“Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.”
1960s
Source: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) "Foreword"
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Arthur C. Clarke 207
British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, u… 1917–2008Related quotes
“The live dead-man is dead as a producer and alive insofar as he consumes”
139
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)
“Behind every successful man, there stands a surprised woman.”
On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)
Context: It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.
The same is true of what we write: it walks and it talks, but it can be dead-alive or alive-alive. What is truly alive stops before nothing and ceaselessly seeks answers to absurd, "childish" questions. Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken — errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs. And if answers be impossible of attainment, all the better! Dealing with answered questions is the privilege of brains constructed like a cow's stomach, which, as we know, is built to digest cud.
“A dead man in Spain is more alive than a dead man anywhere in the world.”
Un muerto en España está más vivo como muerto que en ningún sitio del mundo.
"Theory and Play of the Duende" from A Poet in New York (1940)
