Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes

People don't live or die, people just float.

Oh my God, if I know anything, I know I'm gonna die! I never forget that. I know I'll be forgotten in a minute, and that's just fine with me.

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.

Tomorrow I too – this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be someone who no longer walks these streets, someone others will evoke with a vague: 'I wonder what's become of him?” And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other.

Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation

Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.

Death is nothing, nor life either, for that matter. To die, to sleep, to pass into nothingness, what does it matter? Everything is an illusion.

Can you imagine 4,000 years passing, and you're not even a memory? Think about it, friends. It's not just a possibility. It is a certainty.

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.

We're all making castles in the sand, wonderful tapestries, an exquisite corpse. But is it meaningful? No. It's dogs barking. It doesn't mean anything beyond our yelping, at the pain of being alive.

Who could look on these monuments without reflecting on the vanity of mortals in thus offering up testimonials of their respect for persons of whose very names posterity is ignorant?

As Beckett said, it's not enough to die, one has to be forgotten as well.

We are all racing towards death. No matter how many great, intellectual conclusions we draw during our lives, we know they're all only man-made, like God. I begin to wonder where it all leads. What can you do, except do what you can do as best you know how.

Life is wasted on the living.

For me, life and death are very important themes. There is no life without death. That's why it's very important to me.

I think from my experience in war and life and science, it all has made me believe that we have one life on this planet.

I figure I basically am a ghost. I think we all are.

I am really curious about life, about why we are all here. I notice my skin is ageing, things are changing, I've seen people dying, so that's the train we are all on.

We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.

The flesh, alas, is sad, and I have read all the books.

Such is life and life is such and after all it isn't much. First a cradle. Then a hearse. It might have been better, but it could have been worse.

But each day brings its petty dust Our soon-chok'd souls to fill, And we forget because we must, And not because we will.