“I don't want to do something for the sake of it. I am prepared to wait. If I wait until I am buried, too bad.”

Standard reply to people proposing changes in the running of Oxford University; quoted in Colin Gordon, Beyond the Looking Glass (1982), p. 37

Biff
Source: Death of a Salesman (1949)

Entry in her journal (10 October 1922) which she tore out to send to John Middleton Murry, before changing her mind. This later became the last published entry in The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927) ed. J. Middleton Murry
Context: By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love — the earth and the wonders thereof — the sea — the sun. All that we mean when we speak of the external world. A want to enter into it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious direct human being. I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming so that I may be (and here I have stopped and waited and waited and it’s no good — there’s only one phrase that will do) a child of the sun. About helping others, about carrying a light and so on, it seems false to say a single word. Let it be at that. A child of the sun.

Part 1 “Channels”, Interlude II (p. 65)
The Scar (2002)

To Soviet U.N. Ambassador Valerian A. Zorin in the United Nations Security Council during the Cuban missile crisis (25 October 1962)

In her Journal-entry, December, 1898; as quoted in Modersohn-Becker P, Busch G, Reinken LV: Paula Modersohn-Becker, the Letters and Journals, Taplinger; New York 1983, p. 118
1898

Last words (August, 1503), as quoted in The Life of Cesare Borgia (1912) by Rafael Sabatini, Book IV The Bull Cadent, Chapter I: The Death of Alexander VI

Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 5