Nick Hornby Quotes

People can be so neglectful of each other and of their own heritage - then death intrudes. Conversations we wish that we'd had earlier are had too late.

The biggest fear I have is to die with regrets, and of course that will come true.

Death leaves cans of shaving cream half-used.

The point is, as death gets closer - what's so wrong with wanting someone you love to live forever?

I don't want to die, obviously, but really, the wonder of life is amplified by the fact that it ends.

We die, and we do not die.

He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.

That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.

I believe that everybody, whether you believe in the afterlife or the chance of a near-death experience and you come back and you see someone [on the other side] - whether that has happened or not, I don't know, but certainly everyone has thought about it at some point or another in time. It's a fantasy that if there is anything out there like that, it would be just terrific, but that remains to be seen.

Where all life dies death lives.

Death is terrifying, but it would be even more terrifying to find out that you are going to live forever and never die.

Death is the only monastery; the tomb is the only cell, and the grave that adjoins the convent is the bitterest mock of its futility.

every death diminishes us, but those that leave differences unresolved and things unsaid are the most painful of all.

In the end, we'll all become stories.

The body is not important. It is made of dust; it is made of ashes. It is food for the worms. The winds and the waters dissolve it and scatter it to the four corners of the earth. In the end, what we care most for only lasts a brief lifetime, and then there is eternity. Time forever. Millions of worlds are born, evolve, and pass away into nebulous, unmeasured skies; and there is still eternity. Time always. The body becomes dust and trees and exploding fire, it becomes gaseous and disappears, and still there is eternity. Silent, unopposed, brooding, forever.

The whole motley confusion of acts, omissions, regrets and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end.

Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.

There is nothing strictly immortal, but immortality. Whatever hath no beginning may be confident of no end.

Death will destroy my body, but my creatures will keep on living ever after, in the years to come.

I'm being made aware of my mortality all the time.

Why shed tears that you must die? For if your past life has been one of enjoyment, and if all your pleasures have not passed through your mind, as through a sieve, and vanished, leaving not a rack behind, why then do you not, like a thankful guest, rise cheerfully from life's feast, and with a quiet mind go take your rest.

Death, which hateth and destroyeth a man, is believed; God, which hath made him and loves him, is always deferred.

How some dare scorn (as if a fabulous lie) that they should rise whom death to dust doth bind -- and like to beasts, a beastly life they lead, who naught attend save death when they are dead.

Take Courage, Mortal; Death can't banish thee out of the Universe.