Charles Olson Quotes

I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.

I have a rendezvous with life.

I've been running from, and toward, death all my life, more aware of it than a person should be.

What we pay for with our lives never costs too much.

We come. We go. And in between we try to understand.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

I would rather die a meaningful death than to live a meaningless life.

The conscience of the dying belies their life.

The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death.

Life, not death, is the great mystery you must confront.

We shall come to honor all of Life sooner or later. Our choices are when that shall happen, and the quality of experience that we shall have as we learn.

Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.

The life given us, by nature is short; but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.

Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it.

Quotes about Life Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream! For the soul is dead that slumbers, and things are not what they seem. Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art; to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.

life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

As from a large heap of flowers many garlands and wreaths are made, so by a mortal in this life there is much good work to be done.

When death comes, it's just like winter. We don't say, "There ought not to be winter." That the winter season, when the leaves fall and the snow comes, is some kind of defeat, something which we should hold out against. No. Winter is part of the natural course of events. No winter, no summer. No cold, no heat.

Along the road of life are many pleasure resorts, but think not that by tarrying in them you will take more days to the journey. The day of your arrival is already recorded.

We mourn the blossoms of May because they are to whither; but we know that May is one day to have its revenge upon November, by the revolution of that solemn circle which never stops - which teaches us in our height of hope, ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation, never to despair.

Over and over, we start our own tales, compose our own stories, whether our lives are short or long. Until at last all our beginnings come down to just one end, and the tale of who we are is done.

A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is.

What is our life but a succession of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death?

If it is necessary to die in order to live like men, what harm in dying?

All our lives we sweat and save, Building for a shallow grave.