“Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.”
Hockney’s Alphabet, D is for Death, ed. Stephen Spender (1991)
Book published to raise money for AIDS victims.
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Paul Theroux 32
American travel writer and novelist 1941Related quotes

“Global warming causing climate change may be the ultimate issue that unites us all.”
Speech, Institute of Physics, London (June 2008)

“Life, struck sharp on death,
Makes awful lightning.”
Bk. I, l. 210-214.
Aurora Leigh http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/barrett/aurora/aurora.html (1857)
Context: Life, struck sharp on death,
Makes awful lightning. His last word was, 'Love–'
'Love, my child, love, love!'–(then he had done with grief)
'Love, my child.' Ere I answered he was gone,
And none was left to love in all the world.

“All joys and passions that Mankind may know
By you were nobly felt and nobly sung.”
Main Street and Other Poems (1917), In Memory
Context: Because Mankind is glad and brave and young,
Full of gay flames that white and scarlet glow,
All joys and passions that Mankind may know
By you were nobly felt and nobly sung.
Because Mankind's heart every day is wrung
By Fate's wild hands that twist and tear it so,
Therefore you echoed Man's undying woe,
A harp Aeolian on Life's branches hung.

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), X : Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis