I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.
I think about dying, but i don’t want to die. Not even close. In fact, my problem is the complete opposite. I want to live, I want to escape. I feel trapped and bored and claustrophobic. There’s so much to see and so much to do but I somehow still find myself doing nothing at all. I’m still here, in this metaphorical bubble of existence and I can’t quite figure out what the hell I’m doing or how to get out of it.
I spend a lot of time with Buddhists. I’m not a Buddhist, but their relationship with death interests me.
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
I melted into the dream as if I had always been there. I knew where I had come from; I knew where I was going.
It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule. You are puzzled because you cannot get over the idea that pleasures are only of the sense; but, child, a man who dies for his country dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage because he likes it.
Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.
May, I love you with everything I am. For so long, I just wanted to be like you. But I had to figure out that I am someone too, and now I can carry you, your heart with mine, everywhere I go.
I meant, said Ipslore bitterly, what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?Death thought about it.CATS, he said eventually. CATS ARE NICE.
I asked him if it were a mirage, and he said yes. I said it was a dream, and he agreed, But said it was the desert’s dream not his. And he told me that in a year or so, when he had aged enough for any man, then he would walk into the wind, until he saw the tents. This time, he said, he would go on with them.
Would you like me to [kill you] now? asked Snape, his voice heavy with irony. Or would you like a few moments to compose an epitaph?
There is no man so blessed that some who stand by his deathbed won’t hail the occasion with delight.
Once very near the end I said, ‘If you can — if it is allowed — come to me when I too am on my death bed.’ ‘Allowed!’ she said. ‘Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I’d break it into bits.
Everybody has an angel hiding inside. When you die, your angel comes out. You can die, but not your angel. Your angel never dies.
You are young, and rich, and have friends, and at such an age I know it is hard to die!
I could write my name across the sky, and it would be in invisible ink.
I held her close for only a short time, but after she was gone, I’d see her smile on the face of a perfect stranger and I knew she would be there with me all the rest of my days.
Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death’s perfect punctuation mark is a smile.
Closure is just as delusive-it is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief.
I can’t die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwords I’ll have a whole lifetime in which to die.
Some of us hover when we weep for the other who wasdying since the day they were born.
A tomb now suffices him for whom the world was not enough.[Alexander’s tombstone epitaph]
The whole image is that eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God’s infinite love. That’s the message we’re brought up with, isn’t it? Believe or die! Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options.
You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.
We have only a little time to please the living. But all eternity to love the dead.
In a world where the dead have returned to life, the word trouble’ loses much of its meaning.
The poetry you could write about Rufus helping me out of my grave isn’t lost on me.
…and there you have it, another body on the floor surrounded by things that don’t mean much to anyone except to the one who can’t take any of them along.
Charles de Foucauld, the found of the Little Brothers of Jesus, wrote a single sentence that’s ahad a profound impact on my life. He said, The one thing we owe absolutely to God is never to be afraid of anything. Never to be afraid of anything, even death, which, after all, is but that final breakthrough into the open, waiting, outstretched arms of Abba.
I think the idea that death is not the end, that your dog’s just gone to live on the farm, is limiting. Thoughts like that prevent you from making the most of the time that you have.
Everyone grieves in different ways. For some, it could take longer or shorter. I do know it never disappears. An ember still smolders inside me. Most days, I don’t notice it, but, out of the blue, it’ll flare to life.
A pig resembles a saint in that he is more honored after death than during his lifetime.
This is a night for song and sin and drink, for come the morrow, the virtuous and the vile burn together.
If she could have died…if she could have disappeared forever…but the solid surface of things refused to dissolve around her, and her body, her hateful hermaphrodite’s body, continued in its stubborn, lumpen way, to live…
While he was waiting, leaning on the counter at a coffee place, he remembered the dream he’d had the night before about Antonio Jones, who had been dead for several years now. As before, he asked himself what Jones could have died of, and the one answer that occurred to him was old age. One day, walking down some street in Brooklyn, Antonio Jones had felt tired, sat down on the sidewalk, and a second later stopped existing.
It was from an old friend who thought he was dying. Anyway, he said, ‘Life and death issues don’t come along that often, thank God, so don’t treat everything like it’s life or death. Go easier.’
Nothing, they say is more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than the time of dying
His eyes were more sunken than I remembered them, and his cheekbones more pronounced. This gave him a harsher, older look – until he smiled, of course, and the sagging cheeks gathered up like curtains.
Death’s got an Invisibility Cloak? Harry interrupted again.So he can sneak up on people, said Ron. Sometimes he gets bored of running at them, flapping his arms and shrieking…
Life can’t defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death.
Love doesn’t go anywhere when you die, you know. The person passes on, the body withers, but love, it survives.
I’ve always figured it that you die each day and each day is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you’ve died a couple of thousand times in your life, and that’s a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don’t know or understand or want to understand.
It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death– ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.
So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more.
Bod shrugged. So? he said. It’s only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead.
That cake tasted good. But the cake in the garbage tasted better. It was the best cake I ever ate.
As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.
For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar’s angel:Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him!This was the most unkindest cut of all
Never trust a man who teaches about death but yet had no real experience at all about it.
Red lips are not so red as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
Bushido is realized in the presence of death. This means choosing death whenever there is a choice between life and death. There is no other reasoning.
Keisuke: It’s alright for you to kill someone?Akira: As long as they have tags. According to the rules, if there’s three people present, it’s an official battle. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to start it, though.Keisuke: So killing people is just a game, huh?Akira: It’s the only way to survive.
He cries. ‘Please! I don’t want to die.’I lean over. My hair smothers him.’Then you should never have been born,’ I say.
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.
She had always found villains more exciting than heroes. They had ambition, passion. They made the stories happen. Villains didn’t fear death. No, they wrapped themselves in death like suits of armor! As she inhaled the school’s graveyard smell, Agatha felt her blood rush. For like all villains, death didn’t scare her. It made her feel alive.
When it is winter and we must walk in the blizzard snow do not our fingers and toes whisper death And when winter is at last over. . .can we not hear our bellies whisper death to us In the dark don’t we know And when we are paralyzed by nightmares We know what you are. With our first cries we rail against you. We see you in every drop of blood in every tear.
Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day one should meditate on being carried away by surging waves, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease.
He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.
I want to feel the rush of death, the high of utter nothingness, the fragility of my own mortality. Let it slip through my fingers like sand and when it’s gone for good, I’ll be none the wiser.
We’d stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You’d think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn’t.