Michael Cunningham Quotes

The lot of man is to suffer and die.What's gone is of no consequence.

Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end.

Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

We all die at the end, but does that nullify everything? Would most people rather say, "I wish I hadn't been born?" Once you're born you'll have to die, now is that funny or sad?

For the world, I count it not an inn, but a hospital; and a place not to live, but to die in.

We're all making castles in the sand, wonderful tapestries, an exquisite corpse. But is it meaningful? No. It's dogs barking. It doesn't mean anything beyond our yelping, at the pain of being alive.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

Acquisition means life to miserable mortals.

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.

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

Eventually we will all wither and die in the wasteland of logic and science.

What, then, remains but that we still should cry, For being born, and, being born, to die?

In the end, living is defined by dying. Book-ended by oblivion, we are caught in the vice of terror, squeezed to bursting by the approaching end. Fear is ever-present, waiting to be called to the surface. Change brought fear, and fear brought destruction.

I am Manuel. I have lived in the loneliness which is common to all men, but the difference is that I have known it. Now it is necessary for me, as it is necessary for all men, to die in this same loneliness, and I know that there is no help for it.

The best thing for a man to do is to be born and, being born, to die at once.

My dear fellow,' Burlingame said, 'we sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will care, when anon they make a meal of you, whether you spent your moment sighing wigless in your chamber, or sacked the golden towns of Montezuma? Lookee, the day's nigh spent; 'tis gone careening into time forever. Not a tale's length past we lined our bowels with dinner, and already they growl for more. We are dying men, Ebenezer: i'faith, there's time for naught but bold resolves!

Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust? And, live we how we can, yet die we must.

Life is a tragedy, one way or another. What is certain is that you die.

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying: Everything!

The first and foremost reality is that suffering and death are not only enemies of life, but a means of reminding us of life's twin realities, love and hate.

When all is said and done, what is clear is that all lives end before their time.

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus!

All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.

There is not much difference between a mortal man and a dying man. The absurdity of making plans is only slightly more obvious in the second case.