Tony Judt Quotes

In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.

I don't want to hear about my death.

I envy the dead.

Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.

I don't want to die.

Not a day has gone by in my life when I haven't thought about death.

Something happened to me at the precise moment that my grandmother died. She was three time zones away, but that didn't matter. I believe that I felt something at that moment she passed... some bit of her mortality slipping away.

But you, Achilles,/ There is not a man in the world more blest than you--/ There never has been, never will be one./ Time was, when you were alive, we Argives/ honored you as a god, and now down here, I see/ You Lord it over the dead in all your power./ So grieve no more at dying, great Achilles.’ I reassured the ghost, but he broke out protesting,/ ‘No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!/ By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man--/ Some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—than rule down here over all the breathless dead.

For though Death be a dark passage, it leads to immortality, and that is recompence enough for suffering of it.

Death is an awful thing. I don't believe in it myself.

Ten out of ten people die. You start thinking about that and it really makes you start to ask the big questions: Where did I come from? Where am I going when I die? What happens when we step out of here? What's out there?

'Six Feet Under' was so much about life. Sure, it had a lot to do with death, but that's the fun - that now I became a dead person.

I've always been slightly preoccupied with death or whatever those kind of silly big questions people will tell you to not spend your time worrying about.

Everybody loves you when you're six foot in the ground.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

I don't believe in the afterlife, so I do think when somebody passes, it's worthy of note.

Your lost friends are not dead, but gone before, advanced a stage or two upon that road which you must travel in the steps they trod.

To die, to be really dead, that must be glorious. There are far worse things awaiting man than death.

Americans in the Civil War period were very interested in Heaven and what it might be like, because they were having to face the fact that many of their loved ones were gone and many of their loved ones, they hoped, were in this other realm called Heaven.

I just don't get death at all. Yes, it's there. But I don't get it.

I do fear death. But what I actually fear is not dying. I mean, true, it will be sad. But I know that there is a better place waiting for me.

We see death constantly on film.

I will burn, but this is a mere event. We shall continue our discussion in eternity.

As a child, I didn't know what they mean by 'to die.' So I grew up in a place where people used to die all the time, but a child is not allowed to see a dead body. When you ask, 'Where is so-and so?' you're told, 'He's gone to another world where we all go to live in the future.'

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.