But after I got them to leave and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.
Every cataclysm is welcomed by somebody; there is always someone to rejoice at disaster and see in it the prospect of a new beginning and a better world.
The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
> Why does everything that lives have to die?< So life would be precious, Asher. Something that is yours forever, is never precious.
Awareness of mortality exerts a unique power to focus the mind and heart on essentials.
My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.
Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn’t much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.
I don’t believe in life after death. But I do believe in some grinding destiny that watches over us on earth. If I didn’t, the safety valve would give and the boiler would explode.
I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression ‘killing time.’ It’s a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live –moreover, the only one.
Because there is a larger awareness that transcends time and space, an awareness is available after death.
And I looked out at the dog, and McCoy trying to cradle her in one arm and cut the rope with t’other, and I said, ‘What goes around, comes around, daddy.’ “And he just smiled. A wicked smile. And he nodded. And he kept on driving, turning left onto the road to the church.”
We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and the understanding of them cease first.
The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but what we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.
The dead person is not truly dead until the last person who rememebers them dies.
You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less.
I think people would live a bit longer if they didn’t know how old they were. Age puts restrictions on things.
The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.
But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis.
When it comes, you’ll be dreamingthat you don’t need to breathe;that breathless silence isthe music of the darkand it’s part of the rhythmto vanish like a spark.
Two weeks until your cure she says finally. Sixteen days I say, but in my head I’m counting: Seven days. Seven days until I’m free and away from all these people and their sliding superficial lives brushing past one another gliding, gliding, gliding from life to death. For them there’s hardly a change between the two.
Circe, he says, it will be all right.It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. … He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what is means to be alive.
After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts – like a Chinese nest of boxes – oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front – in our ancestors, back and back until…
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,But young men think it is, and we were young.
My dreams are nothing I want to remember, full of people I must never forget. I visit death after death. It’s a relief to be woken up.
But she wasn’t around, and that’s the thing when your parents die, you feel like instead of going in to every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone.
They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide?
Death alone gives meaning to life, and you will never fully live until you know you must die. And make your peace with that knowledge.
When it’s my time, and the reaper calls my name, there will be no stink of fear on me, and my only wish will be to die with grace, covered in the blood of my enemies.
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
The other mammoths were as protective of the dying as they were of newborns, and they gathered around tying to make the fallen one get up. When all was over, they buried the dead ancestor under piles of dirt, grass, leaves, or snow. Mammoths were even known to bury other dead animals, including humans.
Every night death came, slowly, painfully, and every morning Maddox awoke in bed, knowing he’d have to die again later. That was his greatest curse and his eternal punishment.
Ackx must have owed him big time,” Q said in his drawly Clint Eastwood voice. “A favour like that doesn’t come cheap.” Bonnyman spat into the fire. “A favour like that is only made between psychosis and a lust for power.
Oh God, Alaska, I love you. I love you, and the Colonel whispered, I’m so sorry, Pudge. I know you did, and I said, No. Not past tense. She wasn’t even a person anymore, just flesh rotting, but I loved her present tense.
Nature creates while destroying, and doesn’t care whether it creates or destroys as long as life isn’t extinguished, as long as death doesn’t lose its rights.
Writing, painting, singing- it cannot stop everything. Cannot halt death in its tracks. But perhaps it can make the pause between death’s footsteps sound and look and feel beautiful, can make the space of waiting a place where you can linger without as much fear. For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey there between footsteps makes up our lives.
I answer the heroic question, ‘Death, where is thy sting?’ with ‘It is in my heart and mind and memories.
Be of good cheer about death, and know this of a truth, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.
Our immortality comes through our children and their children. Through our roots and branches. The family is immortality. And Hitler has destroyed not just branches and roots, but entire family trees, forests. All of them, gone.
In any case, this is how all our stories begin, in darkness with our eyes closed, and all our stories end the same way, too, with all of us uttering some last words—or perhaps someone else’s—before slipping back into darkness as our series of unfortunate events comes to an end.
Death is an inevitability, isn’t it? You become more aware of that when you get to my age. I don’t worry about it. I’m ready for it. When I go, I want to go doing what I do best. If I died tomorrow, I couldn’t complain. It’s been good.
When God issues a call to us, it is always a holy call. The vocation of dying is a sacred vocation. To understand that is one of the most important lessons a Christian can ever learn. When the summons comes, we can respond in many ways. We can become angry, bitter or terrified. But if we see it as a call from God and not a threat from Satan, we are far more prepared to cope with its difficulties.
There is just as much beauty in birth as there is in death, and it changes our lives just the same. They both add things to us and take things away. Pg. 155 Undone
If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.
Only death consistently excites your emotions, whether contemplating when life is safe and stale, or fleeing it when life is threatened and precious
The language of roses shifts under our feet. It blows in and out like the wind. It carries the fragrance of the flower and then it is gone…It is how we learn to speak about something that is disappearing as we say its name.
No matter what heights you achieve, even if you’re Brad Pitt, the slide is coming, sure as death and taxes.
Dying should come easy:like a freight train youdon’t hear whenyour back isturned.
You may say suicide is a loss of control and cowardly. Foolish as it may sound, I am prepared to argue.
Stand before his grave and use your gift of breath to complain of your limited time. If you dare.
You’re better looking than me. You’re more intelligent than me. Your personality is more likable than mine. You make more money than me. Your family is nicer than mine. Your religion is better than mine. You’ve seen more beaches than me. You’ve been to more cities than me. Your automobile is nicer than mine. Your significant other is better looking than mine. Your candidate won. Your home team won. You’re number one. But life is a tie. We all die.
Losing Chloe had been like reading a wonderfulook only to realize that all the pages past a certain point were blank.
Be who you are, even if it kills you. It will. Over and over again.Even as you live.Break my heart, why don’t you?
Any way I slice reality it comes out poorly, and I feel an urge to not exist, something I have never felt before; and now here it comes with conviction, almost panic. I mentally bless and exonerate anyone who has kicked a chair out from beneath her or swallowed opium in large chunks. My mind has met their environment, here in the void. I understand perfectly.
Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back — to be sucked back — into it?