Ryan North Quotes

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

I don't care much whether people remember me or not. If people remember, well and good. If they don't remember, it's alright - I'm dead anyway.

I could still be forgotten when I'm dead. I don't really care what happens when I'm dead.

When I'm dead are they going to remember me ? I don't really think about it, it's up to them. When I'm dead, who cares ? I don't.

Forget us, forget us all, it makes no difference now, but don't forget we loved it when we were alive.

Soon I will honor my parents by dying as they died. and if all they believed about death was true, soon I will join them in whatever comes next.

I have heard people say that they felt closer to their parents after they have died. Maybe if I treat people as if they were dead, I could get along with them better

He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.

Fiorito has all the right stuff. His splendid memoir about his relationship with his dying father belongs on that small shelf with Philip Roth's Patrimony and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.

It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.

We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents.

So long as one person remembers you, you'll never really be dead.

I realized people would soon forget me once I was dead. I couldn't even say that this was hard to stomach; really, there's no idea to which one doesn't get acclimatized in time.

My dad passed away...and suddenly I found myself at the top of the tree and looking at the sky instead of at my mom and dad.

[I'll be the first one of the Smith to die.] I'll be shot - probably by one of the ex-Smiths.

You have family", Bob said. "You have a wife who hates you. Kids who are furious with you. A brother and sister who make you insane. And a nephew who used to be kind of a drip but apparently is not so much of a drip now. That's called family".

How many after being celebrated by fame have been given up to oblivion; and how many who have celebrated the fame of others have long been dead.

Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.

The family endures because it offers the truth of mortality and immortality within the same group. The family endures because, better than the commune, kibbutz, or classroom, it seems to individualize and socialize its children, to make us feel at the same time unique and yet joined to all humanity, accepted as is and yet challenged to grow, loved unconditionally and yet propelled by greater expectations. Only in the family can so many extremes be reconciled and synthesized. Only in the family do we have a lifetime in which to do it.

How would you feel about life if Death was your older sister?

When an elder turns to face the dead, that means he turns away from facing the future and his own retirement in Phoenix, let's say. He turns and finds himself facing the children.

I like to think that people live on in other people's memories.

Jump to the day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won't know we ever happened.

Children and old people and the parents in between should be able to live together, in order to learn how to die with grace, together. And I fear that this is purely utopian fantasy.

Old men must die, or the world would grow mouldy, would only breed the past again.