Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age.
It’s awful, telling it like this, isn’t it? As though we didn’t know the ending. As though it could have another ending. It’s like watching Romeo drink poison. Every time you see it you get fooled into thinking his girlfriend might wake up and stop him. Every single time you see it you want to shout, ‘You stupid ass, just wait a minute,’ and she’ll open her eyes! ‘Oi, you, you twat, open your eyes, wake up! Don’t die this time!’ But they always do.
Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.
There was a filmy veil of soft dull mist obscuring, but not hiding, all objects, giving them a lilac hue, for the sun had not yet fully set; a robin was singing … The leaves were more gorgeous than ever; the first touch of frost would lay them all low to the ground. Already one or two kept constantly floating down, amber and golden in the low slanting sun-rays.
…all of our laments could not add a single second to her life, not one additional beat of the heart, nor a breath.
I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition or to have feared the apparition of a spirit. Darkness had no effect upon my fancy, and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm.
Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higher the fences get.
One hand was behind his back, and he held it out, presenting a bouquet of white and smoky purple lilies. “They’re straight from the underworld, by the way. They are everlasting. They won’t die.
People die, I think, but your relationship with them doesn’t. It continues and is ever-changing.
There are certain people that are marked for death. I have my little list of those that treated me unfairly.
When he died, I went about like a ragged crow telling strangers, My father died, my father died. My indiscretion embarrassed me, but I could not help it. Without my father on his Delhi rooftop, why was I here? Without him there, why should I go back? Without that ache between us, what was I made of?
I am no longer knocking at death’s door but the path is still familiar.
Chronic anxiety is a state more undesirable than any other, and we will try almost any maneuver to eliminate it. Modern man is living in anxious anticipation of destruction. Such anxiety can be easily eliminated by self-destruction. As a German saying puts it: ‘Better an end with terror than a terror without end.
Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,I had not thought death had undone so many.
Give me liberty or give me death.[From a speech given at Saint John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia on March 23, 1775 to the Virginia House of Burgesses; as first published in print in 1817 in William Wirt’s Life and Character of Patrick Henry.]
He died and the whole Soviet Union followed. Revmira’s country, her young face, the entire course of her life had changed. Since she started at the hospital, she had sat next to more than a hundred persons to help them go, so she knew death well: the release of breath, the rattle, the calm. Her parents went the same way, one after the other. And she missed them. She had resigned herself a long time ago to missing all the people who left her.
I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behindIn balance with this life, this death.
For each person I lost I found a new layer of grief to cover myself with, and each time I tried to bring something of their essence into my own being – be it unconditional love, kindness and piety.
Everybody believes that capital punishment is wrong, but when they look at certain cases, they’re quick to say, ‘Put them to death,’ or scream ‘capital punishment.’
Christianity has made of death a terror which was unknown to the gay calmness of the Pagan.
For my part I have no joy in tears after dinnertime. There will always be a new dawn tomorrow. Yet I can have no objection to tears for any mortal who dies and goes to his destiny. And this is the only consolation we wretched mortals can give, to cut our hair and let the tears roll down our faces.
What we call ‘time’ isn’t chronological but spatial; what we call ‘death’ is merely a transition between different kinds of matter.
Wayne’s a little attached to that hat, Waxillium said. He thinks it’s lucky.Wayne: It is lucky. I ain’t never died while wearing that hat. Marasi frowned. I … I’m not sure I know how to respond.Wax: That’s a common reaction to Wayne.
Fight on, brave knights! Man dies, but glory lives! Fight on; death is better than defeat! Fight on brave knights! for bright eyes behold your deeds!
Nobody died. how can you kill an idea? How can you kill the personification of an action?Then what died? who are you mourning?A point of view.
What I learned in this tragedy was the eternal lesson of good people going bad.
I must confess, I have always wondered what lay beyond life, my dear.Yeah, everybody wonders. And sooner or later everybody gets to find out.
It is my wish to die of unique causes, perhaps in a high-speed tricycle crash, a bizarre stapling incient, or as a result of inadvertently sucking my brains out through my ear while trying to untwist the vacuum hose.
Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.
It’s important to attend funerals. It is important to view the body, they say, and to see it committed to earth or fire because unless you do that, the loved one dies for you again and again.
I have done it, she says. At first I do not understand. But then I see the tomb, and the marks she has made on the stone. A C H I L L E S, it reads. And beside it, P A T R O C L U S.Go, she says. He waits for you.In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.
That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.
When you’re faced with something for the first time, and if you’re scared to death of that, you might want to reconcile your life beforehand.
OH, THERE HAS TO BE SOMETHING IN THE STOCKING THAT MAKES A NOISE, said Death. OTHERWISE, WHAT IS 4:30 A.M. FOR?
Prudent people are very happy; ’tis an exceeding fine thing, that’s certain, but I was born without it, and shall retain to my day of Death the Humour of saying what I think.
But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.
God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling…
Don’t be afraid to feel as angry or as loving as you can, because when you feel nothing, it’s just death.
Before the beginning of yearsThere came to the making of manTime, with a gift of tears;Grief, with a glass that ran;Pleasure, with pain for leaven;Summer, with flowers that fell;Remembrance, fallen from heaven,And madness risen from hell;Strength without hands to smite;Love that endures for a breath;Night, the shadow of light,And Life, the shadow of death.
Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives.
When I heard your organization was recording testimonies, I knew I had to come. She died in my arms, saying ‘I don’t want to die.’ That is what death is like. It doesn’t matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn’t matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.
You have entered an abnormal, lonely, and unwelcome new world where you are nothing but an island of sadness.
If you want to call it that. But it is a very specific sort of magic. There’s a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.
It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and -what will perhaps make you wonder more – it takes the whole of life to learn how to die.
No one can say that death found in me a willing comrade, or that I went easily.
Take what comes and live life without complaint. What will be, will be. Life is a woman’s gift; death is God’s.
‘Hamlet’ is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what’s real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.
I am one who believes that one of the greatest dangers of advertising is not that of misleading people, but that of boring them to death.
It’s all God’s will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.
FDR Unmasked is first to present convincing evidence of Roosevelt’s battle with prostate cancer, underpinned by FBI memoranda and reliable firsthand information from multiple physicians – even a shocking admission by Eleanor Roosevelt to actress Veronica Lake that her husband was being treated for the disease.
That is a death I will think of often and with great fondness.
When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
Then on your tombstone, where you only get a little bit of space to sum up your life, some wax-faced creep chisels a set of meaningless numbers instead of poetry or a secret love or the name of your favorite candy. In the end, all you get is a few words.
I wish to live to 150 years old, but the day I die, I wish it to be with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other.
I am seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death… . I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter–the Eternity they have entered–where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fulness.
That’s how I want to go. Taking my own way out and totally pissing everybody off at the end.