Last Words Quotes

364 Sourced quotes

Obstreperous, 'huh, said Tad. I see you've been using that Big Word of the Day calendar I got you last Christmas. That is irrefragable, I told him solemnly.

Patricia Briggs

For better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.

Vladimir Nabokov

... the impulse of iconoclasmː refusing unconditional reality and value to the contingent and flawed worlds we build and affirming that there will always be more in us, individually and collectively, than there can ever be in them. The most complete expression of this iconoclastic commitment is the development of forms of life and consciousness that provide us with the means and occasions to resist and reform them. In this way, they save us from having to choose between engaging wholeheartedly in them and keeping the last word, of resistance and transcendence, to ourselves.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Is faith so cheap, my child? Faith is the last word. If one has faith, the goal is practically reached.

You can't argue with the dead, no matter what you say, they always have the last word.

Jennifer Donnelly

The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions — whenever asked — cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination.

The Last Of England works with image and sound, a language which is nearer to poetry than prose. It tells its story quite happily in silent images, in contrast to a word-bound cinema....

My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.

Speak... of the separation of ownership and active leadership. Ordinarily the problem is stated in terms of the divorce between ownership and "control". This last word is badly overused, and it needs to be precisely defined... Our procedure... will be to study the ownership of officers and directors and then to ascertain the extent to which non-management stockholdings are sufficiently concentrated to permit through ownership the wielding of considerable power and influence (control?) over management by an individual, group or another corporation.

Robert Aaron Gordon

Now I know I am an intellectual. I saw Malcolm Muggeridge on the television last night, and I understood nearly every word. It all adds up. A bad home, poor diet, not liking punk. I think I will join the library and see what happens.

I was born from nothing and to nothing I will return. And yet, when i say the word nothing, when i admit, at last, 'I am nothing,' i feel mysteriously like something again, ground zero, genesis, the pull of possibilities.

Psychology, speaking for emotion and instinct, has reduced intellect to impotence over life. Metaphysics has subordinated it to will. Bergson and his followers have charged it with falsehood and issued a general warning against its misrepresentations; while with pragmatists and instrumentalists it has sunk so low that it is dressed in livery and sent to live in the servant's quarters. It is against this last indignity in particular that I wish to speak a word of protest, to the end that the intellect may be accorded full rights within the community of human activities and interests.

Ralph Barton Perry

And once we reach the city, my stylist will dictate my look for the opening ceremonies tonight anyway. I just hope I get one who doesn't think nudity is the last word in fashion.

Suzanne Collins

I think Joyce and Kafka have said the last word on each of the two forms they developed. There's no one to follow them. They're like cats which have licked the plate clean. You've got to dream up another dish if you're to be a writer.

On the writing style o James Joyce and Franz Kafka

A man who has the last word usually says, "Yes, dear."

Franklin P. Jones

The writer does not and should not have the last word. That belongs to the reader.

Nature is a conjurer for supermen. Generations of scientists have attempted to penetrate her secrets. Bit by bit the disguise is being torn away, but each new discovery seems only to open out fresh avenues demanding further exploration. Nature is a true woman, who will have the last word.

In various talk th' instructive hours they past, Who gave the ball, or paid the visit last; One speaks the glory of the British queen, And one describes a charming Indian screen; A third interprets motions, looks, and eyes; At every word a reputation dies.

So too Plato was, in my view, a very unreliable Platonist. He was too much of a philosopher to think that anything he had said was the last word.

Life has unfathomable secrets. Human knowledge will be erased from the archives of the world before we possess the last word that the Gnat has to say to us.

Maurice Maeterlinck

It became the middle finger I couldn't raise in PR photographs. The mustache became my silent last word in the verbal battles I was losing with higher headquarters on rules, targets, and fighting the war.

Not the scientist, but nature has the last word.

Hans Christian von Baeyer

First, we believe that God is a being with a body in form like man's; that he possesses body, parts and passions; that in a word, God is an exalted, perfected man. Secondly, we believe in a plurality of Gods. Third, we believe that somewhere and some time in the ages to come, through development, through enlargement, through purification until perfection is attained, man at last may become like God - a God.

The only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said.

The secret of joy is hidden in the word itself: first J, then O, then Y: Jesus first, Others next, Yourself last.