Dan Chaon Quotes

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

Should I perchance still feel after my death, I would no longer have any doubt, but I would most certainly give the lie to anyone asserting before me that I was dead.

Nothing made sense to me anymore. I knew I was young, I knew I was small. But I was worried that I might already be ruined.

Tessa was convinced that it was a lie, and also that everything she had done in her life, telling herself that it was for the best, had been no more than blind selfishness, generating confusion and mess all around. But who could bear to know which stars were already dead, she thought, blinking up at the night sky; could anybody stand to know they all were?

I'm still not sure I didn't die

Dead … might not be quiet at all.

I'm sad. Pressed down by sorrow. I'm angry. Pissed at God, if there is one, and the way things are. I'm scared. Confused by the whys. Why are we here? Is there, really, some intelligent design? Why do we cry for someone who leaves us if there's some Grand Pearly Gate in the sky? Why worry about how we build our lives if the ultimate ending for all is death, a single breath away? (358)

[From a window in the Writer's Building at MGM, which overlooked a cemetery:] Hello down there. It might interest you to know that up here we are just as dead as you are.

I'm never sure why I do anything, to tell you the truth.

My joy is death- Death, at whose name I oft have been afeard, Because I wish'd this world's eternity.

I think people believe in heaven because they don't like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don't like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish.

I am always thinking 'What am I doing here? Is this the way I am supposed to feel?'

In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead.

If the spiritual universe and the way to it were shown, No one would remain in this world for a single moment.

The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better? Only God knows.

In these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know.

It's okay if you can't see what you're doing, cuz even when your eyes are open, you can't see what you're doing.

Death holds no horrors. It is simply the ultimate horror of life.

Sometimes I'm not so sure just who I am either.

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.

How do I know that loving life is not a delusion? How do I know that in hating death I am not like a man who, having left home in his youth, has forgotten the way back?

What have I done? I've blundered my way through life. So I have my picture on the wall. The minute I die, that picture will start to yellow and fade and eventually be gone. Blown in the wind and become part of the molecular structure of something else. These things we see as "success," they're non-accomplishments.

I have decided, it is fruitless. For I am no longer sure of anything concerning my existance. A philosopher is a dead poet and a dying theologian.

I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.

Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.