Boris Vian Quotes

Mean and mighty, rotting Together, have one dust.

I was realizing, for the first time, that everything goes on, turns gray, is ruined in the living. That there is no end to our story until death comes and the body decays.

The course of Nature seems a course of Death, And nothingness the whole substantial thing.

We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve.

I'm here. Soon I won't be. Zoey's baby is here. Its pulse tick-ticking. Soon it won't be. And when Zoey comes out of that room, having signed on the dotted line, she'll be different. She'll understand what I already know- that death surrounds us all. And it tastes like metal between you teeth.

I hate to say this, but I'll repeat it: After death, all we know that you do is stink.

The amazing miracle of death, when one second you're walking and talking, and the next second you're an object.

That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.

We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying and our strength leaves us, and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.

No one gets out of here alive.

Let this be my final lesson. Everyone and everything has a time to die.

But ah! what once has been shall be no more! The groaning earth in travail and in pain Brings forth its races, but does not restore, And the dead nations never rise again.

The end of all is death and man's life passeth away suddenly as a shadow.

If there were a sympathy in choice, War, death, or sickness, did lay siege to it, Making it momentary as a sound, Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, Brief as the lightning in the collied night That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!' The jaws of darkness do devour it up; So quick bright things come to confusion.

For some reason focusing on destruction and mortality is more poetically exciting to me than hope and love.

Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.

Whatever is truly alive must die. Look at the flowers; only plastic flowers never die.

The colors of living things begin to fade with the last breath, and the soft, springy skin and supple muscle rot within weeks. But the bones sometimes remain, faithful echoes of the shape, to bear some last faint witness to the glory of what was.

Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.

Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse.

How many together with whom I came into the world are already gone out of it.

We are dust and to dust return. In the end we're neither air, nor fire, nor water, just dirt, neither more nor less, just dirt, and maybe some yellow flowers.

Blessed be Death, that cuts in marble What would have sunk to dust!

Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie, Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and-sans End!