P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

Life and death. At some point we're gonna leave this world. Do I know when? Absolutely not.

Life and death. They are somehow sweetly and beautifully mixed, but I don't know how.

Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority.

What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.

Life and death matters, yes. And the question of how to behave in this world, how to go in the face of everything. Time is short and the water is rising.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow.

I think you are born, and I think you die. I have a pragmatic nature, but I yearn to believe.

Death is an absolute mystery. We are all vulnerable to it, it's what makes life interesting and suspenseful.

We all live in this little bubble that we just expect to live forever and I think those of us that have been with people battling cancer, you realise, actually, this surrounds us everywhere we go.

I don't think we're any more preoccupied by life and death or heaven and hell than anyone else, but it's fun to write about the inevitable - you're alive, and you're going to die.

What we put into every moment is all we have. You can drug yourself to death or you can smoke yourself to death or eat yourself to death, or you can do everything right and be healthy and then get hit by a car. Life is so great, such a neat thing, and yet all during it we have to face death, which can make you nuts and depressed.

Books are not life, only its ashes.

Every man that ever lived craved perfect happiness, the detective poignantly reflected. But how can we have it when we know we’re going to die? Each joy was clouded by the knowledge it would end. And so nature had implanted in us a desire for something unattainable? No. It couldn’t be. It makes no sense. Every other striving implanted by nature had a corresponding object that wasn’t a phantom. Why this exception? the detective reasoned. It was nature making hunger when there wasn’t any food. We continue. We go on. Thus death proved life.

The only certainty is death.

Death is funny, when you think about it. Everybody does it, but nobody knows how, exactly how.

We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

All men die. You may say: 'Is that encouraging?' Surely yes, for when a man dies, his blunders, which are of the form, all die with him, but the things in him that are part of the life never die, although the form be broken.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition. Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them.

Even when you're making a movie about life, death is a presence, and I guess it's part of my dramatic viewpoint. I'm not sure why exactly.

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

No one is so old that he cannot live yet another year, nor so young that he cannot die today.