You smile upon your friend to-day,To-day his ills are over;You hearken to the lover’s say,And happy is the lover.’Tis late to hearken, late to smile, But better late than never:I shall have lived a little whileBefore I die for ever.
Of all the ways I had imagined my death, getting beaten by my zombified mentor while trapped by a cannibalistic window handle wasn’t one of them
Because no one needs to live for ever. I think that sometimes you can outstay your welcome.
No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Without that, I am not alive.
Some people say my work is often depressing and pessimistic, with the emphasis on death, blood, overcrowding, strange beings and so on, but I don’t really think it is.
Endings are not always bad. Most times they’re just beginnings in disguise.
I always say, if you must mount the gallows, give a jest to the crowd, a coin to the hangman, and make the drop with a smile on your lips.
Together, they would watch everything that was so carefully planned collapse, and they would smile at the beauty of destruction.
How do you measure the life of one person against the greater good? Can it ever be the right thing to sacrifice an innocent person? And how do you know what the greater good really is?
The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows.
WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEART OF MEN?The Death of Rats looked up from the feast of the potato. SQUEAK, he said.Death waved a hand dismissively. WELL, YES, OBVIOUSLY ME, he said. I JUST WONDERED IF THERE WAS ANYONE ELSE.
She died–this was the way she died;And when her breath was done,Took up her simple wardrobeAnd started for the sun.Her little figure at the gateThe angels must have spied,Since I could never find herUpon the mortal side.
All through life there were distinctions – toilets for men, toilets for women; clothes for men, clothes for women – then, at the end, the graves are identical.
Sometimes there’s nothing you can do. […] Sometimes they don’t have enough to fight with.
There was not an inch of solid ground anywhere in the world for me to call my own. I didn’t belong anywhere. Had I disappeared, no one would have noticed.
Celaena knew where she was before she awoke. And she didn’t care. She was living the same story again and again.The night she’d been captured, she’d also snapped, and come so close to killing the person she most wanted to destroy before someone knocked her out and she awoke in a rotting dungeon. She smiled bitterly as she opened her eyes. It was always the same story, the same loss.
He shoved her aside and forced his sword, to the hilt, straight through James’s torso.
He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn’t really much else to do. Make something, and die.
We fear death, we shudder at life’s instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.
Dark circles under my eyes sink deeper and deeper into my skull, in contrast to my pale skin there is an undeniable resemblance to a fresh corpse.
Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.
A piece of me is gone, she told me once while we were bra shopping. I think we’re made up of all these different pieces and every time someone goes, you’re left with less of yourself.
If it is perfectly acceptable for a widow to disfigure herself or commit suicide to save face for her husband’s family, why should a mother not be moved to extreme action by the loss of a child or children? We are their caretakers. We love them. We nurse them when they are sick. . . But no woman should live longer than her children. It is against the law of nature. If she does, why wouldn’t she wish to leap from a cliff, hang from a branch, or swallow lye?
Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you’re free to live. You no longer care about your reputation. You no longer care except so far as your life can be used tactically to promote a cause you believe in.
Death comes for us all, Brother. You cannot hide from it forever. We will die one day, you and I. And that doesn’t frighten you? Rhy shrugged. Not nearly as much as the idea of wasting a perfectly good life in fear of it.
Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind toward some final resolution, some clear meaning, which it perhaps never finds.
Maybe the only good thing about death is that you never have to relive it. You never have to remember the pain.
For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.
Too easy to lose the way.Too hard to keep from unraveling when there’s nothing to remind you of who youare and where you should be.Another eternity passes in the flick of an eyelash.
Now every mortal has painand sweat is constant,but if there is anything dearer than being alive,it’s dark to me.We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth–we call it life. We know no other.The underworld’s a blankand all the rest just fantasy.
But now–it’s like God has it out for us. Why both of them? Wasn’t my dad enough? It’s like death came and punched us square in the face.
Nothing has changed. It’s still very simple. I miss him. I miss him every day. I miss him very much. But how would it be if that feeling was gone? I would not want that to happen. I told the shrink: it would not make me happy at all not to miss him anymore.
You are afraid to die, and you’re afraid to live. What a way to exist.
This is war, and people are going to die. Friends are going to die. I’ve come to accept the pain, to take the ugliness for granted. So it can be a little stunning when something good actually happens.
Death is alive, they whispered. Death lives inside life, as bones dance within the body. Yesterday is within today. Yesterday never dies.
Morrie,” Koppel said, “that was seventy years ago your mother died. The pain still goes on?”“You bet,” Morrie whispered.
Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you – it’s born with us the day that we are born.
Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.
Not only during the ascent, but also during the descent my willpower is dulled. The longer I climb the less important the goalseems to me, the more indifferent I become to myself. My attentionhas diminished, my memory is weakened. My mental fatigue is nowgreater than the bodily. It is so pleasant to sit doing nothing – and therefore so dangerous. Death through exhaustion is like deaththrough freezing – a pleasant one.
I think it’s cool to wear roadkill. If I died and somebody wanted to wear my teeth around their neck to VMAs, I’d feel honored.
In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life.
In the end, it wasn’t death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.
How easy to be a bird or an animal, living from day to day, unaware you’re alive, unaware that one day you will die.
Stay with me to-night; you must see me die. I have long had the taste of death on my tongue, I smell death, and who will stand by my Constanze, if you do not stay?
Now I gazed out of my office window. Slowly the world was changing from old-gold to the deep purple which, in the words of that dreamy song Mum was fond of humming, bathes garden walls under the twinkle of starlight.
What is of the nature of spirit and soul must be gleaned from facts belonging to the spirit and soul; we shall then know that in the living thinking which is liberated from the will, a life-germ has been discerned which passes through the gate of death, goes through the spiritual world after death, and afterwards returns again to earthly life.
If there is an after, I hope it’s not dark. And I hope you can remember. I’d hate to wander around in the dark forever, not knowing who I was or what I was doin’ here, or not even knowing that I’d ever had anything different.
He watched his feet, the only things that were keeping him from finding out if there really was a Kingdom of Heaven or not.