Robert Graves Quotes

Destroying is a necessary function in life. Everything has its season, and all things eventually lose their effectiveness and die.

This is the spot where I will lie When life has had enough of me, These are the grasses that will blow Above me like a living sea. These gay old lilies will not shrink To draw their life from death of mine, And I will give my body's fire To make blue flowers on this vine. "O Soul," I said, "have you no tears? Was not the body dear to you?" I heard my soul say carelessly, "The myrtle flowers will grow more blue.

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?

There is nothing in nature that can't be taken as a sign of both mortality and invigoration.

Life and death. They are somehow sweetly and beautifully mixed, but I don't know how.

Death borders upon our birth, and our cradle stands in the grave.

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.

Anyone can stop a man's life, but no one his death; a thousand doors open on to it.

Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay.

Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses, kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.

Without death and decay, how could life go on?

Fall leaves are brilliant with gold and red. You can cup them in your hand and wonder at them, be amazed at their uniqueness and glory. But eventually they are gone, brown, crumbling, scattered on the wind. But the tree remains. The tree is what is important. The tree lives on. That was a difficult knowledge to bear, and an even more difficult life to live. Of course, being the leaf wasn't exactly desirable either.

Every man that ever lived craved perfect happiness, the detective poignantly reflected. But how can we have it when we know we’re going to die? Each joy was clouded by the knowledge it would end. And so nature had implanted in us a desire for something unattainable? No. It couldn’t be. It makes no sense. Every other striving implanted by nature had a corresponding object that wasn’t a phantom. Why this exception? the detective reasoned. It was nature making hunger when there wasn’t any food. We continue. We go on. Thus death proved life.

He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later.

You may be reborn a thousand times, but you can never know the real, for only that which dies, that which comes to an end, can renew itself.

Life is a terminal condition. Were all going to die. Cancer patients just have more information, but we all, in some ways, wait for permission to live.

Death is feared as birth is forgotten.

If you haven't understood that if you are born you die, you scarcely deserve to be able to be alive.

Death showed up in my life very early on, so I'm aware of it. If you look at most of the things I write there's a sort of contemplation of mortality - although 'True Blood' doesn't fall into that. Even though there's such a ridiculously high body count!

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.