We have equated a cancer diagnosis to ‘death,’ but we look at diabetes as ‘something that you get when you get older.’ But look at diabetes – it’s the leading cause of limb amputation, heart disease, kidney failure. Many people don’t equate diabetes with these other destructive things. I didn’t equate it to those until I started reading about it.
White man trying to kill you slow every day, and sometimes trying to kill you fast. Why make it easy for him? That was one kind of work you could say no to.
I became a very simple person. The simple things are the most precious to me. I don’t ascribe much significance to the things I have now. That feeling of touching death has never left me.
Death is not a reaper, like they say, nor even a friend. It is a dark, fierce water, an inundation.
Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.
Bubba then grabbed a hold of my leg and his eyes got all cloudy and that terrible pink sky seem to drain all the colour in his face. He was trying to say something, and so I bent over real close to hear what it was. But I never could make it out. So I asked the medic, ‘ You hear what he say?’ And the medic say, ‘Home. He said, home.’ Bubba, he died, and that’s all I got to say about that.
I came in haste with cursing breath,And heart of hardest steel;But when I saw thee cold in death,I felt as man should feel.For when I look upon that face,That cold, unheeding, frigid brown,Where neither rage nor fear has place,By Heaven! I cannot hate thee now!
The times that were most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realized how utterly gone she was.
Sorry to hear about your Dad.He shrugged. He was seventy, and we always told him fast food would kill him.Heart attack?He was hit by a Pizza Express truck.
My life closed twice before its close; It yet remains to seeIf Immortality unveil A third event to me,So huge, so hopeless to conceive, As these that twice befell.Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell.
Human experience resembles the battered moon that tracks us in cycles of light and darkness, of life and death, now seeking out and now stealing away from the sun that gives it light and symbolizes eternity.
The painful truth about life is not death but death while you are alive.
Having reached 451 books as of now doesn’t help the situation. If I were to be dying now, I would be murmuring, Too bad! Only four hundred fifty-one. (Those would be my next-to-last words. The last ones will be: I love you, Janet.) [They were. -Janet.]
It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we’re alive – to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.
He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides
I want that. I want that awful intense and serious unhappiness, cos then I might feel better, and then I might be happy.
Not only had my brother disappeared, but–and bear with me here–a part of my very being had gone with him. Stories about us could, from them on, be told from only one perspective. Memories could be told but not shared.
Yes — or rather, it’s not so much that I want to die as that I’m tired of living.
And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.
Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land, drawing no dividend from time’s tomorrows.
Like the pain of a bad wound, the effect of a deep shock takes some while to be felt. When a child is told, for the first time in his life, that a person he has known is dead, although he does not disbelieve it, he may well fail to comprehend it and later ask–perhaps more than once–where the dead person is and when he is coming back.
Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.
But that’s the thing with death. The whisper of it descent travels fast and wide, and people must’ve know I’d become a corpse because nobody even came to view the body.
I’m a man who believes that I died 20 years ago. And I live like a man who is dead already. I have no fear whatsoever of anybody or anything.
It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness alike were really only appreciable with one’s legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave.
That’s what we’re all looking for. A certain peace with the idea of dying. If we know, in the end, that we can ultimately have that peace with dying, then we can finally do the really hard thing. Which is? Make peace with living.
I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it–it, the physical act.I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.
When you die, she thought now, you can no longer give love. You can’t give love anymore. She wouldn’t be able to love her children. It struck her suddenly as the very worst thing about death, worse than not being able to breathe or laugh or kiss. A kind of existential suffocation, to not be able to give her children her love anymore.
Nothing is impossible to kill. It’s just that sometimes after you kill something you have to keep shooting it until it stops moving
Upon the death of my father, our family and myself were emotionally and financially exhausted.
The worst that can possibly have happened to him is death and that we are all in for—if not this morning, then in days, or weeks, or years at most.
Each man is everything to himself, for with his death everything is dead for him. That is why each of us thinks he is everything to everyone. We must not judge nature by ourselves, but by its own standards.
Through every generation of the human race there has been a constant war, a war with fear. Those who have the courage to conquer it are made free and those who are conquered by it are made to suffer until they have the courage to defeat it, or death takes them.
Everybody was dying, or already dead, or leaving other people, and the year was dying into winter, and the only thing to do was make some noise.
So, what do you do when you know you have two days to live? Eat an entire Bitter Chocolate Death cake all by myself. Reread my favorite novel. Buy eight dozen roses from the best florist in town–the super expensive ones, the ones that smell like roses rather than merely looking like them–and put them all over my apartment. Take a good long look at everyone I love.
Oh threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!One thing at least is certain – This Life flies;One thing is certain and the rest is Lies -The Flower that once has blown forever dies.
We all die. We have only the choice, if we are privileged, of whether death comes with a whimper or a bang; of what worlds we taste before we go.
Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay; the worst is death and death will have his day.
He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.’s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving.
What you possess in the world will be found at the day of your death to belong to someone else. But what you are will be yours forever.
We are eternal beings. We lived as intelligent spirits before this mortal life. We are now living part of eternity. Our mortal birth was not the beginning; death, which faces all of us, is not the end.
The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.
Dance, my darling dance! If you dance then death can’t catch you! Nothing bad can touch you! Dance!
When we can’t understand the science behind something in this world, we make up mythological entities that we can relate to. We personify the forces of nature that mystify us, using our boundless imaginations to comfort us and make us feel like we have some control over these things that are much bigger than we are.
Leonard asks me if there’s anything I need to know before he dies, I think about it for a minute, turn to him, say what’s the meaning of life, Leonard? He laughs, says that’s an easy one, my son, it’s whatever you want it to be.
You only get one life. Live it to the fullest. All your miseries will be forgiven when you will be dead.
We suddenly feel fearful and apprehensive, naked in our perishable flesh, and for just a moment we wish we could go back to being stone—crumbling in death rather than rotting, trapped inside an immobile prison of stone rather than reduced to immaterial souls like those that now rattled within our skulls. The moment passes. There is no point in regretting irreversible decisions—one has to live with them, and we try.
Birth and death – what could be more monstrous than that? We like to deceive ourselves and call it wondrous and beautiful and majestic, but it’s freakish, let’s face it.
Our lives can’t be measured by our final years, of this I am sure.
If Shaw and Einstein couldn’t beat death, what chance have I got? Practically none.
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming Wow! What a Ride!
If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character…Would you slow down? Or speed up?
But remember that good intentions pave many roads. Not all of them lead to hell.
For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
When the time comes to die, make sure that all you have to do is die!