Quotes by American Authors - Page 190

There is no death! the stars go down To rise upon some other shore And bright in Heaven's jeweled crown They shine for ever more.
John L. McCreery
Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.
Charles Frohman
Around around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.
Archibald MacLeish
It cost me never a stab nor squirm To tread by chance upon a worm. 'Aha my little dear' I say 'Your clan will pay me back one day.'
Dorothy Parker
I cannot forgive my friends for dying: I do not find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.
Ernest Becker
I hate funerals and would not attend my Own if it could be avoided but it is well for every man to stop once in a while to think of what sort of a collection of mourners he is training for his final event.
Robert T. Morris
In nature there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation.
Edwin Way Teale
You don't die in the United States you underachieve.
Jerzy Kosiński
You have to learn to do everything even to die.
Gertrude Stein
After sixty years the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something personal about it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die which is man's charter of nobility.
George Santayana
Because I could not stop for Death He kindly stopped for me - The carriage held but just ourselves And Immortality.
Emily Dickinson
Let the tent be struck.
Robert E. Lee
When Andrew Jackson died someone asked a friend if he thought Old Hickory would go to heaven. 'He will if he wants to ' was the reply. On his death bed Disraeli declined a visit from Queen Victoria. 'No it is better not' he said 'she would only ask me to take a message to Albert.' I am a broken machine. I am ready to go.
Woodrow Wilson
There may be little or much beyond the grave But the strong are saying nothing until they see.
Robert Frost
The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
Mark Twain
Dying is a wild night and a new road.
Emily Dickinson
Poisons pain you Rivers are damp Acid stains you And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren't lawful Nooses give Gas smells awful You might as well live.
Dorothy Parker
Human life consists in mutual service. No grief pain misfortune or 'broken heart' is excuse for cutting off one's life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Epitaph n: an inscription on a tomb showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.
Ambrose Bierce
Mausoleum n: the final and funniest folly of the rich.
Ambrose Bierce
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying.
Woody Allen
Things have a terrible permanence when people die.
Joyce Kilmer
I will be dead in a few months. But it hasn't given me the slightest anxiety or worry. I always knew I was going to die.
B.F. Skinner
The question is whether suicide is the way out or the way in.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Most persons have died before they expired - died to all earthly longings so that the last breath is only as it were the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
I had a lover's quarrel with the world.
Robert Frost
For three days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off.
Johnny Carson
Death - the last voyage the longest the best.
Thomas Wolfe
Here lies Jack Williams. He done his damndest.
Harry S. Truman
Death twitches my ear. "Live " he says "I am coming".
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
For mem'ry has painted this perfect day. With colors that never fade And we find at the end of a perfect day The soul of a friend we've made
Carrie Jacobs Bond
Every dew-drop and raindrop had a whole heaven within it.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
When it is dark enough you can see the stars.
Charles A. Beard
Flowers grow out of dark moments.
Corita Kent
The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl vigilant in darkness and blind to light mousing for vermin and never seeing noble game. The cynic puts all human actions into two classes - openly bad and secretly bad.
Henry Ward Beecher
Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.
Lillian Hellman
A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Watch what people are cynical about and one can often discover what they lack.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
There is nothing to which men while they have food and drink cannot reconcile themselves.
George Santayana
Cynicism is that blackguard defect of vision which compels us to see the world as it is instead of as it should be.
Ambrose Bierce
Cynicism - the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence.
Russell Lynes
A cynic is a man who when he smells flowers looks around for a coffin.
H.L. Mencken
A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.
Sidney J. Harris
Culture is what your butcher would have if he were a surgeon.
Mary Pettibone Poole
Culture with us ends in headache.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every crowd has a silver lining.
P.T. Barnum
To escape criticism - do nothing say nothing be nothing.
Elbert Hubbard
Nature when she invented manufactured and patented her authors contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Nature fits all her children with something to do He who would write and can't write can surely review.
James Russell Lowell
A critic is a legless man who teaches running.
Channing Pollock
If you are willing to take the punishment you're halfway through the battle. That the issues may be trivial the battle ugly is another point.
Lillian Hellman
To many people dramatic criticism must seem like an attempt to tattoo soap bubbles.
John Mason Brown
His words leap across rivers and mountains but his thoughts are still only six inches long.
E B White
More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader and would no more read a book alone if they could help it than have a baby alone.
Randall Jarrell
He has a right to criticize who has a heart to help.
Abraham Lincoln
Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience - 4000 critics.
Mark Twain
Two and two continue to make four in spite of the whine of the amateur for three or the cry of the critic for five.
James McNeill Whistler
The critic is an overgoer with pen-envy.
Geoffrey Hartman