When I’m lying in my bed I think about life and I think about death and neither one particularly appeals to me.
The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.
A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right.
Saving YouThe darkness takes him over, the sickness pulls him in; his eyes—a blown out candle, I wish to go with him.Sometimes I see a flicker— a light that shone from them; I hold him to me tightly, before he’s gone again.
He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living.
The Angel of Death is always a young person, or a group of young people, you’ll begin seeing them left and right soon.
To what do I owe the pleasure of your company? he said.I placed my hands flat on the table and leaned across it. Stay the hell away from him.Who? Oh, you mean the guy who’s gonna bite it soon? He’s not. He’s going to be fine.He reached a hand out and placed it over my own. I snatched my hand back. He shook his head at me and whispered, You can’t stop it.Watch me.
I’m one of the slowest drivers on the road. I mosey along. If you’re doing anything too fast, including living life too fast, that creates sudden death. If I have to be somewhere on time, I make sure I leave early enough.
He loved me and I loved him, but the number in my head was telling me that he was going to die today. And the numbers had never been wrong.
It’s when I have to acknowledge the past and all of those nameless, faceless people I’d assassinated, that I unravel inside.
What branch does not have its leaves and which twig will not have its flowers?
Crap.It’s all crap.Living is crap.Life has no meaning.None. Nowhere to be found.Crap.Why doesn’t anybody realize this?
About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.
The living stayed home, haunting the world of the dead like ghosts.
Nothing is permanent. The only thing any of us have in common is the inevitable.
There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so often, of missing her. But she knew that this was an illusion, a mirage, and that the distance between them was now infinite, unyielding.
Cordelia! stay a little. Ha! What is’t thou say’st? Her voice was ever soft.
We go by the will of the black rabbit. When he calls you, you have to go
Where is Polonius? HAMLET In heaven. Send hither to see. If your messenger find him not there, seek him i’ th’ other place yourself. But if indeed you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.
Oh, we do not understand death, we never understand it; creatures are only truly dead when everyone else has died who knew them.
The death of a language. The word has the same kind of reluctant resonance as it has when we talk about the death of a person. And indeed, that’s how it should be. For that’s how it is. A language dies only when the last person who speaks it dies.
Dude, you don’t want to be dead. Take it from me. No-pussy is bad. But dead is like no-pussy times ten.
There is absolutely no worse death curse than the humdrum daily existence of the living dead.
I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip.
The stillness and stasis of bed are the perfect opposite of travel: inertia is what I’ve come to consider the default mode, existentially and electronically speaking. Bed, its utter inactivity, offers a glimpse of eternity, without the drawback of being dead.
I think anyone who opened their heart enough to love without restraint and subsequently were devastated by loss knows that in that moment you are forever changed; a apart of you is no longer whole. Some will never again love with that level of abandon where life is perceived as innocent and the threat of loss seems implausible. Love and loss, therefore, are linked.
Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.
The real hell of this, he told her, is that you’re going to get through it.
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride, In the sepulchre there by the sea, In her tomb by the sounding sea.
The problems of today’s youth were no longer a Sunday supplement, or a news broadcast, or anything so remote and intangible. They were suddenly become a dirty, shivering boy, who told us that in this world we had built for him with our sweat and our blood, he was not only tired of living, but so unscared of dying that he did it daily, sometimes for recreation.
L.A. kills people.’ Jacaranda said. ‘You’re lucky you’re leaving. You’ll be able to write.’She looked paler, going through another depression, smoking in bed in her lilac room. The walls were the color of her veins. She was getting too thin, even for the modeling. . .Jacaranda died last winter when the flowering trees were bare. You couldn’t even tell which ones once cried the purple blossoms she named herself after.
When she fucked up all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she fell onto the enigma of herself.
Things change after you die, though, I guess because dying is the loneliest thing you can do.
I don’t say goodbye very easily, Anna. Not gracefully or prettily.Goodbye tears your heart out and leaves it a feast for carrion birds who happen by.
You, why are you so afraid of war and slaughter? Even if all the rest of us drop and die around you, grappling for the ships, you’d run no risk of death: you lack the heart to last it out in combat—coward!
Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.
The world had ended, so why had the battle not ceased, the castle fallen silent in horror, and every combatant laid down their arms? Harry’s mind was in freefall, spinning out of control, unable to grasp the impossibility, because Fred Weasley could not be dead, the evidence of all his senses must be lying—
He had been bored, that’s all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen – and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!
When a husband loses his wife, they call him a widower. When a wife loses her husband, they call her a widow. And when somebody’s parents die, they call them an orphan. But there is no name for a parent, a grieving mother, or a devastated father who have lost their child. Because the pain behind the loss is so immeasurable and unbearable, that it cannot be described in a single word. It just cannot be described.
You’ll forget it when you’re dead, and so will I. When I’m dead, I’m going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.
So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
Everything we do really is just a little marker on the long road to death. And sometimes that’s overwhelmingly depressing to me, and sometimes it makes me feel kinship and forgiveness. We’ve all got the same ending to the story. The way we make that story more elaborate, I got to respect.
I saw the world from the stars’ point of view, and it looked unbearably lonely.
Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.
There would be no chance to get to know death at all …if it happened only once.
I have never dated. I have no experience. It’s terrible, and I’m scared to death of it, too, at the same time.
I have outlasted all desire,My dreams and I have grown apart;My grief alone is left entire,The gleamings of an empty heart.The storms of ruthless dispensationHave struck my flowery garland numb,I live in lonely desolationAnd wonder when my end will come.Thus on a naked tree-limb, blastedBy tardy winter’s whistling chill,A single leaf which has outlastedIts season will be trembling still.
O my love, my wife!Death, that hath suck’d the honey of thy breathHath had no power yet upon thy beauty.
There is a child – a baby – who long since kicked off her blankets. Her skin is ashen and her mouth open in a perpetual yet silent scream. She isn’t old enough to roll over, to sit up, to climb. So she lies there kicking her fat legs against the footboard of the crib, eternally calling for her mother. For food. For flesh.
And what does it mean — dying? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and only the five we know are lost at death, while the other ninety-five remain alive.
The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters—it was something about the way they carried themselves, something that had broken too soon and had not mended, marking them in spite of their lightheartedness.
The day she was born,her grandfather made her a ring of silver and a polished stone, because he loved her already.
Why should I fear death?If I am, then death is not.If Death is, then I am not.Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?Long time men lay oppressed with slavish fear.Religious tyranny did domineer.At length the mighty one of GreeceBegan to assent the liberty of man.
…Our friend Nunheim was filled full of .32s just about an hour after he copped the sneak on us – deader’n hell. The pills look like they come from the same gun that cut down the Wolf dame. The experts are matching ’em up now. I guess he wishes he’d stayed and talked to us.
Life’s only choosing when to die. Life’s a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It’s a tremendous relief not to have to choose.
Birth and death: there was the same consciousness of heightened existence and of her own elevated importance
Son. Everyone dies alone. That’s what it is. It’s a door. It’s one person wide. When you go through it, you do it alone. But it doesn’t mean you’ve got to be alone before you go through the door. And believe me, you aren’t alone on the other side.
It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood- you give it together, you take it together.
Perhaps because it seems so appropriate, I don’t notice the rain. It falls in sheets, a blanket of silvery thread rushing to the hard almost-winter ground. Still, I stand without moving at the side of the coffin.
It’s normal to shy away from illness and death. It’s natural to gravitate toward laughter and life.