every once in awhile, we all get a bad hand dealt to us.

I spoke to a girl today who had cancer and we were talking about how this is such a hard thing for her, but it taught her a big lesson on who her friends are and so much about life. She's 18. And I was like, that's how I feel.

There is no fair in life and death. If it were, no good men would die young.

All stories, if continued far enough, end in death.

Every shot has its commission, d'ye see? We must all die at one time, as the saying is.

Luck, you see, brings bitter friends.

Men believe death's elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny.

The tall, the wise, the reverend head Must lie as low as ours.

Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all.

I guess the kid had everything but the luck.

If something's going to happen for you, it will, you can't make it happen. And it never does happen until you're past the point where you care whether it happens or not. I guess it's for our own good that it always happens that way, because after you stop wanting things is when having them won't make you go crazy.

Everyone is going to die. Aren't you interested in what's going to happen?

But I tell you - and mark my words - you will come some day to a craggy pass in the channel, where the whole of life's stream will be broken up into whirl and tumult, foam and noise: either you will be dashed to atoms on crag points, or lifted up and borne on by some master-wave into a calmer current.

Our lives are but our marches to the grave.