Oblivion Quotes - Page 9

• Mankind . . . possesses two supreme blessings. First of these is the goddess Demeter, or Earth whichever name you choose to call her by. It was she who gave to man his nourishment of grain. But after her there came the son of Semele, who matched her present by inventing liquid wine as his gift to man. For filled with that good gift, suffering mankind forgets its grief; from it comes sleep; with it oblivion of the troubles of the day. There is no other medicine for misery.

  Euripides

  Grief, Wine, Sleep

  Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (1958). “The complete Greek tragedies”

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• An artisan without memories, whose only dream was to die of fatigue in the oblivion and misery of his little gold fishes.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Dream, Memories, Gold

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• How bitterly glad I am to see you. You bring joy and pain in equal measure. Joy because you are with me, but pain because it won't be for long. What do you know about the sea? Nothing. What do I know about the sea? Nothing. Without a driver this bus is lost. Our lives are over. Come aboard if your destination is oblivion-- It should be our next stop. We can sit together. You can have the window seat, if you want. But it's a sad view. Oh enough of this disembling. Let me say plainly: I love you, I love you, I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you. Not the spiders, please.

  Yann Martel

  Pain, Love You, Views

  "Life of Pi". Book by Yann Martel, September 11, 2001.

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• "Art is the ability to turn one's gaze to the world of oblivion." This is the way in which I understand art at fundamental level.

  Yasumasa Morimura

  Art, Fundamentals, World

  Source: u-in-u.com

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• I did what I could to inflate the rumor I was on my way to stardom. What I was on my way to, by any mathematical standards known to man, was oblivion, by way of obscurity.

  Tallulah Bankhead

  Men, Rumor, Obscurity

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• Even if it means oblivion, friends, I'll welcome it, because it won't be nothing. We'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.

  Philip Pullman

  Stars, Fall, Home

  Philip Pullman (2007). “The Amber Spyglass”, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• What do you believe? I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu. Equally? It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul. Of what would you repent? Nothing. Nothing? One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Believe, Dark, Vanity

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• To think about "oblivion" is to think about "what art is".

  Yasumasa Morimura

  Art, Thinking, Art Is

  Source: u-in-u.com

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• We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008)

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Thinking, People, Three

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• I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion.

  Thomas Hardy

  Flesh, Faces, Rough Times

  "Heredity" l. 1 (1917)

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• Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America—burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion.

  Walter M. Miller, Jr.

  Fall, Play, Phoenix

  Walter M. Miller Jr (2014). “A Canticle For Leibowitz”, p.146, Hachette UK

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• Fame is an illusive thing - here today, gone tomorrow. The fickle, shallow mob raises its heroes to the pinnacle of approval today and hurls them into oblivion tomorrow at the slightest whim; cheers today, hisses tomorrow; utter forgetfulness in a few months.

  Henry Miller

  Cheer, Hero, Gone

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• I first wrote down all the phenomena that have emerged in contemporary society that I thought were related to this theme ["sea of oblivion"], and then sorted them out by grouping them into islands of ideas.

  Yasumasa Morimura

  Islands, Sea, Ideas

  Source: u-in-u.com

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• Oblivion eyes on a cereal box, the warm blinds of a father lost and last to know lost and last to love last boy lost you can't see even a bubble once it's popped

  Kami Garcia

  Father, Eye, Boys

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• Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.

  Mark Twain

  Inspiration, Vapor, Reputation

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.116, Courier Corporation

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• As the days piled up into weeks, and the weeks turned into months, and fall slid into winter, I realized one of the great truths about tragedy: You can dream of disappearing. You can wish for oblivion, for endless sleep or the escape of fiction, of walking into a river with your pockets full of stones, of letting the dark water close over your head. But if you've got kids, the web of the world holds you close and wraps you tight and keeps you from falling no matter how badly you think you want to fall.

  Jennifer Weiner

  Dream, Fall, Sleep

  Jennifer Weiner (2008). “Certain Girls: A Novel”, p.376, Simon and Schuster

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• Man does find in Nature deliverance from himself, oblivion of his past, with peace and purity!

  George A. Smith

  Peace, Past, Men

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• When ABBA broke up, I assumed our music would fall into oblivion so in the early 90's with BJRN AGAIN becoming popular and when U2 invited Benny and I on stage to sing Dancing Queen, I just assumed we were being sent up. But now I see they were paying tribute to us

  Bjorn Ulvaeus

  Queens, Fall, Dancing

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• Know how to play the card of contempt. It is the most politic kind of revenge. For there are many of whom we should have known nothing if their distinguished opponents had taken no notice of them. There is no revenge like oblivion, for it is the entombment of the unworthy in the dust of their own nothingness.

  Baltasar Gracian

  Revenge, Taken, Should Have

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• Death is the stone into which our oblivion hardens.

  Pablo Neruda

  Death, Stones

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• Young women with ambitions should be very crafty and cautious, lest mayhap they be caught in the soft, silken mesh of a happy marriage, and go down to oblivion, dead to the world.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Ambition, Happy Marriage, World

  Elbert Hubbard, Bert Hubbard (1923). “Selected writings of Elbert Hubbard: his mintage of wisdom, coined from a life of love, laughter and work”

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• Lay silently the injuries you receive upon the altar of oblivion.

  Hosea Ballou

  Injury, Lays, Altars

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• I shudder at the very thought of being born again into this world. Life to me . . . has been a monstrous, painful, agonizing affair, and the idea of repeating such an existence - even if better in a way - is horrifying to me. . . . I gratefully look forward to oblivion, but I must be sure of it.

  Taylor Caldwell

  Ideas, Looks, World

  "The Search for a Soul". Book by Jess Stearn, 1972.

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• Few and precious are the words which the lips of Wisdom utter: To what shall their rarity be likened? What prices shall count their worth? Perfect, and much to be desired, and giving joy with riches, No lovely thing on earth can picture their fair beauty. They be chance pearls, flung among the rocks by the sullen waters of Oblivion.

  Martin Farquhar Tupper

  Wisdom, Rocks, Giving

  Martin Farquhar Tupper (1838). “Proverbial Philosophy: A Book of Thoughts and Arguments, Originally Treated”, p.9

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• I don't believe people let things slide away. It's the nature of the universe that everything dissolves into oblivion and by every route possible, but human beings invest a lot of cleverness trying to cling to past events, real or imagined. And because we can't succeed, we get angry and frustrated and feel guilty. Except the Buddhists.

  Robert Reed

  Buddhist, Real, Believe

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