Quotes About Legacy

You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.

Measure me while I live - after it will be too late.

The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait.

The isms go, the ist dies, art remains

He suggested I play golf, but finally agreed to give me something that, he said, would really work; and going to a cabinet, he produced a vial of violet-blue capsules banded with dark purple at one end, which, he said, had just been placed on the market and were intended not for neurotics whom a draft of water could calm if properly administered, but only for great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries.

anyone can create the future but only a wise man can create the past

Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.

What can be sadder than a discouraged artist dying not from his own commonplace maladies, but from the cancer of oblivion?

For we die every day; oblivion thrives Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives, And our best yesterdays are now foul piles Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.

Fame in our day is too common to be confused with the enduring glow around the deserving book.

Great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries.

I was an infant when my parents died. Thye both were ornithologists. I've tried So often to evoke them that today I have a thousand parents. Sadly they Dissolve in their own virtues and recede, But certain words, chance words I hear or read, Such as bad heart always to him refer, And cancer of the pancreas to her.

You lose your immortality when you lose your memory. And if you land then on Terra Caelestis, with your pillow and chamberpot, you are made to room not with Shakespeare or even Longfellow, but with guitarists and cretins.

Az életnek, a szerelemnek, a könyvtáraknak nincs jövÅ'jük.

GeçmiÅŸ en soylu yakacakt?r.

The theme of the book is simple: a man is dying: you feel him sinking throughout the book; his thought and his memories pervade the whole with greater or lesser distinction (like the swell and fall of uneven breathing), now rolling up this image, now that, letting it ride in the wind, or even tossing it out on the shore, where it seems to move and live for a minute on its own and presently is drawn back again by grey seas where it sinks or is strangely transfigured.

The years are passing, my dear, and presently nobody will know what you and I know.

Mucho después de su muerte sentía que sus pensamientos flotaban en torno a los míos.

In its published form, this book is being read, I assume, in the first years of 2000 A.D. (1935 plus eighty or ninety, live long, my love)...

only for great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries

I have always had a number of parts lined up in case the muse failed. A lepidopterist exploring famous jungles came first, then there was the chess grand master, then the tennis ace with an unreturnable service, then the goalie saving a historic shot, and finally, finally, the author of a pile of unknown writings- Pale Fire, Lolita, Ada- which my heirs discover and publish.

Ma l'ultimissimo giro di pista della sua vita era stato felice e gli aveva dimostrato come la morte non sia altro che una questione di stile.

The Russian reader in old cultured Russia was certainly proud of Pushkin and of Gogol, but he was just as proud of Shakespeare or Dante, of Baudelaire or of Edgar Allan Poe, of Flaubert or of Homer, and this was the Russian reader's strength. I have a certain personal interest in the question, for if my fathers had not been good readers, I would hardly be here today, speaking of these matters in this tongue.

Tell all my mourners To mourn in red- Cause there ain't no sense In my bein' dead.