Robert Fulghum Quotes

All people know that they will die, but they don't actually believe it.

You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.

I live in a fantasy world where I think I'm immune to all disease. I don't get sick and haven't had anything major go wrong.

It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it.

What does he say?' he asked. 'He’s very sad,’ Úrsula answered, ‘because he thinks that you’re going to die.' 'Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.

Everybody dies. There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God. (Although there’s no question a belief in God would come in handy. It would be great to think there’s a plan, and that everything happens for a reason. I don’t happen to believe that. And every time one of my friends says to me, “Everything happens for a reason,” I would like to smack her.)

We have long had death and taxes as the two standards of inevitability. But there are those who believe that death is the preferable of the two.

Everyone knows they're going to die, but nobody believes it.

We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing in them becomes too high.

Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.

He was dead. He just didn't know it yet.

We find ourselves in that situation where we want to believe, we want to think we're the exception, we want to think we can change someone or tame a lion or make a bad guy good or something like that but 9 times out of 10 we end up looking back going, "Oh, shame on me, should've seen that one coming!"

No, it's not fair, but what makes Earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven. Earth is earth. Dead is dead. You'll find out for yourself soon enough. It won't help the situation for you to get all upset.

I still don’t believe it. It’s not in him. Yeah, and you are delusional. Babe, news flash, with the exception of you and the pirate, we’re all animals here. And we all have a killer’s instinct.

They like to tell us that it is important to speak the truth, but it has been my experience that real happiness lies in having people tell you what you want to believe, usually not the same thing at all, and if you have to stub your toe on the truth later, so be it.

For me, the dead remain dead. If I couldn't believe that, I don't think I could go on living.

Men believe death's elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny.

But don't you see, all human decisions are made like this. Do you think the mother knows what will happen to the child in her womb? Dear God, we are lost, I tell you. What does it matter if you give it to me and it's wrong! There is no wrong! There is only desperation, and I would have it! I want to live forever with you.

Think not disdainfully of death, but look on it with favor; for even death is one of the things that Nature wills.

You should never wish for wishful thinking.

At best you can hold death at bay, you can pretend it isn't there; but to deny it totally is a sickness. And I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems, and, perversely perhaps, to enjoy a vicarious confrontation with them.

Those who live by the wall must die by the wall.

Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That's one reason old men can send them to war.

Probability is the guide of life, and of death, too.

Is death such a high price to pay, when you will die anyway?