Killers aren’t always assassins. Sometimes, they don’t even have blood on their hands.
You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe
No! no! My engagement is with no bride–the worms! the worms expect me! I am a dead man–I have been slain by robbers–my body lies at Wurtzburg–at midnight I am to be buried–the grave is waiting for me–I must keep my appointment!
You may not believe in life, but I don’t believe in death. … The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity–it’s envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.
Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages
Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.
She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, a tiny, bloody angel in the snow, and they were going to destroy her.
They say that in the second before our death, each of us understands the real reason for our existence, and out of that moment, heaven or hell is born.
What is a ghost? Something dead that seems to be alive. Something dead that doesn’t know it’s dead.
I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.
Life is just one long day separated into sections by sleep. Life never stops happening until you are dead. So whatever happens-love, grief, hate, shame- never disappears. It just gets easier to live with. It just scabs over, waiting for something else significant to happen.
You can’t give her that!’ she screamed. ‘It’s not safe!’IT’S A SWORD, said the Hogfather. THEY’RE NOT MEANT TO BE SAFE.’She’s a child!’ shouted Crumley.IT’S EDUCATIONAL.’What if she cuts herself?’THAT WILL BE AN IMPORTANT LESSON.
Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.
Having made the decision to love, had I chosen life instead of death?
It’s not easy losing someone, she said. It never goes away, does it? The Phantom Pain, they call it, I said. Like amputees get when they can still feel their missing limbs.
My best day ever. Got up. Had breakfast. Came to school. Bored, as usual. Wishing I wasn’t there, like usual. Kids ignoring me, suits me fine. Sitting with the other retards—we’re so special. Wasting my time. Yesterday was the same, and it’s gone, anyway. Tomorrow may never come. There is only today. This is the best day and the worst day. Actually it’s crap.
If there’s any guy crazy enough to attack me, I’m going to show him the end of the world — close up. I’m going to let him see the kingdom come with his own eyes. I’m going to send him straight to the southern hemisphere and let the ashes of death rain all over him and the kangaroos and the wallabies.
What especially moved him was the corpse of a child of twelve or thirteen. He felt something like envy as he looked at it, recalling such expression as “Those whom the gods love die young.” Both his sister and his half-brother had lost their houses to fire. His sister’s husband, though, was on a suspended sentence for perjury.Too bad we didn’t all die.
Dear as remembered kisses after death,And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’dOn lips that are for others; deep as love,Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;O Death in Life, the days that are no more!
I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.
I could picture how Caprice was before we lost her. Dark hair, beautiful smile, intelligent hazel eyes, quick wit.Now gone.Just gone.Like a chessboard where suddenly one of the knights disappeared. A blank spot on the board of life that could never truly be replaced because no two things were alike, no two beings alike.
Fear not death for the sooner we die, the longer we shall be immortal.
We have once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create.
I didn’t tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.
After sixty-one years together, she simply clutched my hand and exhaled.
How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.
Tell me what it is like to die, I answered. He dismounted from his horse, looking at me strangely the whole while. You experience something similar every day, he said softly. It is as familiar to you as bread and butter. Yes, I said. It is like every night when I fall asleep. No. It is like every morning when you wake up.
All persons harboring or secreting the conspirators or aiding their concealment or escape, will be treated as accomplices in the murder of the President and shall be subject to trial before a military commission, and the punishment of death.
That’s the beautiful thing about innocence; even monsters have a pocketful of childhood memories with which to seek comfort with.
The rest of my days I’m going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I’m going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I will die–with my hand in the hand of some nice looking ship’s doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch. Poor lady, they’ll say, The quinine did her no good. That unwashed grape has transported her soul to heaven.
The white sail of his soul has rounded the promontory – death.
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
Time and space were, from Death’s point of view, merely things that he’d heard described. When it came to Death, they ticked the box marked Not Applicable. It might help to think of the universe as a rubber sheet, or perhaps not.
Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why they write symphonies..
There’s nothing here. Nothing at all.’Marina gave me a look that I could not fathom.’You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘The memories of hundreds of people lie here. Their lives, their feelings, their expectations, their absence, the dreams that never came true for them, the disappointments, the deceptions and the unrequited loves that poisoned their existence… All that is here, trapped for ever.
I got out on the street and started crying the kind of hysterical tears made justifiable only by turning off one’s cell phone, putting it to the ear, and pretending to be told of a death in the family.
Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.
Of course, in a novel, people’s hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us. There is a most busy and important round of eating, drinking, dressing, walking, visiting, buying, selling, talking, reading, and all that makes up what is commonly called living, yet to be gone through…
You can’t just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different, and I’m sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice. You left me Perhapsless, stuck in your goddamned labyrinth. And now I don’t even know if you chose the straight and fast way out, if you left me like this on purpose. And so I never knew you, did I? I can’t remember, because I never knew.
The truth is that I feel totally helpless, or totally inconsolable, to be more honest. I’m not trying to hide it, but it’s something you’re not to worry about.
…the dead have a way of becoming saints in the eyes of their survivors…
I wonder if I’ll ever have to decide which is worse, life as we’re living or no life at all.
Science ask facts and religion ask faith, humans are confused between life and death.
I’d like to die listening to a piece of music. I imagine this as so easy, so natural, but naturally it’s quite impossible. Notes stab too softly. The wounds they leave behind may smart, but they don’t fester. Melancholy and pain trickle out instead of blood. When the notes cease, all is peaceful within me again.
Death didn’t bother me much. Strong Christian and all that. Method of death did. Being eaten alive. One of my top three ways not to go out.
This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man’s brains out of his hair. That is my job.
And no child deserved to die for defending her father, no matter who she was
What if it’s as simple as one moment? One tiny thing, like that kiss on the rocks? What if I’d kissed him a little longer? Would he be alive right now? Or what if I’d stayed with him Friday night, what if I’d been with him… wherever he was?
I killed four flies while waiting. Damn, death was everywhere. Man, bird, beast, reptile, rodent, insect, fish didn’t have a chance. The fix was in. I didn’t know what to do about it. I got depressed. You know, I see a boy at the supermarket, he’s packing my groceries, then I see him sticking himself into his own grave along with the toilet paper, the beer and the chicken breasts.
The wind made me shiver as i pulled my arms into my T-shirt. There I was, cold, isolated and desperate for something I knew I couldn’t have.A solution. A remedy. Anything.The silence continued except for my own footsteps. I hated it. Alone and confused was the last place I wanted to be.Somehow I knew I deserved this.
Still, they have one thing I envy. Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.
As Ginny and Hermione moved closer to the rest of the family, Harry had a clear view of the bodies lying next to Fred: Remus and Tonks, pale and still and peaceful-looking, apparently asleep beneath the dark, enchanted ceiling.
When you die, do you want to feel ashamed of what you’ve done with your life? Feel ashamed of what your life meant?
I’ll stop eating steak when you stop killing spiders. Absurdity: comparing cows to spiders. Arachnids are pure evil. They’re like a cigarette manufacturer or a terrorist. They’re organized religion on eight legs.