Posthumous Quotations

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

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