Montgomery Clift Quotes

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

When one's dead, one's dead... This squirrel will become earth all in his time. And still later on, there'll grow new trees from him, with new squirrels skipping about in them. Do you think that's so very sad?

I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.

He not busy being born is busy dying.

Everything born has to die, in order to make room for the future.

I'm going to die one day. I know it's coming for me, too. I'll be a mountain, I'll be a stone on the beach. I'll be nourishment.

Death is the dropping of the flower, that the fruit may swell.

I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing.

when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.

Spring flies, and with it all the train it leads; and flowers, in fading, leave us but their seeds.

When something dies is the greatest teaching.

The death of what's dead is the birth of what's living.

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.

Life and death are illusions. We are in a constant state of transformation.

Death is not a word to fear, any more than birth is.

Is it sin, which makes the worm a chrysalis, and the chrysalis a butterfly, and the butterfly dust?

We are washed both on coming into the world and on going out of it, and we take no pleasure from the first washing nor any profit from the last.

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.

There's a harsh reality - nothing lasts forever. You have to be ready to grow, and grow fast.

I've become more comfortable as time has gone on with saying goodbye because... I've been having so many conversations about the cyclical nature of life. It just keeps going.

Man is immortal; therefore he must die endlessly. For life is a creative idea; it can only find itself in changing forms

Death is not an end. It is a new impulse.