“No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away…”

11
Gospel of Thomas (c. 50? — c. 140?)

The Razor's Edge (1943)

Source: Gargoyles

Shallows- a poem in the anthology Bog Myrtle & Peat (1921)
Poetry

Source: My Fantoms

Book VII, Ch. 4
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
Context: The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, — and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

As quoted in Women on War : Essential Voices for the Nuclear Age (1988), by Daniela Gioseffi, p. 103
Variant: A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There's too much work to do.
As quoted in Singing the Living Tradition (1993) by the Unitarian Universalist Association, p. 560
Context: What I want to bring out is how a pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. And each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. Going to jail for distributing leaflets advocating war tax refusal causes a ripple of thought, of conscience among us all. And of remembrance too. …. There may be ever improving standards of living in the U. S., with every worker eventually owning his own home and driving his own car; but our modern economy is based on preparation for war. … The absolutist begins a work, others take it up and try to spread it. Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.

Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Source: I Shall Wear Midnight