William T. Vollmann Quotes

One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breath, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives - transitoriness and oblivion.

Time has a doomsday book, upon whose pages he is continually recording illustrious names. But as often as a new name is written there, an old one disappears. Only a few stand in illuminated characters never to be effaced.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

I don't care much whether people remember me or not. If people remember, well and good. If they don't remember, it's alright - I'm dead anyway.

To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.

Oh, I'll be forgotten too, don't worry.

Oblivion is the rule and fame the exception, of humanity.

I don't give a toss about being remembered after my death.

Just to be remembered is good enough for me. Lots of people are forgotten.

When I die, and people realize that I will not be resurrected in three days, they will forget me. That is the way it should be.

Total oblivion is the fate of almost everything in this world. I'm very likely to suffer that same fate; my work will probably not be remembered, and if any of it is, if any of those novels is fated to be one of those novels that is still being read 50 or 100 years after it was written, I've probably already written it.

Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.

I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy.

It doesn't matter how popular an actor you are: nobody will remember you forever.

One-hundred years from now, nobody's going to remember that I played for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays - nobody!

We all go to our grave thinking that we will never be forgotten, and we are forgotten ten minutes later.

Who gives a damn about being remembered? That's really for amateurs.

The deep waters of time will flow over us: only a few men of genius will lift a head above the surface, and though doomed eventually to pass into the same silence, will fight against oblivion and for a long time hold their own.

When I'm dead are they going to remember me ? I don't really think about it, it's up to them. When I'm dead, who cares ? I don't.

How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.

One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, "I will always be here."

There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.

What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.

Time erases both the best and the worst of us.