Anton Chekhov Quotes

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

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

Time erases both the best and the worst of us.

In the end, the end of a life only matters to friends, family, and other folks you used to know. For everyone else, it's just another end.

How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten.

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.

We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.

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.

Time stays, we go.

Fifty years from now I'll be just three inches of type in a record book.

The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.

A lot of people think they should be happy all the time. But the writer understands you need both. You need the whole piano: the richness of the whole human experience. Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.

If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.

When Time is spent, Eternity begins.

We forget our pleasures, we remember our sufferings.

The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.

The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you.

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.

The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.

Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

Writers and believers live their lives haunted by the same question: What happens to our days once they disappear? The objective fact is that each day that passes is lost forever, as forbidden to us as the dead. But prayer and fiction offer a different answer. Those lost days still live among us, written in each person's hand, turned into stories.

So much of what we do is ephemeral and quickly forgotten, even by ourselves, so it's gratifying to have something you have done linger in people's memories.

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.