Toni Morrison Quotes

We are all racing towards death. No matter how many great, intellectual conclusions we draw during our lives, we know they're all only man-made, like God. I begin to wonder where it all leads. What can you do, except do what you can do as best you know how.

You don't waste your entire life waiting to go back to dust.

I would rather die a meaningful death than to live a meaningless life.

We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.

As an artist, as a person, I don't want to be here for just a little while.

life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

Everyone needs reminders that the fact of their being on this earth is important and that each life changes everything.

The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?

I think when you think of death as being part of the life cycle and recognize that death is an inevitability for our species because the world has to be renewed with each death, then the hope becomes when it is renewed it will be renewed by people on whom I have had some influence for good.

Life and death are important. Don't suffer them in vain.

For me, life and death are very important themes. There is no life without death. That's why it's very important to me.

Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.

At the end of our lives we all ask, 'Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter?'

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

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

Who knows for what we live, and struggle, and die? Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle, is beyond all human wisdom.

The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography.

I don't think we're any more preoccupied by life and death or heaven and hell than anyone else, but it's fun to write about the inevitable - you're alive, and you're going to die.

What's the point of our life? Everything seems absurd until we die, and then it makes sense.

Life is short, and therefore, one thing being certain, death, let us take up a great ideal, and give up the whole life to it. For what is the value of life, this vegetating little low life of man? Subordinating it to one high ideal is the only value that life has.

One of the very important things that have to be learned around the time dying becomes a real prospect is to recognize those occasions when we have been useful in the world.

Man cannot live without some knowledge of the purpose of life. If he can find no purpose in life he creates one in the inevitability of death.

Before my death I hope to obtain my life.

Books are not life, only its ashes.