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!
He looked upon this verdant, blossoming spring, a spring Joanna would never see, he looked upon a field of brilliant blue flowers- the bluebells Joanna had so loved- and at that moment he’d willingly have bartered all his tomorrows for but one yesterday.
She made the decision that her existence had lost its meaning. And you cannot judge that.
People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely. It’s too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies.
As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relationships with this best and truest friend of mankind that death’s image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling.
Death waits for no man – and if he does, he doesn’t usually wait for very long.
I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can’t due to deadness.
At the door of life, by the gate of breath,There are worse things waiting for men than death.
I believe that more people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.
He hoped wherever he was going that there’d still be the sun and the moon and the stars. He’d spent a majority of his life with his head turned down. It seemed only fair that eternity would allow him to raise his face toward the sky.