Quotes & Sayings About Posthumous

Having confronted the world with little except a battered typewriter and a certain resilience, he can now take posthumous credit for having got the three great questions of the 20th century essentially 'right.' Orwell was an early and consistent foe of European imperialism, and foresaw the end of colonial rule. He was one of the first to volunteer to bear arms against fascism and Nazism in Spain. And, while he was soldiering in Catalonia, he saw through the biggest and most seductive lie of them all - the false promise of a radiant future offered by the intellectual underlings of Stalinism. — Christopher Hitchens

Posthumous fame is a plant of tardy growth, for our body must be the seed of it; or we may liken it to a torch, which nothing but the last spark of life can light up; or we may compare it to the trumpet of the archangel, for it is blown over the dead; but unlike that awful blast, it is of earth, not of heaven, and can neither rouse nor raise us. — Charles Caleb Colton

To think that she had read the same elegiac prose he now beheld with such quiet awe made his heart sing. — David S.E. Zapanta

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance - no matter how improved - as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

High on their posthumous pedestals, the dead become hard to see. Grief, deference, and the homogenizing effects of adulation blur the details, flatten the bumps, sand off the sharp corners. — Anne Fadiman

Posthumous: It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that's what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage. — Roberto Bolano

Having a memoir and a retrospective of your work running almost simultaneously when you're still alive does feel a bit posthumous. — Anthony Browne

The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins. — Milan Kundera

I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame. — Doris Lessing

When a man dies, his wife is burned alive with him, but if the wife dies before her husband, the man does not suffer the same fate. If a man dies before marriage, he is given a posthumous wife. The women passionately want to be burned because they believe they will enter paradise. — Mas'udi

Man has always desired power. Ownership of property gives this power. Man hankers also after posthumous fame based on power. — Mahatma Gandhi

He no longer wished to be dead. At the same time, it cannot be said that he was glad to be alive. But at least he did not resent it. He was alive, and the stubbornness of this fact had little by little begun to fascinate him - as if he had managed to outlive himself, as if he were somehow living a posthumous life. — Paul Auster

It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous. — Gloria Steinem

What, I ask, has the fixed and solid nature of the earth to do with the right of appropriation?
(...)
But the creator of the land does not sell it: he gives it; and, in giving it, he is no respecter of persons. Why, then, are some of his children regarded as legitimate, while others are treated as bastards? If the equality of shares was an original right, why is the inequality of conditions a posthumous right? — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

What is new about Barthes's posthumous reputation is the view of him as a writer whose books of criticism and personal musings must be admired as serious and beautiful works of the imagination. — Edmund White

Posthumous men-myself, for example-are not as well understood as timely ones, but we are listened to better. More precisely: we are never understood-hence our authority. — Friedrich Nietzsche

In civilized communities, property as well as personal rights are the essential object of the laws, which encourage industry by securing the enjoyment of its fruits: that industry from which property results, and that enjoyment which consists not merely in its immediate use, but in its posthumous destination to objects of choice and of kindred affection. In a just and free government, therefore, the rights both of property and of persons ought to be effectually guarded. — James Madison

Maybe he didn't want that life after all, starting over broke, hailing a cab in a busy intersection filled with jockeying junior executives, arms aloft, bodies smartly spinning to cover every compass point. What did he want that was not posthumous? He stared into space. He understood what was missing, the predatory impulse, the sense of large excitation that drove him through his days, the sheer and reeling need to be. — Don DeLillo

Psychic change, as Todorov has recognized, subverted the genre in another way, by revoking the cultural taboos, the social censorship, that had prohibited the overt treatment of psychosexual themes, which then found covert expression in the supernatural tale. 'There is no need today to resort to the devil [or to posthumous reverie] in order to speak of excessive sexual desire, and none to resort to vampires in order to designate the attraction exerted by corpses: psychoanalysis, and the literature which is directly or indirectly inspired by it, deal with these matters in undisguised terms. The themes of fantastic literature have become, literally, the very themes of the psychological investigations of the last fifty years. — Howard Kerr

Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance - no matter how improved - as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing. — Tennessee Williams

We take from the art of the past what we need. The variable posthumous reputations of even the greatest artists and the unpredictable revivals of interest in even the most obscure ones tend to reveal more about those who make revisionist assessments than about those who are being reassessed. — Martin Filler

But because me and myself, as you no doubt are well aware, we are going to die, my relation - and yours too - to the event of this text, which otherwise never quite makes it, our relation is that of a structurally posthumous necessity.
Suppose, in that case, that I am not alone in my claim to know the idiomatic code (whose notion itself is already contradictory) of this event. What if somewhere, here or there, there are shares in this non-secret's secret? Even so the scene would not be changed. The accomplices, as you are once again well aware, are also bound to die. — Jacques Derrida

Immortality was overrated, as far as he was concerned. Hardy had enough problems as it was; living forever sounded like a death sentence for someone with his practical sensibilities. — David S.E. Zapanta

People out for posthumous fame forget that the Generations To Come will be the same annoying people they know now. — Marcus Aurelius

As any avid reader knew, a good read deserved a good seat. — David S.E. Zapanta

To reject any vast group of one's cultural ancestors in the cause of some current theory is not just arrogance; it's posthumous mass murder. It's the same kind of thinking that makes genocide possible. The masses (albeit the dead masses) and the pathetic little lives they lived are irrelevant compared to this greater purpose we have at hand. Write them out of the record. They never existed.
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One could not judge things by the brief span of one's own lifetime. That was at the core of modern arrogance: only my lifetime counts. My lifetime is 'forever.' Time before it and time after it do not exist. Everything of importance must come to pass in my lifetime. This is what drives the frenzy for change. — Tony Hendra

