Delmore Schwartz Quotes

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book.

Old age: I fall asleep during the funerals of my friends.

Death was a big part of my life growing up. I went to lots of funerals.

When you get old the worst thing is you lose so many friends. Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, John Wayne. People who I loved to work with.

A terrible thing about getting oldish is that your friends start dying, and in the last ten years I have lost seven or eight of my closest.

I remember burying a girl fourteen years of age who had died with a ruptured appendix... I buried a good many people that I knew, some of whom I loved.

I had assumed that I would age with all my friends growing old around me, dying off very gradually one by one. And here was a plague that cut them off so early.

I have always done my duty. I am ready to die. My only regret is for the friends I leave behind me.

I think I've become more aware of aging in the last couple of years because of friends dying of cancer or friends' parents dying and myself - I'm still healthy, but I'm aging, and that's something that I think about more, even though I shouldn't be too concerned.

I get my exercise acting as a pallbearer to my friends who exercise.

I lost a dear friend of mine from a rugby injury at 26. We don't usually deal with mortality at that early age and it's given me an appreciation of time, of trying to fit everything in.

I don't believe in happy endings, but I do believe in happy travels, because ultimately, you die at a very young age, or you live long enough to watch your friends die. It's a mean thing, life.

The years that remain are clearly limited. When you're 80, you attend a lot more funerals. A lot more people are having a hard time and are ill.

Funerals prove that someone is really gone.

When you get to my age, you find that most of your dear friends are gone.

When you get to be my age there are more and more people you have known that you miss. Brion [Gysin], Antony Balch, Ian Summerville are ones I think of right away I was quite close to.

Then, with an enormous rush of meadow-filled wind, the green candle went out, and my best friend died.

One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not everybody is goin to get older with you.

Bod shrugged. "So?" he said. "It's only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead.

Indeed, I have, alas! outlived almost every one of my contemporaries. One pays dear for living long.

When the friends we love the best Lie in their churchyard bed, We must not cry too bitterly Over the happy dead.

The only kind office performed for us by our friends of which we never complain is our funeral; and the only thing which we most want, happens to be the only thing we never purchase--our coffin.

All of my best friends are dead people. Someday I've got to figure out how that happened.

A funeral isn't for the dead. You'll simply be a stage set for a kind of festival maybe. And besides, you won't even be there.