Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.
Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
When along the pavement,Palpitating flames of life,People flicker around me,I forget my bereavement,The gap in the great constellation,The place where a star used to be
Tired of life, afraid of death, not unlikeA lost brig, toy of ebb and flow on the ocean,My soul weighs anchor for a frightful shipwreck.
Beastly of him to die before you realized he might be fascinating.
If Christ is God, He cannot sin, and if suffering was a sin in and by itself, He could not have suffered and died for us. However, since He took the most horrific death to redeem us, He showed us in fact that suffering and pain have great power.
A statue stands in a shaded placeAn angel girl with an upturned faceA name is written on a polished rockA broken heart that the world forgot
God isn’t the son of Memory; He’s the son of Immediate Experience. You can’t worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it’s hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you’ve got to die to every other moment.
Every man believes to some extent that the world began when he was born and, at the moment of leaving it, suffers at having to let the Universe remain unfinished.
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies . . . Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die . . . It doesn’t matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.
At a formal dinner party, the person nearest death should always be seated closest to the bathroom.
At the temple there is a poem called Loss carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.
Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.
If you remembered somebody was as real as yourself, how could you kill anybody?
I could kill you a thousand times over Abraham, but we would never be even. You took everything I had.
Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live.
Here are the things girls die of: hunger, disease, accidents, childbirth, and violence. It takes more than heartache to kill a girl. Girls are tough as rocks.
There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.
To live is to be vulnerable. A thin membrane of a soap bubble separates one from impenetrable hell. Ice on the road. The unlucky division of an aging cell. A child picks up a pill from the floor. Words stick to each other, line up, obedient to the great harmony of speech…
Fear of death has been the greatest ally of tyranny past and present.
I’m gonna kill him, Eve said, or at least that was what it sounded like filtered through the pillow.Stake him right in the heart, shove garlic up his ass, and-and-And what? (Michael)When did you get home? Claire demanded.Apparently just in time to hear my funeral plans. I especially like the garlic up the ass. It’s…different.
Relax. They’re not going to kill us. They’re going to TRY and kill us. And that is a very different thing.
Believe it or not each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die
Why is it we have so little choice? We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated – defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Sill, to cease living is unacceptable.
But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?
How nice it would be to be dead if only we could know we were dead. That is what I hate, the not being able to turn round in the grave and to say It is over.
We do not sleep,” said Aya. “These bodies do not require it. All they need is food to provide them with energy. Sleep is not needed.
What glitters may not be gold; and even wolves may smile; and fools will be led by promises to their deaths.
Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics.
The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable.
Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed toward a mortal object, and the secret of this ultimate sweetness only is defined by the bitterness of death. Thus the white peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customs have lost their living power.
Eyes, look your last! Arms, take your last embrace! And, lips, oh you the doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss a dateless bargain to engrossing death!
Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.
The desire of death will not always lead you to death but the fear of death will.
I’m sick to death of famous people standing up and using their celebrity to promote a cause. If I see a particular need, I do try to help. But there’s a lot that can be achieved by putting a check in the right place and shutting up about it.
Women’s bodies are so often under the purview of men, whether it’s our reproductive organs, our sexuality, our weight, our manner of dress. There is a freedom found in decomposition, a body rendered messy, chaotic, and wild. I relish this image when visualizing what will become of my future corpse.
If we have lost the knack of living, I thought, it is a safe bet to presume we have forfeited the magic of dying.
You sometimes hear people say that you can’t tell someone who’s dead that you love them. But I don’t believe it. I tell my dad every day that I love him and I know that he can hear me.
Thanks to presidential immunity and executive control of the Justice Department, there are no consequences to executive branch lawbreaking. And when it comes to presidential lawbreaking, the sitting president could literally strangle someone to death on national television and meet with no consequences.
I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, I want to go too! I want to go too! And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: We are all going.
For 3 million you could give everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we could dig a hole so deep we could hand her over to Satan in person. (on Margaret Thatcher)
Time has transfigured them intoUntruth. The stone fidelityThey hardly meant has come to beTheir final blazon, and to proveOur almost-instinct almost true:What will survive of us is love.
You should read something else.Why would he have done that to him?I don’t know, she said.Do you ever feel like Job?She smiled, a little twinkle in her eyes.Sometimes.But you haven’t lost your faith?No, I knew she hadn’t, but I think I was losing mine.Is it because you think you might get better?No, she said,its because its the only thing I have left.
Sooner or later it’d get to you. Death was fascinated by humans, and study was never a one-way thing. A man might spend his life peering at the private life of elementary particles and then find he either knew who he was or where he was, but not both.
He thought he saw some horses, too, and a clown, but it was the faces of all those dead raptors that really bothered him. And maybe that clown a little bit.
Anna: Ash, I don’t have anything planned with my Mother… She’s dead.Ashley: What?Anna: She died when I was seven. She drowned. It’s just my Dad and me. I didn’t tell you before because I just wanted a fresh start here, because before I moved, everybody knew about it and… I’m sorry.Ashley: ……. You’re like a Disney Princess!
We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.
Two turtle doves will show theeWhere my cold ashes lieAnd sadly murmuring tell theeHow in tears I did die
I was born on January 8, 1942, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo. I estimate, however, that about two hundred thousand other babies were also born that day. I don’t know whether any of them was later interested in astronomy.
My sister, Judy, has always said that she would like to lie in state, propped up in her coffin with her eyes blared wide open, face fixed in a big grin, and have a taped greeting for all her mourners. Something real upbeat and, well, live-sounding, like: ‘He-e-e-ey!Cuteshoestellyomamahi!
Death, my son, is a good thing for all men; it is the night for this worried day that we call life. It is in the sleep of death that finds rest for eternity the sickness, pain, desperation, and the fears that agitate, without end, we unhappy living souls.
The human animal is a beast that dies and if he’s got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting!–Which it never can be….
John: ‘Have mercy. I don’t want to die!’Sita: ‘Then you should never have been born.
We can’t be sad for her, she murmured. Only for ourselves at having to say good-bye.
Other friends have flown before -On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before.
Music links us humans, heart to heart…Across time and space, and life and death.
Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.
After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die.
Today I have gathered together my nearest and dearest, my sixteen nieces and nephews (Sit down, Grace Windsor Wexler!) to view the body of your Uncle Sam for the last time. Tomorrow its ashes will be scattered to the four winds. I, Samuel W. Westing, hereby swear that I did not die of natural causes. My life was taken from me–by one of you!
If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That’s what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.