Terminal Quotes

• There is only one terminal dignity - love.

  Helen Hayes

  Love, Glimpse, Dignity

  Guideposts, January 1960.

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• Wake up! If you knew for certain you had a terminal illness--if you had little time left to live--you would waste precious little of it! Well, I'm telling you...you do have a terminal illness: It's called birth. You don't have more than a few years left. No one does! So be happy now, without reason--or you will never be at all.

  Dan Millman

  Inspirational, Happy, Time

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• Today I arrived by train in New York City, which I'd never seen before, walked through the grandeur of Grand Central Terminal, stepped outside, got my first look at the city and instantly fell in love with it. Silently, inside myself, I yelled: I should have been born here!

  Edward Robb Ellis

  New York, Should Have, Cities

  Edward Robb Ellis, Pete Hamill (1996). “A Diary of the Century: Tales from America's Greatest Diarist”, Kodansha Amer Incorporated

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• Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.

  Iain Banks

  Lonely, Night, Car

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• During the air war of 1944, a four-man combat crew on a B-17 bomber took a vow to never abandon one another no matter how desperate the situation. The aircraft was hit by flak during a mission and went into a terminal dive, and the pilot ordered everyone to bail out. The top turret gunner obeyed the order, but the ball turret gunner discovered that a piece of flak had jammed his turret and he could not get out. The other three men in his pact could have bailed out with the parachutes, but they stayed with him until the plan hit the ground and exploded. They all died.

  Sebastian Junger

  Death, War, Men

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• Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities.

  Alain de Botton

  Country, Prayer, Airports

  Alain de Botton (2010). “A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary”, p.22, Profile Books

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• So I got off the plane and I forget to take off my seat-belt and I'm dragging the plane through the terminal... The wings are knocking people over.

  Steven Wright

  Wings, People, Forget

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• We are here among you as seekers of refuge from our present-your future-a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty-the end of the capitalistic experiment. Once we came to understand the simpl...truth that earth's resources were limited, in fact soon to run out, the whole capitalistic illusion fell to pieces. Those of us who spoke this truth were denounced as heretics, as enemies of the prevailing economic faith. Like religious Dissenters of an earlier day.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Running, Religious, Enemy

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• Any combination of a 250-pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Mexican, Pounds, Lsd

  Hunter S. Thompson (2011). “The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time”, p.507, Simon and Schuster

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• It's not gray," Clary felt compelled to point out. "It's green." "If there was such a thing as terminal literalism, you'd have died in childhood," said Jace.

  Cassandra Clare

  Childhood, Green, Jace

  Cassandra Clare (2012). “Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (5 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls”, p.225, Simon and Schuster

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• The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that's the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Success, Teenager, Spring

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• His crush went from exciting to depressing, as if he'd gone from the first blush of infatuation to the terminal nostalgia of a former lover without even the temporary relief of an actual relationship in between.

  Lev Grossman

  Crush, Depressing, Relief

  Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.57, Penguin

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• ...And nostalgia is a cancer. Nostalgia will fill your heart up with tumors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what you are. You're just an old fart dying of terminal nostalgia.

  Sherman Alexie

  Cancer, Heart, Dying

  Sherman Alexie (2012). “Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories”, p.116, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• We have bigger things to brood on and enormous reasons for wallowing in terminal craziness until we finally hit bottom.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Reason, Craziness, Enormous

  Hunter S. Thompson (2012). “Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness”, p.23, Pan Macmillan

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• All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.

  W. H. Auden

  Addiction, Damnation, Sin

  A Certain World (1970) "Hell"

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• Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness because if you do you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.

  Anna Quindlen

  Happiness, Baby, Passion

  Anna Quindlen (2002). “A Short Guide to a Happy Life”, Arrow/Children's (a Division of Random House Group)

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• America as a setting seems inexhaustibly fascinating to me, and I think there's something about the outsider viewpoint that works for me. Being of Jewish descent in England always carried a vague sense of being foreign, while not being a practicing Jew made it hard to think of myself as fully Jewish either. So living here in a way just clarifies that terminal outsider position - makes it somehow official, which I like.

  James Lasdun

  Thinking, America, Viewpoints

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

  Annie Dillard

  Writing, Dying, Patient

  Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.82, Canongate Books

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• Unlike presidential administrations, problems rarely have terminal dates.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Presidential, Politics, Administration

  Eisenhower, Dwight D. (1961). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960-1961”, p.930, Best Books on

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• Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover either for grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much-cherished aspect of academic freedom.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Freedom, People, Criticism

  "H.L. Mencken: The Baltimore Oracle" by John Kenneth Galbraith, www.washingtonpost.com. September 14, 1980.

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• The truth is that there is only one terminal dignity - love. And the story of a love is not important - what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.

  Helen Hayes

  Love, Heart, Important

  Guideposts, January 1960.

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• There is nothing I fear more than waking up without a program that will help me bring a little happiness to those with no resources, those who are poor, illiterate, and ridden with terminal disease.

  Nelson Mandela

  Fear, Equality, Waking

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• The desire to be seen as superior and singular- and, conversely, but similarly, inferior and individual, is a big topic...They have a term for the syndrome- it is called terminal uniqueness...we all refuse to be part of the crowd, to walk in the middle of the road in the safety of others. We all think were special. But the problem is, as I point out to Dr. Singer all the time, I actually am special.

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Thinking, Safety, Special

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• Love is the worst earthquake there is. Can crush you to the thickness of your bones. Love can be like cancer sometimes. Terminal. It can make you vomit. It can make you want to cut it out. It can take you over against your will.

  Francesca Lia Block

  Crush, Cancer, Cutting

  Francesca Lia Block (2008). “Quakeland”, p.96, Manic D Press

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• Life is a terminal disease, and it is sexually transmitted.

  John Cleese

  Disease, Life Is, Sexually

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