“We desire very much that none of us be dead. And we will fight till all of you are dead only if it is absolutely necessary.”
Captain Roadstrum to Bjorn, on planet Valhal, also known as Lamos, in Ch. 2
Space Chantey (1968)
Context: I do not understand your custom in this, but we do not intend to fight until all of us are dead. We desire very much that none of us be dead. And we will fight till all of you are dead only if it is absolutely necessary.
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R. A. Lafferty 109
American writer 1914–2002Related quotes
“While there's life there’s hope, and only the dead have none.”
Idyll 4, line 42; translation by A. S. F. Gow, from Theocritus ([1950] 1952) vol. 1, p. 37.
Compare Cicero (1st century BC), Epistolarum ad Atticum [Epistle To Atticus], Book IX, 10, 4: Ægroto, dum anima est, spes est [While the sick man has life, there is hope.]
Idylls
“Only the dead find peace, only the living desire it.”
Ron English's Fauxlosophy: Volume 2 (2022)
“Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.”
Source: Adam Bede (1859)
Mrs. Alving, Act II
Ghosts (1881)
Context: I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant, all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.
Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference
“One day all of us will die but - and this is the important thing - we are not dead yet.”
Source: I Shall Wear Midnight