Numerous are the posthumous museums and memorials devoted exclusively to one artist, architect or author and designed to preserve or artificially reconstruct the namesake's original working or living conditions. — Hans Ulrich Obrist

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist. — Jean Cocteau

Try to get all your posthumous medals in advance. — Gregory Benford

Posthumous retention of copyright is really a gangrenous foot-in-the-door for the coming zombie apocalypse. And who in tarnation really wants that? — Pansy Schneider-Horst

It always bothers me to see people writing RIP when a person dies. It just feels so insincere and like a cop out. To me, RIP is the microwave dinner of posthumous honours. — Lou Reed

POSTHUMOUS POSTPONEMENT
FACT: Unlike airplanes, many dreams take off after the pilot's departure
Kamil Ali — Kamil Ali

The late Mr. David Hume, in his posthumous works, places the powers of generation much above those of our boasted reason; and adds, that reason can only make a machine, as a clock or a ship, but the power of generation makes the maker of the machine; ... he concludes, that the world itself might have been generated, rather than created ; that is, it might have been gradually produced from very small beginnings, increasing by the activity of its inherent principles, rather than by a sudden evolution of the whole by the Almighty fiat. — Erasmus Darwin

If you try to write posthumously, however, fashion doesn't apply. You step off the catwalk, ignoring this season's trends and resigning yourself to being unfashionable and possibly unnoticed, at least for a while. As Kurt Woolf, Kafka's first publisher in Germany, wrote to him after Kafka's book tanked, "You and we know that it is generally just the best and most valuable things that do not find their echo immediately." Fashion is the attempt to evade that principle: to be the echo of someone else's success and, therefore, to create nothing that might create an echo of its own. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The desire of posthumous fame and the dread of posthumous reproach and execration are feelings from the influence of which scarcely any man is perfectly free, and which in many men are powerful and constant motives of action. — Thomas B. Macaulay

Dead men hear no tales; posthumous fame is an Irish bull. — Israel Zangwill

I have a habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am now leading a posthumous existence. — John Keats

He pinched the remaining chapters' pages delicately between his fingers and sighed. He always hated reaching the end of a good book. — David S.E. Zapanta

Posthumous reputations have little to do with real lives. — Felix Dennis

This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive. First the day after tomorrow must come for me. Some men are born posthumously. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Posthumous fame, book fame, nerd fame is not like the good kind of fame. It might last for centuries and let antique egg heads torture the young from the grave, but it just doesn't pay the bills. — Laura Penny

Maybe that is the greatest of wonders: that we can be shaped so much by those we've known closely, and equally by those we've never known at all - and that we too can change the world long after we've left it. — Jacob M. Appel

Certainly the highest posthumous praise that can be conferred upon any writer is the assertion that his or her writing permanently altered the literary landscape for the better, opening new textual doors and engaging new readers. That the author's oeuvre was essential and irreplaceable and transformative. — Paul Di Filippo

Darwin, Marx, and Freud meet. They may have understood other things, but the human soul, and in particular the soul of Culture-man, they did not understand. Systems like theirs are only historical curiosities to the 20th century, unless they happen to claim to be appropriate descriptions of Reality. Anyone who believes in these antiquated fantasies stamps himself as ludicrous, posthumous, ineffective, and superfluous. No leading men of the coming decades will be Darwinians, Marxians or Freudians. — Francis Parker Yockey

Proust has been dead since 1922, yet the annual appearance of his posthumous works has left him, to the reader, alive. Now there is nothing left to publish. Five years after his interment, Proust seems dead for the first time. — Janet Flanner

People who are excited by posthumous fame forget that the people who remember them will soon die too. And those after them in turn. Until their memory, passed from one to another like a candle flame, gutters and goes out. — Marcus Aurelius

What difference does it make whether your work is appreciated or not? The work will still be yours. Anyway, most of us are only appreciated after we are dead. — John Sloan

Reading is accumulating knowledge. But not only that. Reading offers us every day what religion promises us for a posthumous and improbable future: the possibility of living beyond what our lifetime allows us to. — Camilo Gomes Jr.

Posthumous pardons, however, do not resurrect the innocent. — Allan Nicol

Reputation being essentially contemporaneous, is always at the mercy of the Envious and the Ignorant. But Fame, whose very birth is posthumous, and which is only known to exist by the echo of its footsteps through congenial minds, can neither be increased nor diminished by any degree of wilfulness. — Anna Brownell Jameson

Ironically, Henry James' biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation he wrote, in pain, gave all his life (which is more than I could think of doing I have Ted, will have children but few friends) & the critics insulted & mocked him, readers didn't read him. — Sylvia Plath

And yet, after all, what is posthumous fame? Altogether vanity. — Marcus Aurelius

I like a look of agony, because I know it's true — Emily Dickinson

She had stayed home and worked hard and a posthumous recognition had eventually followed. Not that Buck hadn't worked hard, sure he did, but in the end the body won't hold up as a work of art. — Duff Brenna

Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Bereavement? Franzen's posthumous novel? — Edan Lepucki

One posthumous measure of a person's life is how often you imagine his impossible return to deal with some event he never lived to encounter. You picture his reactions, his advice, his sage commentary and humorous asides. For instance, I think about Mark Twain's hypothetical take on current events several times a week. — Paul Di Filippo

Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness when bequeathed by those who, even alive, would part with nothing. — Charles Caleb Colton

It was only in Palo Alto that I searched "Rachav Binder" and "Rach Binder," got an undousable flame of her defense of an article of mine critical of the Mormon Church's databasing of Holocaust victims in order to speed their posthumous conversions — Joshua Cohen

You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray [the confessed assassin of Martin Luther King]. We miss you, James. Godspeed. — Rush Limbaugh