Jonathan Franzen Quotes

Life is change, to cease to change is to cease to live; yet if you may shed a tear beside the death-bed of an old friend, let not your heart be silent on the dissolving of a faith.

Death is an absolute marvel.

I don't think of death in a romantic way anymore.

People come. They go. Dying is the same as rehab or moving back to Missouri. It just means I won't be seeing them again.

Death is present every day in our lives. It's not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life.

While I understand that all things must come to an end, whether it's a television advertisement or one's life or the world itself, it doesn't make it any easier to deal with.

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

All things are only transitory.

Life is sad. People, you know, are going to pass, and you know that you will one day.

Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

Every so often, we all gaze into the abyss. It's a depressing fact of life that eventually the clock expires; eventually the sand in the hourglass runs out. It's the leaving behind of everything that matters to us that hurts the most.

Death is an art, you know.

Everything born has to die, in order to make room for the future.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

I began writing 'The Cold Song' in the months following my father's death, when I felt this sense of loss, disappearance, of being right in the middle of life and wondering: 'What now? How to proceed?'

I don't believe in happy endings, but I do believe in happy travels, because ultimately, you die at a very young age, or you live long enough to watch your friends die. It's a mean thing, life.

The past is buried and I mourn it with greater pain than many among you, because no human power can awaken it when the Crown itself has scattered ashes upon the coffin.

I'm hyper-focused on loss. But I know it's just the impermanence of being here.

So we're in this process of letting go of our own attachments to our physical forms and to the people we love, and... basically everything. Life is like this one big process of letting go.

Every great thing has to come to an end at some point. It's the way that it goes.

It's tough when you're an artist because you get to go around the world and make a lot of friends, but guess what? One day, all these people that you love are going to die, from DJ Mehdi to DJ Dusk to J Dilla to Austin Peralta to DJ Rashad.

Love is transient even on a very personal level. We lose everyone that we love. Sometimes we drift apart and sometimes we die.

Death is as casual and often as unexpected as birth. It is as difficult to define grief as joy. Each is finite. Each will fade.

One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not everybody is goin to get older with you.