Richard Flanagan Quotes

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?

We're not really afraid to die. We're only afraid of being forgotten. We know that we'll be forgotten, and the idea is unbearable, don't you agree? As time passes we become infrequent visitors in the minds of those left behind. The ones who clear out the house & divide up the belongings. Throw away the rubbish. And forget. If we knew that every evening someone lit a candle and sat down to think – thought about is if only for a few seconds – then we could depart this earth in peace. No-one will light a candle for me. Who would do that?

To be forgotten, is to die a little.

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.

A man has only one way of being immortal on earth: he has to forget he is a mortal.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

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

He is dead who called me into being, and when I shall be no more the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish.

Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.

There is no remembrance which time does not obliterate, nor pain which death does not terminate.

The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.

And when I am forgotten, as I shall be, And asleep in dull cold marble, where no mention Of me must be heard of, say, I taught thee.

Everything is ephemeral, both that which remembers and that which is remembered.

So long as one person remembers you, you'll never really be dead.

I like to think that people live on in other people's memories.

The monument of death will outlast the memory of the dead. The Pyramids do not tell the tale which was confided to them; the living fact commemorates itself.

As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the fame that comes after is oblivion.

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

We don't like flowers that do not wilt; they must die, and nine she-camel hairs aid memory.

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

When you're dead, you're dead. No one is going to remember me when I'm dead. Oh, maybe a few friends will remember me affectionately. Being remembered isn't the most important thing, anyhow. It's what you do when you are here that's important.

Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all.

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

I have seen all, I have heard all, I have forgotten all.