He knows that after him ...

He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.
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 John Banville

Quotes from the same author

There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.
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 John Banville
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s devoted Beckett readers greeted each successively shorter volume from the master with a mixture of awe and apprehensiveness; it was like watching a great mathematician wielding an infinitesimal calculus, his equations approaching nearer and still nearer to the null point.
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 John Banville
I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.
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 John Banville
I dont know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, its very difficult to find.
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 John Banville
Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.
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 John Banville