Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 5: “Gertrude and Sidney”, p. 214
“My destiny is accomplished and I die content.”
How often she made such quotations as these, said or felt or was them! For just as many Americans want art to be Life, so this American novelist wanted life to be Art, not seeing that many of the values—though not, perhaps, the final ones—of life and art are irreconcilable; so that her life looked coldly into the mirror that it held up to itself, and saw that it was full of quotations, of data and analysis and epigrams, of naked and shameful truths, of facts: it saw that it was a novel by Gertrude Johnson.
Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 5: “Gertrude and Sidney”, p. 214
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Randall Jarrell 215
poet, critic, novelist, essayist 1914–1965Related quotes
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James Wolfe
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Source: Last words, on hearing of the defeat of the French at Quebec. Quoted in Francis Parkman's Montcalm and Wolfe
“I shall eat cheese before I die contented.”
James Wolfe
(1727–1759) British Army officer
Source: Last words, on hearing of the defeat of the French at Quebec. Quoted in Francis Parkman's Montcalm and Wolfe
“To accomplish nothing and die of the strain”
Emil M. Cioran
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Anathemas and Admirations (1987)
Variant: To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.
Napoleon I of France
(1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
“If I hear the Way [of truth] in the morning, I am content even to die in that evening.”
Confucius
(-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher
Source: The Analects, Chapter IV
Miguel de Unamuno
(1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VI : In the Depths of the Abyss
Context: I will not say that the more or less poetical and unphilosophical doctrines that I am about to set forth are those which make me live; but I will venture to say that it is my longing to live and to live for ever that inspires these doctrines within me. And if by means of them I succeed in strengthening and sustaining this same longing in another, perhaps when it is all but dead, then I shall have performed a man's work, and above all, I shall have lived. In a word, be it with reason or without reason or against reason, I am resolved not to die. And if, when at last I die out, I die altogether, then I shall not have died out of myself — that is, I shall not have yielded myself to death, but my human destiny shall have killed me. Unless I come to lose my head, or rather my heart, I will not abdicate from life — life will be wrested from me.
“Destiny can contain a few extra threads in her design and still accomplish her original aims.”
Michael Moorcock
(1939) English writer, editor, critic
Book 3, Chapter 4 “Two Black Swords” (p. 114)
The Elric Cycle, Elric of Melniboné (1972)
Abraham Lincoln
(1809–1865) 16th President of the United States
As quoted in Life on the Circuit with Lincoln (1892) by Henry Clay Witney
Posthumous attributions