Top 35 Tom Rachman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Our worst fear isn’t the end of life but the end of memories.”

— Tom Rachman

2. “You know, there’s that silly saying ‘We’re born alone and we die alone’ -it’s nonsense. We’re surrounded at birth and surrounded at death. It is in between that we’re alone.”

— Tom Rachman

3. “We enjoy this illusion of continuity and we call it memory. Which explains, perhaps, why our worst fear isn’t the end of life, but the end of memories.”

— Tom Rachman

4. “Remembering is the most overrated thing. Forgetting is far superior.”

— Tom Rachman

5. “Anything that’s worth anything is complicated.”

— Tom Rachman

6. “The training of a journalist, of working with words for thousands of hours, is extraordinarily useful for a fiction writer.”

— Tom Rachman

7. “Journalists who are devoted to strictly factual reporting take particular pleasure from satirical news outlets that have the liberty to laugh and even mock the hypocrisy that reporters and editors must simply observe without comment.”

— Tom Rachman

8. “Nothing epitomizes the futility of human striving quite like aspartame.”

— Tom Rachman

9. “What’s remarkable about fiction is that it places you in the unusual position of having no trajectory. You stand aside, motives abandoned for the duration. The characters have the trajectories now, while you just observe. And this stirs compassion that, in real life, is so often obscured by our own motives.”

— Tom Rachman

10. “Basically, financial reporting is this sinking hole at the centre of journalism. You start by swimming around it until finally, reluctantly, you can’t fight the pull anymore and you get sucked down the drain into the biz pages.”

— Tom Rachman

11. “Nobody likes to be understood without warning.”

— Tom Rachman

12. “People, it turns out, aren’t a product of their own time. They’re a product of the time before theirs.”

— Tom Rachman

13. “Milton stood among his staff, shaking hands, memorising names. He already knew them in a way – he understood this breed backward and had foreseeen how his speech would be received. Journalists were as touchy as Cabernet performers and as stubborn as factory machinists. He couldn’t help smiling.”

— Tom Rachman

14. “A common defense among obituary-fanciers such as myself is that the obit is not about death at all. It is about life. This is true since an article about the condition of deadness would make for turgid reading at best.”

— Tom Rachman

15. “What strikes me,” Sarah continued, “is that men are such savages – they don’t fold their clothes, they pee on the toilet seat, they barely wash – yet when it comes to their views on women they’re suddenly so concerned about how everything looks. Each barbarian becomes an aesthete about the female body, all of a sudden expecting perfection.”

— Tom Rachman

16. “Good reporting and good behavior are mutually exclusive.”

— Tom Rachman

17. “Unlike in books, there was no concluding page on the Internet, just a limitless chain that left her tired, tense, up too late.”

— Tom Rachman

18. “Leo sought to tease out details but failed – Ott had the ability to insert full stops in conversations, when and where he wished them.”

— Tom Rachman

19. “When, she wonders, do people have time to contemplate anything? But she has no time to answer that.”

— Tom Rachman

20. “Here is a fact: nothing in all civilization has been as productive as ludicrous ambition. Whatever its ills, nothing has created more. Cathedrals, sonatas, encyclopedias: love of God was not behind them, nor love of life. But the love of man to be worshiped by man.”

— Tom Rachman

21. “Art doesn’t spring from the muses alone, but from hard work.”

— Tom Rachman

22. “What’s there to say about making paintings?” He looks hard at his son. “My real life, it’s when I’m working. It’s entirely there. The rest – everything – is flimflam. And that’s tragedy. Because what am I really doing? Wiping colors across fabric? Tricking people into feeling something’s there, when it’s nothing? When I’m doing the work, I almost think it adds up. Then they drag me to some farce like tonight, and I’m reminded what my job really is: goddamn decoration.”

— Tom Rachman

23. “During my past career as a journalist, I relished writing obits and equally dreaded phoning relatives for the necessary facts. But to my surprise and great relief, they often wanted to talk – they wanted their recently deceased loved ones recorded in print.”

— Tom Rachman

24. “Xavi never did see the end of the Iraq War; he died at the peak of the pandemonium there, though he’d stopped caring, having receded from the world in stages: aware of just the hospice, then just his room, then his bed, then his body, then nothing.”

— Tom Rachman

25. “I say that ambition is absurd, and yet I remain in its thrall. It’s like being a slave all your life, then learning one day that you never had a master, and returning to work all the same.”

— Tom Rachman

26. “He cannot deny a certain relief in being able to sift through academic tomes, fulfilling his journalistic duty without having to barge past security guards at the Arab League or grab man-on-the-street from women at the market. This library work is easily his favorite part of reporting so far.”

— Tom Rachman

27. “People kept their books, she thought, not because they were likely to read them again but because these objects contained the past – the texture of being oneself at a particular place, at a particular time, each volume a piece of one’s intellect, whether the work itself had been loved or despised or had induced a snooze on page forty.”

— Tom Rachman

28. “You can’t dread what you can’t experience. The only death we experience is that of other people. That’s as bad as it gets. And that’s bad enough, surely.”

— Tom Rachman

29. “When young, Pinch considered human connections the refuge of those who couldn’t make art. Or is art just the refuge of those who cannot connect?”

— Tom Rachman

30. “People did not see the world for what it was but for what they were.”

— Tom Rachman

31. “You have to understand, Annika, that I have pretty much resigned myself to spinsterhood since, I don’t know, since approximately my entire life. But just because I act chirpy about it doesn’t mean that I’m chirpy about it. You have Menzies. Me? I dread weekends. How depressing is that? I wish I didn’t have vacation time-I have no idea what to do with it. I don’t have anyone to go anywhere with. Look at me-I’m practically forty and I still resemble Pippi Longstocking.”

— Tom Rachman

32. “You asked why I came here to Rome. I never cared about the news. I came to be in the same room as you, even if I had to build that room, fill it with people, with typewriters, the rest.”

— Tom Rachman

33. “The purpose of clothing, as best he could tell, was to keep one unembarrassed and at the right temperature. If an outfit served that purpose for a respectable period – twenty years, say – and at the lowest price available, then it was successful.”

— Tom Rachman

34. “He glances at the sorry trio of copy editors before him: Dave Belling, a simpleton far too cheerful to compose a decent headline; Ed Rance, who wears a white ponytail – what more need one say?; and Ruby Zaga, who is sure that the entire staff is plotting against her, and is correct. What is the value in remonstrating with such a feckless triumvirate?”

— Tom Rachman

35. “This is good for my ego after, like, two years of seeing Italian guys in pink sweaters and orange pants and, like, pulling it off. You know what I’m saying?”

— Tom Rachman

36. “Books,” he said, “are like mushrooms. They grow when you are not looking. Books increase by rule of compound interest: one interest leads to another interest, and this compounds into third. Next, you have so much interest there is no space in closet.”

— Tom Rachman

37. “Many things embarrass me, but reading isnt one of them. Im not ashamed of my slightly weird collection of prison memoirs. Nor the flaky meditation books. After all, I can pretend I never read those.”

— Tom Rachman

38. “But my point, you see, is that death is misunderstood. The loss of one’s life is not the greatest loss. It is no loss at all. To others, perhaps, but not to oneself. From one’s own perspective, experience simply halts. From one’s own perspective, there is no loss.”

— Tom Rachman