Conrad Aiken Quotes

We are all born and someday we'll all die. Most likely to some degree alone. Our aloneness in this world is, maybe not anymore, a thing to mourn.

We enter the world alone, we leave the world alone.

Death is an absolute mystery. We are all vulnerable to it, it's what makes life interesting and suspenseful.

And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.

When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.

Death is an absolute marvel.

We all know that we're going to die, but we don't know when. That's not a blessing, that's a curse.

Life and death. They are somehow sweetly and beautifully mixed, but I don't know how.

Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

Time's fatal wings do ever forward fly; to every day we live, a day we die.

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

Birth and death; we all move between these two unknowns.

Life is apogee, apex, decline; life is death - and everything else is open to discussion.

Our birth is nothing but our death begun, As tapers waste the moment they take fire.

It ends all things: birds, trees, flowers, mountain tops, and business; it grinds stones to sand, and as terrible as it is, and it's the most beautiful thing we have in our lives - time.

We pop into existence and we know that we die and we know that we lose everyone that we love and we know we even lose our own bodies. And what a paradigm. What a mystery.

A little while with grief and laughter, And then the day will close; The shadows gather ... what comes after No man knows.

This was the life I was going to be living, everybody separated from everybody else, hanging on for a moment only to be washed away.

All human beings are like travelers floating down the eternal river of time, embarking at a certain point and disembarking again at another point in order to make room for others waiting below the river to come aboard.

Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.

We may be together for another six months—a year—there’s no knowing. At the end we’re certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we shall be?

There is nothing certain in a man's life but that he must lose it.

It was difficult when I was very young because I was so separated from my family. When I was at school or acting in a play, I felt very much part of something, and then it would always change, and I would be by myself.

Believe me, if a man doesn't know death, he doesn't know life.