Ruth Rendell Quotes

I don't give a toss about being remembered after my death.

One-hundred years from now, nobody's going to remember that I played for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays - nobody!

Age makes all things greater after their death; a name comes to the tongue easier from the grave.

No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.

I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy.

Oh, you know, your legacy's all you're gonna be remembered by.

It doesn't worry me how I'm remembered.

What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.

I don't expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever. - Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after death

It is strange how the memory of a man may float to posterity on what he would have himself regarded as the most trifling of his works.

To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

I suppose that every one of us hopes secretly for immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live forever in this world, whatever he may be doing, himself, in the next.

I certainly hope 'Dragon' can leave some legacy behind.

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.

Authors want their names down in history; I want to keep the smoke coming out of the chimney.

The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you.

Total oblivion is the fate of almost everything in this world. I'm very likely to suffer that same fate; my work will probably not be remembered, and if any of it is, if any of those novels is fated to be one of those novels that is still being read 50 or 100 years after it was written, I've probably already written it.

Of all the delusions that existed, Posthumous Fame was the greatest.

People will forget me pretty quick.

I've had a wonderful life. What people are going to write about me 10 years after I'm dead - who cares?

I think all creative people are operating from the fear that, of the best of what they did, will anybody remember it? Will anybody tell stories about them? Will anybody keep those pictures on the mantle long after they are gone? It's why people write stories. It's peoples' grave markers.

I am not concerned about my posthumous fame. Monuments are no good to the dead.

How many other people get a chance to be remembered forever? And that's what I really want. I want to be remembered forever.

We all go to our grave thinking that we will never be forgotten, and we are forgotten ten minutes later.