One day in the afternoon of the world, glum death will come and sit in you, and when you get up to walk, you will be as glum as death, but if you're lucky, this will only make the fun better and the love greater.
Interpretation
Life's challenges and the inevitability of death can enhance our experiences of joy and love.
William Saroyan's quote reflects on the inevitability of death and the sorrow that often accompanies it. However, he suggests that this awareness can actually deepen our appreciation for life, making our joyful experiences and loving connections more meaningful. The contrast between glumness and joy serves to remind us that the realities of life and death coexist, and understanding this can enrich our emotional experiences.
In practice
Use this quote in a speech at a memorial service to celebrate the lives of those who have passed.
The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.
San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.
I care so much about everything that I care about nothing.
I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity? Are we sure it is desirable for a man's spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even?
Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.
It is a pity, in my opinion, that no prize exists for the writer who best refrains from adding to the world's bad books.
Music is the soundtrack to the crappy movie that is my life.
And now, I'm glad I didn't know the way it all would end, the way it all would go. Our lives are better left to chance, I could've missed the pain, but I'd have had to miss the Dance.
To some extent, 'The Wall' is asking the question, 'Do you want a voice? And if you do, you better bloody well go out and get it because it's not going to be handed to you on a plate.'
The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.
For every laugh, there should be a tear.
The Negroes are facing the alternative of rising in the sphere of production to supply their proportion of the manufacturers and merchants or of going down to the graves of paupers.
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