A. E. Housman Quotes

No young man ever thinks he shall die.

You walk around feeling like a teenager and immortal your whole life, and suddenly there isn't much time left.

I don't talk about my personal life, and I don't talk about death.

It is inevitable that those to whom is vouchsafed a long life of usefulness should outlive the friends of their youth.

I realise how precious life is, probably because I've seen how it can be taken away.

I'm a young correspondent, so sometimes I'm just young. Sometimes I'm just straightforward.

It is better for aged diplomats to be bored than for young men to die.

Even when you're 22 and you feel immortal, you know in your heart you're not.

You have to accept the fact that as long as you are alive, you have something to lose. Living is dangerous.

The great risk of being alive is always that something can happen to you - or to someone you dearly love - at any moment.

At the end of the day, when you're young you think you're invincible.

I've seen people pass away. I've seen how fragile life is.

When one is young, one can become distracted and overconfident.

Anyone can stop a man's life, but no one his death; a thousand doors open on to it.

My problems aren't big but it doesn't necessarily take a big problem to kill me.

The Young Soldier It is not death Without hereafter To one in dearth Of life and its laughter, Nor the sweet murder Dealt slow and even Unto the martyr Smiling at heaven: It is the smile Faint as a (waning) myth, Faint, and exceeding small On a boy's murdered mouth.

When you're 21 you think, "Old people sound like this. Old people think like this." I don't think my ideas about aging and about eternal life changed that much, but it became more poignant to me as I did get older and I could better imagine, as you sort of inch closer to death every day, why legacy, more than aging, becomes important to people.

I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered –about her teeth for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things she had lost, *but whose inner glow has faded*. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.

We'd stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You'd think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn't.

In the end, life makes victims of us all.

Now that lilacs are in bloom She has a bowl of lilacs in her room And twists one in her fingers while she talks. "Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know What life is, you who hold it in your hands"; (slowly twisting the lilac stalks) "You let it flow from you, you let it flow, And youth is cruel, and has no remorse And smiles at situations which it cannot see." I smile, of course, And go on drinking tea.

A simple child. That lightly draws its breath. And feels its life in every limb. What should it know of death?

Every time someone in your life dies, you realize you're not invincible and you have to wonder if we're celebrating life or if we're mourning a death.

How many more times do we have to come to terms with death before we find safety?