“We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.”

Source: The Sea

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our…" by John Banville?
John Banville photo
John Banville 97
Irish writer 1945

Related quotes

Greg Bear photo
Emil M. Cioran photo
Kamisese Mara photo

“But my friends, my brothers and sisters of the Pacific, we know who we are. We carry in our hearts the knowledge that we are the bearers of a proud legacy that surely marks us as people of strength, and courage and will. We have survived in our aquatic continent through many centuries.”

Kamisese Mara (1920–2004) President of Fiji

Opening address, Pacific Vision festival, Auckland, New Zealand (26 July 1999) http://www.minpac.govt.nz/resources/reference/pvdocs/opening/mara.php.

George Eliot photo

“Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.”

Source: Adam Bede (1859)

Douglas Coupland photo
Claude McKay photo
Czeslaw Milosz photo

“We go down with the bells ringing in all the sunken cities.
Forgotten, we are greeted by the embassies of the dead,
While your endless flowing carries us on and on;
And neither is nor was. The moment only, eternal.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"Rivers" (1980), trans. Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass
Hymn of the Pearl (1981)

Harriet Beecher Stowe photo
Percy Bysshe Shelley photo
Sri Aurobindo photo

Related topics