That is not dead which can eternal lie,And with strange aeons even death may die.
We theorize that if these disruptions continue to happen, eventually the separate realities will begin to compete with our primary reality for dominance, and there will end up being no safe reality to live in.
That’s what literature is. It’s the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them!
We’re so old that the winds of age echo along our ribs and pick at our eye sockets. We could be gone tomorrow. A chill, say, or a little slip on the cliff side. I feel as fragile as a dried flower. I rattle a little in the moving air, but I’m only coherent dust-a shape of what once was. My essence is going.
Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.
Oh, brothers! I don’t care for brothers. My elder brother won’t die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.
Self-destruction would be a brief, almost autoerotic free-fall into a great velvet darkness.
Cancer has been the No. 1 cause of death during the last half-century. The trend is getting even worse as the average life span increases.
She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking.
That is — your friend? Philtatos, Achilles replied, sharply. Most beloved.
In my kind of falling, there’s no landing. There’s only hitting the ground. Hard. Dead, or wanting to be dead. So the whole time you’re falling, it’s the worst feeling in the world. Because you feel you have no control over it. Because you know how it ends.
And will ‘a not come again? And will ‘a not come again? No, no, he is dead, Go to thy death bed: He will never come again.
Here we are, alone again. It’s all so slow, so heavy, so sad. . . I’ll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They’ve talked. They haven’t said much. They’ve gone away. They’ve grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world.
And thus we all are nighingThe truth we fear to know:Death will end our cryingFor friends that come and go.
It’s not the dead even. They’re gone. Nothing you can do about that. It’s what’s left behind – the echo. These woods you’re walking through. There are some old timers who think a sound echoes here forever. Makes sense when you think about it. That Billingham kid. I’m sure he screamed. He screams, it echoes, just bounces back and forth, the sound getting smaller and smaller, but never entirely disappearing. Like a part of his is still calling out, even now.
He felt his heart pounding fiercely in his chest. How strange that in his dread of death, it pumped all the harder, valiantly keeping him alive. But it would have to stop, and soon. Its beats were numbered. How many would there be time for, as he rose and walked through the castle for the last time, out into the grounds and into the forest?
– had a million things to do today; death would have to wait, -(The Tin Star)
The death penalty is an inhumane punishment that disproportionately violates the human rights of Black, brown, indigenous, and other marginalized people.
We do have funerals for the living, Jill said. They’re called birthday parties.
It’s the solitude that slays you. Maybe because you’d expected ruin to arrive in a grander and more romantic form.
Death is as unexpected in his caprice as a courtesan in her disdain; but death is truer – Death has never forsaken any man
On ‘Death In Paradise,’ I had a CGI pet lizard and had to react to nothing, which was hideously embarrassing.
If I could make a dream real, I would not kill anything unless it could never be changed at heart.
When my trust was suspended from the fragile thread of justice and in the whole city they were chopping up my heart’s lanterns when they would blindfold me with the dark handkerchief of Law and from my anxious temples of desire fountains of blood would squirt out when my life had become nothing nothing but the tic-tac of a clock, I discovered I must must must love, insanely.
Everything is true,’ he said. ‘Everything anybody has ever thought.”Will you be all right?”I’ll be all right,’ he said, and thought, And I’m going to die. Both those are true, too.
The die is set and Malcolm will not escape for the foolish talk he spoke against his benefactor, such a man, is worthy of death, and it would have been so, were it not for Muhammad’s confidence that God would give him the victory over the enemies.
You don’t have friends in here, you’ll soon come to understand that. You get attached to someone, then you’ll just lose them. They’ll get shanked or they’ll jump or they’ll be taken one night.
It felt as though the whole globe was dressed in snow. Like it has pulled it on, the way you pull on a sweater. Next to the train line, footprints were sunken to their shins. Trees wore blankets of ice. As you may expect, someone has died.
I’m so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand?
No one goes on, but what we leave behind keeps us alive for someone else.
With a hint of good judgment, to fear nothing, not failure or suffering or even death, indicates that you value life the most. You live to the extreme; you push limits; you spend your time building legacies. Those do not die.
Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I loveIf you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.You will hardly know who I am or what I meanBut I shall be good health to you nonethelessAnd filter and fibre your blood.
Death consists, indeed, in a repeated process of unrobing, or unsheathing. The immortal part of man shakes off from itself, one after the other, its outer casings, and – as the snake from its skin, the butterfly from its chrysalis – emerges from one after another, passing into a higher state of consciousness.
The man who kills a man kills a man.The man who kills himself kills all men.As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.
Apparently people commonly died when their loved ones were out of the room. Bathroom break. Quick trip down to the cafeteria for a grilled cheese. It was easier to die if you didn’t have family members to worry about at that exact moment.Easier for the one who was dying, maybe.
I wish it need not have happened in my time, said Frodo.So do I, said Gandalf, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
The Little War?How can there bea little war?Are some deathssmaller than others,leaving motherswho weepa little less?
The air between us crackles, as it does when you speak of your beloved dead. But it’s hard to know what to say next.
Sendak is in search of what he calls a yummy death. William Blake set the standard, jumping up from his death bed at the last minute to start singing. A happy death, says Sendak. It can be done. He lifts his eyebrows to two peaks. If you’re William Blake and totally crazy.
When your demon was yourself, there really was no way to fight or get rid of it.
I am not ready to die,But I am learning to trust deathAs I have trusted life.I am movingToward a new freedom
And so we weep for the fallen. We weep for those yet to fall, and in war the screams are loud and harsh and in peace the wail is so drawn-out we tell ourselves we hear nothing.
God surely did not create us, and cause us to live, with the sole end of wishing always to die. I believe, in my heart, we were intended to prize life and enjoy it, so long as we retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me, among the rest.
Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order
I looked at the stained-glass image of the lamb in the window above me, but that only reminded me that lambs are famous for being led to slaughter, or sometimes hanging out with lions in ill-advised relationships.
For Death is the meaning of night;The eternal shadowInto which all lives must fall, All hopes expire.
Most people don’t want to die, but they don’t want to live either. I am speaking about men now as much as women. They look for a third way, but there is no third way.
You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.”“I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground… And so are you. So are we all.
… for overstrong was the command to hold fast to each smallest particle of time, to the smallest particle of every circumstance, and to embody all of them in memory as if they could be preserved in memory through all deaths for all times.
God, there must be a meaning. Fiercely he was certain that there must be a meaning.Surely, while we live we are not lost.Oh Janos, Janos my brother!Surely we are not lost–while we live.
Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.
With Rue My Heart Is LadenWith rue my heart is ladenFor golden friends I had,For many a rose-lipt maidenAnd many a lightfoot lad.By brooks too broad for leapingThe lightfoot boys are laid;The rose-lipt girls are sleepingIn fields where roses fade.