Edna Ferber Quotes

Don't lie - when you are 105 years of age - on your deathbed, thinking, 'I should have done a few things!' I would like to think I tried as much as I could.

Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.

What helps with aging is serious cognition - thinking and understanding. You have to truly grasp that everybody ages. Everybody dies. There is no turning back the clock. So the question in life becomes: What are you going to do while you're here?

Life is much shorter than I imagined it to be.

What I try to get physically healthy people to understand is that they're going to die someday. There is no way out. And dying isn't failure, but not living is, so make use of your time. Don't keeping waiting.

Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

I think mortality makes you live a fuller existence. When I was a kid I was scared of death, and maybe that's what made me desperate to get the most out of life.

Death is inevitable, but Life - that's the tricky bit where things happen.

I think most of us who live into our 50s have had a few experiences with death. You know, we see people we know start to die. We realize it's getting closer and closer for us.

Who cares about great marks left behind? We have one life... just one. Our life. We have nothing else.

Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.

I think about death all the time. I think that's a good thing because we're all going to die, and the only thing we can control is how we are and what we're doing in the meantime.

Life is short and the older you get, the more you feel it. Indeed, the shorter it is. People lose their capacity to walk, run, travel, think, and experience life. I realise how important it is to use the time I have.

The conscience of the dying belies their life.

You live till you die, and that's the end of it. What good is your legacy when you are dead? I worry about being alive, selling work, having fun, moving and doing things when I am alive.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

There's a finite amount of time on this planet for each of us. Sometimes, the only way we figure out how to deal with that reality - knowing that there will be an end to every story, and you don't know how many chapters are left in your book - is by living in denial.

Above all, learn to live when you're dying.

None of us can be sure of how long we will live. Because this is so, I think you should try not to think too much about dying but think about all the nice things that make life so precious to us all.

When you talk to people who are old, some wish they had enjoyed themselves more, but not many wish they had wasted more time.

Ultimately, I think, as humans, we all care deeply about our life's legacy, and contemplating our own mortality is the only real way to approach that question of legacy honestly.

Many a life has been injured by the constant expectation of death. It is life we have to do with, not death. The best preparation for the night is to work diligently while the day lasts. The best preparation for death is life.

One day all of us will die but - and this is the important thing - we are not dead yet.

It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and - even more surprising - it takes the whole of life to learn how to die.

We should live and learn; but by the time we've learned, it's too late to live.