Who knoweth if to die be but to live, and that called life by mortals be but death?
When it reached the mirror’s edge, the blood began to drip and the synchronous echo of each drop that hit the white, porcelain sink below almost felt relaxing.
When you attempt suicide, the counselors try to talk you out of trying it again by asking you about other people, which is good prevention if you care about other people.
When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I’m dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.
Madlen came to sit beside her on the bed. Lady Queen, she said with her own particular brand of rough gentleness. It is not the job of the child to protect her mother. It’s the mother’s job to protect the child. By allowing your mother to protect you, you gave her a gift. Do you understand me?
I could introduce myself properly, but it’s not really necessary. You will know me well enough and soon enough, depending on a diverse range of variables. It suffices to say that at some point in time, I will be standing over you, as genially as possible. Your soul will be in my arms. A color will be perched on my shoulder. I will carry you gently away.
‘Rent’ is about a community celebrating life in the face of death and AIDS at the turn of the century.
It bothered me that he was right. Without Sir Stuart’s intervention, I’d have been dead again already.That’s right–you heard me: dead again already.I mean, come on. How screwed up is your life (after- or otherwise) when you find yourself needing phrases like that?
The oblivion fear is something else, fear that I won’t be able to give anything in exchange for my life. If you don’t live a life in service of a greater good, you’ve gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won’t get either a life or a death that means anything.
Gods whose dominion is over the Souls, Shades without sound, Void, and you, Burning River, and you, broad Spaces voiceless beneath the Night, may I remain sinless in telling what has been told to me, and, by your divine assent, reveal truth sunk in depths of earth and gloom.
You can’t live your life thinking death is going to come all the time. You have to live life and if it comes, then we can only hope we were able to do all the things we wanted. He has to want to do something. Everyone does.
What if she’s all I give you in this life of ours, my love? she asked quietly. Then I’ll shout at the goddess in fury, he said fiercely. I’ll beg to know why I’ve been given so much when other men have so little.
Attempts to tame the wayward and domesticate the riotous, to make the unknowable predictable and enchain the free-roaming – all such things sound the death knell to love.
You start to die the moment you are born. The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death. So take it easy.
Nico didn’t like to be touched, but somehow this brief contact with his father felt reassuring – the same way the Chapel of Bones was reassuring. Like death, his father’s presence was cold and often callous, but it was real – brutally honest, inescapably dependable.
At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.
If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.
To his way of thinking, the only thing more natural than death was sex.
I’m watching the Weather Channel more than I’ve ever watched it. I’m scared to death it’s going to rain.
However cozy things seemed, the facts of life were the same. You couldn’t escape death: It would get us all in the end.
I hope you never hear those words. Your mom. She died. They are different than other words. They are too big to fit in your ears. They belong to some strange, heavy, powerful language that pounds away at the side of your head, a wrecking ball coming at you again and again, until finally, the words crack a hole large enough to fit inside your brain. And in so doing, they split you apart.
Life is like a very short visit to a toyshop between birth and death.
What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief.
I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it – from The Gulag Archipelago
Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It’s the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom…
I doubt love can do little else, if it cannot bring back people back from the dead.
But those who believe that flowers grow in vases don’t understand anything about literature. The library has now become her first-aid kit, and she’s going to give the children a little of the medicine that helped her recover her smile when she thought she’d lost it forever.
But eyes couldn’t stay closed forever, unless one was dead. And the dead never dreamed.
The young open the paper to forget about life by reading the funny strips. The old do it to forget about death by reading other people’s obits. My advice: don’t open the paper and go on with your life.
In life, more than in anything else, it isn’t easy to end up alive.
In fact, I would defend to the death their right to express a different point of view.
DEATHWhy do you fear me?I am your friend.I but guide trav’lersRounding the bend —Lead them to freedomFrom time and age,Help them start writing a new page…Seek for me never,Keep your course true —When I am neededI’ll come to you,Then I will show youRoads without end —Why do you fear me?I am your friend.
Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you’re scared to death.
At this time I had complete confidence in Russian policy and believed that the Western Allies deliberately allowed Germany and Russia to fight each other to death.
If you’re thinking of calling on that Mrs. Pentstemmon, you can save yourself the trouble. The old biddy’s dead.Dead? said Sophie. She had a silly impulse to add, But she was alive an hour ago! And she stopped herself, because death is like that: people are alive until they die.
Even death, faced with the option of death or life, she would choose life.
Grief, no matter how you try to cater to its wail, has a way of fading away.
As he watches the sun rise, what grieves him is that he failed her. He thinks of the terror she felt. They tell him it was quick, as if that will somehow confine the horror.
When the state imposes the death penalty, it proclaims that taking one human life counterbalances the taking of another life. This assumption is profoundly mistaken.
From too much love of livingFrom hope and fear set free,We thank with brief thanksgivingWhatever gods may beThat no life lives for ever;That dead men rise up never;That even the weariest riverWinds somewhere safe to sea.Then star nor sun shall waken,Nor any change of light:Nor sound of waters shaken,Nor any sound or sight:Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,Nor days nor things diurnal;Only the sleep eternalIn an eternal night.
We all know we’re one day closer to the end when we wake up in the morning. We just kid ourselves that it’s not happening.
When the star dies, Its eye closes; tired of watching, It flies back to its first bright dream.
Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?
The tension has worn us out. It is a deadly tension that feels as if a jagged knife blade is being scraped along the spine. Our legs won’t function, our hands are trembling and our bodies are like thin membranes stretched over barely repressed madness, holding in what would otherwise be an unrestrained outburst of endless scream.s. We have no flesh, no muscle now
The true Christian is called to be a soldier and must behave as such from the day of his conversion to the day of his death. He is not meant to live a life of religious ease, indolence and security. He must never imagine for a moment that he can sleep and doze along the way to heaven, like one traveling in an easy carriage.
Although we resolutely supported the armed struggle against Batista’s tyranny, we were, on principle, opposed to any terrorist action that could cause the death of innocent people.
I hope, by God’s grace, that I am truly a Christian, not deviating from the faith, and that I would rather suffer the penalty of a terrible death than wish to affirm anything outside of the faith or transgress the commandments of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Therin lies the paradox of the profession,’ Faraday said. ‘Those who wish to have the job should not have it…and those who would most refuse to kill are the only ones who should.
The over-weight and out of shape guy who owned the house had apparently decided that having a half-million dollar house meant that he couldn’t afford to hire someone to clean out his gutters. Now he was dead with what looked to me like a broken neck after the ladder had slipped. He’d taken the plunge into his fancy landscaping—complete with rock garden. But hey, his fucking gutters were clean.
He wipes tears off my face and then snot. He uses his hands. He loves me that much.
We are all the fools of time and terror: DaysSteal on us and steal from us; yet we live,Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.
When one is young, aspiring to play for the country, doing well, any hindrance, like injury or being out of form, can be frustrating and a cause of annoyance or even anger. But once you have a close encounter with death, you realise the real value of life.
For 200 years we’ve been conquering nature. Now we’re beating it to death.
Sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day — Mother Nature’s best effort yet at contra-death.
In the moment before I crossed over, I knew that the priests and magicians of Egypt were fools and charlatans for promising to prolong the beauties of life beyond the world we are give. Death is no enemy, but the foundation of gratitude, sympathy, and art. All of life’s pleasures, only love owes no debt to death.