Louise Erdrich Quotes

The understanding that we reach a point where we stop becoming something and start ending as something. That comes at different times in different points in different people's lives, and obviously there are lots of people who experience the presence of death much more keenly and much earlier than I did. But we all come to grips with it eventually.

I'm happier because I had to face what all of us try not to face: that we're going to die. It's a fact.

I still see life entirely through its Darwinian prism. I keep trying to shake off the aftereffects of writing 'The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead', and I find I can't.

and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality.

As one gets older, this question of death, becomes more vexing and urgent.

I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.

Woe, woe, woe... in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already.

Until having kids, I had never really thought about mortality so much.

The decisive moment in a man’s life is when he decides to confront death.

I've learned to accept death better than most people.

As a society, when you have your mortality slapped in your face, it changes you.

It takes so many years to learn that one is dead.

Those who have known death from inside lose all fear of death.

There is nothing terrible in life for the man who realizes there is nothing terrible in death.

I was confident that I was a special person. But time slowly chips away at life. People don't just die when their time comes. They gradually die away, from the inside. And finally the day comes when you have to settle accounts. Nobody can escape it. People have to pay the price for what they've received. I have only just learned that truth.

I have the idea that lyric poetry is a poetry that's driven by a sense of the presence of death. That there's something unbearable about the fact that we're going to die and that we can't stand it and I think you find that out in childhood and you don't really - at least I found it out in childhood and I found it hard to get over.

Life, struck sharp on death, Makes awful lightning.

Death ... doesn't take her eyes off us for a minute, so much so that even those who are not yet due to die feel her gaze pursuing them constantly.

When death comes too near, comedy and tragedy fall silent.

Change the emphasis, turn your attention around. If you become concerned with death, your life comes to be revealed to you for the first time, because the moment you become at ease with death you have gained a life that cannot die. The moment you have known death, you have known that life which is eternal.

Mark, how the ready hands of Death prepare: His bow is bent, and he hath notch'd his dart; He aims, he levels at thy slumb'ring heart: The wound is posting, O be wise, beware.

If you're a serious actor, it's when you know you're going to die tomorrow that you really start to feel it.

An awareness of death encourages us to live more intensely.

I will keep faith with death in my heart... For the sake of goodness, for the sake of love, Let no man's heart be ruled by death... The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life; to regard it, with the understanding and the .emotions, as the inviolable condition of life.

If a man doesn't know death, he doesn't know life.