Peter De Vries Quotes

There came to him an image of man’s whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all man’s life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man’s grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance on his lips, and that the shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing of his heart into the maw of all-engulfing night.

It was almost funny. Life seemed downright accidental in its brevity, and death a punch line to a lousy joke.

Little fly, thy summer's play My thoughtless hand has brushed away. Am not I a fly like thee? Or art not thou a man like me? For I dance and drink and sing, Till some blind hand shall brush my wing!

Life is a vapor. It passes in the blink of an eye.

Oh, we are but soft and squishy bags of mortality rolling in a bin of sharp circumstance, leaking life until we collapse, flaccid, into our own despair.

Man is a torch borne in the wind; a dream But of a shadow, summed with all his substance.

Human stories are practically always about one thing, really, aren't they? Death. The inevitability of death. . . . . . (quoting an obituary) 'There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that ever happens to man is natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident, and even if he knows it he would sense to it an unjustifiable violation.' Well, you may agree with the words or not, but those are the key spring of The Lord Of The Rings

What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!

All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.

Brief is this existence, as a visit in a strange house. The path to be pursued is poorly lit by a flickering consciousness.

I was dying. Like all the other people who live in this world.

Is it not better to intimate our astonishment as we pass through this world if it be only for a moment ere we are swallowed up in the yeast of the abyss? I will lift up my hands and say Kosmos.

All who are born are always dying.

The Person is a bubble on Time's sea.

What is man but a little soul holding up a corpse?

God help us! it is a foolish little thing, this human life, at the best; and it is half ridiculous and half pitiful to see what importance we ascribe to it, and to its little ornaments and distinctions.

The plain truth is we are going to die. Here I am, a teeny spec surrounded by boundless space and time, arguing with the whole of creation, shaking my fist, sputtering, growing even eloquent at times, and then-poof! I am gone. Swept off once and for all. I think that is very, very funny.

To think that so much comes to so little, to think that life is really short.

Everything passes away-suffering,pain, blood, hunger,pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the Earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes toward the stars? Why?

Our life is woven wind.

He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience.

Man's wretched state, That floures so fresh at morne, and fades at evening late.

And a man's life's no more than to say "One."

We are fastened to a dying animal.