Ethan Canin Quotes

When I was a child, I used to paint intently. The older I become, and the closer death approaches, the brighter my life gets day by day.

Death makes us sad, but it can also make us feel more alive.

The only thing you want is to come back alive.

You're never more alive than in battle." "Never more dead after," I say.

I've been running from, and toward, death all my life, more aware of it than a person should be.

When you have been born in a war like me, living in a war as a child, when you have been in wars as a war correspondent all your life - trust me! You develop a form of fatalism; you are always ready to die.

You've gotta know what death is to know life!

It is neccessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.

He not busy being born is busy dying.

It is only in the light of the inescapable fact of death that a person can adequately engage and enter upon the mysterious fact of life.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

I nearly died three times in 2008, and when you go through those experiences, you realize that you're blessed every day that you wake up. My world changed, my life changed, and with the help of my wife Jane, I was able to survive.

People who think dying is the worst thing don't know a thing about life.

Since I was shot, everything is such a dream to me. Like I don't know whether I'm alive or whether I died. I wasn't afraid before. And having been dead once, I shouldn't feel fear. But I am afraid. I don't understand why.

Once you've stared death in the face, every day is a good day.

All of us are going to die. Every single one of us. So, while you're alive, be alive.

What makes us really human is it's in the presence of death that we start valuing life.

I've suffered quite a lot, to the point where I've experienced death. Years before I wasn't fit to die, but I understand life better now. Death is nice, death is beauty.

A weird side effect of being in close proximity to death is an urgency.

Death is the mother of forms.

This is the spot where I will lie When life has had enough of me, These are the grasses that will blow Above me like a living sea. These gay old lilies will not shrink To draw their life from death of mine, And I will give my body's fire To make blue flowers on this vine. "O Soul," I said, "have you no tears? Was not the body dear to you?" I heard my soul say carelessly, "The myrtle flowers will grow more blue.

The fact that you were essentially dead does not register until you begin to come alive.

There is no Death,/What seems so is transition.

As the dead rise to live, the live sink to die, the currents are deep and raging inside.

We have to learn to die in every moment in order to be fully alive.