Afterlife quotes

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◆ When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, 'I used everything you gave me.

- Erma Bombeck100

◆ He meant the Kingdom was over, the Kingdom of Heaven, it was all finished. We shouldn't live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.... We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we've got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different world, and then we'll build... The Republic of Heaven.

- Philip Pullman99

◆ Fools that will laugh on earth, most weep in hell.

- Christopher Marlowe99

◆ We can always hate that which we loved, and with a fire as great as our love once was.

- Claudia Gray99

◆ Seeing death as the end of life is like seeing the horizon as the end of the ocean.

- David Searls99

◆ The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. (It's the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall.

- Christopher Hitchens99

◆ There wasn't a lot of bullshit in my heaven.

- Alice Sebold99

◆ Here's my question: What age are you when you're in Heaven?

- Jodi Picoult99

◆ There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.

- Colum McCann99

◆ I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

- Isaac Asimov99

◆ Memory is the only afterlife I have ever believed in. But the forgetting inside us cannot be stopped. We are programmed to betray.

- Michael Ignatieff99

◆ There's the tree with the branches that everyone sees, and then there's the upside-down root tree, growing the opposite way. So Earth is the branches, growing in opposing but perfect symmetry. The branches don't think much about the roots, and maybe the roots don't think much about the branches, but all the time, they're connected by the trunk, you know?

- Gabrielle Zevin99

◆ Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.

- Tom Stoppard99

◆ If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

- Christopher Hitchens99

◆ All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

- David Eagleman99