Oblivion

Oblivion is an eternal state of lack of awareness thought by some to occur after death. This idea contradicts beliefs that there is an afterlife, such as a heaven or hell, after death. The idea of eternal oblivion stems from the idea that the brain creates the mind; therefore, when the brain dies, the mind ceases to exist. The name of the idea derives from the original meaning of the word, referring to a state of forgetfulness or distraction, or a state of being completely forgotten.

Quotes

• It's calm under the waves in the blue of my oblivion.
  • Fiona Apple

• [Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.
  • Clive Barker

• Oblivion is full of people who allow the opinions of others to overrule their belief in themselves.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• I fear oblivion. I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark.
  • John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

• There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.
  • John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

• Only the dead could afford oblivion.
  • Robert Jordan, New Spring, Chapter 1: The Hook. p. 5 (January 2004)

• No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away.
  • Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

• Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.
  • Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

• I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.
  • Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

• Wishing to grab the life with nothingness
  wanting to erase the sigh of tiredness
  forgetting myself completely from my being
  why do I seek embrace of yours
  do not ask me, I know not,
  I am in oblivion.
  • Suman Pokhrel, I'm in Oblivion

• Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.
  • Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

• As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that.
  • Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

• Then she was kissing him as she had never kissed him before...and it was blissful oblivion, better than firewhisky; she was the only real thing in the world.
  • J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

• Oblivion - what a blessing...for the mind to dwell a world away from pain.
  • Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 564-65.

• Oblivion is not to be hired.
  • Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, Chapter V.

• For those sacred powers
  Tread on oblivion: no desert of ours
  Can be entombed in their celestial breasts.
  • William Browne, Britannia's Pastorals, Book III. Song II, Stanza 23.

• It is not in the storm nor in the strife
  We feel benumb'd, and wish to be no more,
  But in the after-silence on the shore,
  When all is lost, except a little life.
  • Lord Byron, Lines on Hearing that Lady Byron was Ill, line 9.

• Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.
  • Thomas Carlyle, Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, Introduction, Chapter I.

• And o'er the past oblivion stretch her wing.
  • Homer, Odyssey, Book XXIV, line 557. Pope's translation.

• He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more.
  • Job, VII. 10.

• Injuriarum remedium est oblivio.
  • Oblivion is the remedy for injuries.
  • Seneca the Younger, Epistles, 94. Quoting from an old poet, also found in Syrus.

• What's past and what's to come is strew'd with husks
  And formless ruin of oblivion.
  • William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602), Act IV, scene 5, line 166.

• Eo magis præfulgebant quod non videbantur.
  • They shone forth the more that they were not seen.
  • Tacitus; adapted from Annals, Book III. 76.

• But from your mind's chilled sky
  It needs must drop, and lie with stiffened wings
  Among your soul's forlornest things;
  A speck upon your memory, alack!
  A dead fly in a dusty window-crack.
  • Francis Thompson, "Manus Animam Pinxit", St. 2.