Brian Aldiss Quotes

I love things on the decline because that's really the natural progression of our lives. We're born, we're feisty for the first couple of years, and then the inevitable decline begins.

Old men, what are they? Fast fading the leaf, Three-footed they walk, yet frail as a child, As a dream set afloat in the daylight.

Life is precious. Not because it is unchangeable, like a diamond, but because it is vulnerable, like a little bird. To love life means to love its vulnerability, asking for care, attention, guidance, and support. Life and death are connected by vulnerability. The newborn child and the dying elder both remind us of the preciousness of our lives. Let's not forget the preciousness and vulnerability of life during the times we are powerful, successful, and popular.

I used to believe I was going to live forever. And then you suddenly become aware that you're not.

Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.

Everything that's realistic has some sort of ugliness in it. Even a flower is ugly when it wilts, a bird when it seeks its prey, the ocean when it becomes violent.

Death is a distant rumor to the young.

I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability - the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.

I don't feel invincible because I'm human.

What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?

At my age flowers scare me.

A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.

I don't think of myself as being invincible anymore.

I don't think I'm invincible.

I don't take things for granted, because everything feels more fragile. It's made me wonder about mortality and how long you've got somebody in the world. I'm more fearful than I used to be.

I realise how precious life is, probably because I've seen how it can be taken away.

This is part of the involuntary bargain we make with the world just by being alive. We get to experiences the splendor of nature, the beauty of art, the balm of love and the sheer joy of existence, always with the knowledge that illness, injury, natural disaster, or pure evil can end it in an instant for ourselves or someone we love.

I now know that things I always thought I could depend on can crash in an instant. Because of the love that I have been shown, I now know what it means to be 'beloved.' I now know that no breath is to be taken for granted.

Even when you're 22 and you feel immortal, you know in your heart you're not.

You realize as you get older that tomorrow is not guaranteed for anybody.

Some people might think they're invincible, but I don't.

The great risk of being alive is always that something can happen to you - or to someone you dearly love - at any moment.

Everything is fleeting and passing and impermanent in life. Relationships, people, our finite physical forms... We let go of our childhoods, we let go of different parts of our body, we lose elasticity in our skin, and we lose hair and we lose teeth.

When you're younger you feel more invincible - that nothing is ever going to get you down or beat you. When you get a bit older, you realise the fragility of things, how easy it is to get caught out by things - and Ant did.

I've said many times that there only two things to write about: love and death. And when you have children, you remember that the world is full of sharp corners and dangerous things, and suddenly you have these small, soft creatures, which you love in almost painful way.