John Berryman Quotes

At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.

thus with a kiss I die

It has ever been since time began, and ever will be, till time lose breath, that love is a mood - no more - to man, and love to a woman is life or death.

We were all fated to die, and so it is good that at least we can be sure our deaths today might bring about a good end, might make the world a better place.

I don't know if I was put on this Earth for a purpose or not. But I'm fairly confident that I'll be taken off of it for one.

It is in the middle that human choices are made; the beginning and the end remain with God. The decrees of God are birth and death, and in between those limits man makes his own distress or joy.

Loving and perishing: it's been a rhyme all these eternities. The will to love: that is, also being willing to die.

I have a rendezvous with life.

I was thinking about how fleeting and precious life is. Life is also arbitrary. For example, the choices that you make, the luck of being born into the right bed, to parents who support and help you and who love you. That doesn't always happen - and then, what happens when it doesn't?

All rivers, even the most dazzling, those that catch the sun in their course, all rivers go down to the ocean and drown. And life awaits man as the sea awaits the river.

Why should I ask the wise men: Whence is my beginning? I am busy with the thought: Where will be my end?

The line between life or death is determined by what we are willing to do.

A common soldier will make an empire, but he will eventually meet his fate and be condemned to the Great Rock.

I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

I have a wife, I have sons: all of them hostages given to fate.

Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.

Love is such a powerful subject matter because it comes in so many different shapes and sizes. It's about timing, fate, failure, redemption.

The same characters that keep reappearing, bigger than life, find their own integrity in doing what they do the way they do it, even if it causes their own deaths.

When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.

All the great Shakespeare plays are about killing. 'Alas, poor Yorick,' that's about death. And in 'Romeo and Juliet' everyone up ends up dying. The greatest dramas in the world are all about sex, violence and death.

You’ll be free or you will die.

If I died on the battlefield, then that was the way it was supposed to be.

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.