Lee Child Quotes

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.

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

You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.

We all die at the end, but does that nullify everything? Would most people rather say, "I wish I hadn't been born?" Once you're born you'll have to die, now is that funny or sad?

The meaning of life is that it stops.

I finally did not understand if we are living to survive or we are living to die!

What is our life but a succession of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death?

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

Death threatens our speech with futility because death is not just a biological event - it is a reality we fear may rob our living of any significance.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

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.

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

I don’t know. We’ll all be dead.

Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave.

If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.

In previous generations, there was purpose; you had to die, but there was God, and literature and culture would go on. Now, there is no God, and our species is imminently doomed, so there is no purpose. We get up, raise families, have bank accounts, fix our teeth and everything else. But really, there is utterly no purpose except to be alive.

It even feels absurd to be writing or singing a song at all - in the context of actual death, being alive feels absurd.

What's the point of our life? Everything seems absurd until we die, and then it makes sense.

We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we’re all going to die, without really finding out the big answers. We develop all those long-winded ideas which just interpret the reality of our lives in different ways, without really extending our body of worthwhile knowledge, about the big things, the real things. Basically, we live a short disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up our lives with shite, things like careers and relationships to delude ourselves that it isn’t all totally pointless.

Life is short, and therefore, one thing being certain, death, let us take up a great ideal, and give up the whole life to it. For what is the value of life, this vegetating little low life of man? Subordinating it to one high ideal is the only value that life has.

One day we'll all be dead, and none of this will matter" -The Brightest Star in the Sky.

...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

I started thinking about how life is a lot like getting pushed out of a plane. You didn't ask to be here, none of us did. But we're all careening through space towards an eventual end that no one's gonna be able to put off. That's the only thing that's definite, this impact. So I started to think about how a lot of us fall at an incredible velocity, and it's over in the blink of an eye.

life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

It was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.