Death Quote by William Saroyan — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.”

“It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself.”

“But try to remember that a good man can never die. You will see your brother many times again-in the streets, at home, in all the places of the town. The person of a man may go, but the best part of him stays. It stays forever.”

“You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself.”

“Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.”

“Have you ever, for even a second, thought about how hard it is for people like me just to stay alive?”

“He comes down next to me, and when I hold out my hand, he takes it. Our fingers lace together. And in that feeling, that perfect feeling of our hands and fingers pressed together, I want to tell him everything. I want to tell him about Josh, and his sister, Emily. I want to tell him about tall, crazy Gert. I want to tell him about bridges and funerals, and most of all, maps. More than anything else, I want to tell him about myself. I want to tell him that I know what things look like from above now. There's so much I want to tell him, because I know he'll understand.”

“For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.”

“Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.”

“And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time — so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.”