11 Quotes Tagged: inevitability

Kevin is right about his cat. It’s all there in his dead cat. The Great Judge can’t answer Kevin: ‘Why did my cat die?’ Answer: ‘Damned if I know.’ There is no answer; there is only a dead animal that just wanted to cross the street. We’re all animals that want to cross the street only something mows us down half-way across that we never saw.

The moving hand once having writ moves on. Nor all thy piety nor wit can lure it back to cancel half a line.

And so castles made of sand slips into the sea, eventually.

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you're aboard there's nothing you can do.

Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.

Death, of course, is not a failure. Death is normal. Death may be the enemy, but it is also the natural order of things.

If we could learn to look instead of gawking,
We'd see the horror in the heart of farce,
If only we could act instead of talking,
We wouldn't always end up on our arse.
This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;
Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.

So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...

You could have kept on driving and never looked back. No one's ever had to stop for me. Or even hear me. Anyway, you did, and now I'm afraid the time for choice is behind us both.

But solace also asks us very direct and forceful questions. Firstly, how will you bear the inevitable loss that is coming to you? And how will you endure it through the years? And above all, how will you shape a life equal to and as beautiful and as astonishing as a world that can birth you, bring you into the light and then just as you were beginning to understand it, take you away?