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.
It has ever been since time began, and ever will be, till time lose breath, that love is a mood – no more – to man, and love to a woman is life or death.
It’s unfair.As a rule, life is unfair, I said.Yeah, but I think I did say some awful things.To Dick?Yeah.I pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road and turned off the ignition. That’s just stupid, that kind of thinking, I said, nailing her with my eyes. Instead of regretting what you did, you could have treated him decently from the beginning. You could’ve tried to be fair. But you didn’t. You don’t even have the right to be sorry.
You never know how the loss will come — whether he will lose you or you him, but it is a certainty that there will be a shattering involuntary separation. Death is the abandonment caused not by betrayal but by fidelity.
There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what’s dead. It won’t complain.
Achieving the state of SABLE is not, as many people who live with these knitters believe, a reason to stop buying yarn, but for the knitter it is an indication to write a will, bequeathing the stash to an appropriate heir.
But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think; ’T is strange, the shortest letter which man uses Instead of speech, may form a lasting link Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces Frail man, when paper — even a rag like this, Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.
No – no – no! someone was shouting. No! Fred! No!And Percy was shaking his brother, and Ron was kneeling beside them, and Fred’s eyes stared without seeing, the ghost of his last laugh still etched upon his face.
I have stitched life into me like a rare organ–from Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices, written 1962
I guess I just couldn’t see standing there — alive, talking, thinking, breathing, being — one second, and dead the next. It really bothered me. Death by violence isn’t the same as dying any other way, accident or disease or old age. It just ain’t the same.
Would that the dead were not dead! But there is grass that must be eaten, pellets that must be chewed, hraka that must be passed, holes that must be dug, sleep that must be slept.
Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow lazy and indifferent; the desire to have a death of one’s own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one’s own.
Yer a good lad, Atticus, mowin’ me lawn and killin’ what Brits come around.
If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?
See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded.
Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can’t really understand why it doesn’t obsess everyone – I think it does really, I’m just a little more out about it.
If men only felt about death as they do about sleep, all terrors would cease. . . Men sleep contentedly, assured that they will wake the following morning. They should feel the same about their lives.
I don’t care if the New York Times writes an obituary for me. I just want you to write one. … You say you’re not special because the world doesn’t know about you, but that’s an insult to me. I know about you.
Just because a person dies doesn’t mean it should change the way you feel about them, or the way they really were. Just because they’re gone doesn’t mean that they weren’t a bad person or that they never fucked up.
Everything- even me, and one day even Charlotte- must come to end.
If I had my life to live over again, I would form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is not another practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life.
John Lennon said life was what happened while you made other plans. So was death.
Death is terrible for anyone. Young or old, good or evil, it’s all the same. Death is impartial. There is no especially terrible death. That’s why death is so fearsome. Your deeds, your age, your personality, your wealth, your beauty: they are all meaningless in the face of death.
You think the final act of love is setting them free to Rainbow Bridge? That is not the final act of love. The final act of love is releasing them from your leash of grief so they can be free in the heaven on the other side of the Bridge. Until you resolve your grief, you bind them to you in the land between Heaven and Earth while they wait, suspended between the worlds, for you to heal. When you are free of your grief, they are free of your grief.
When I was a child, all problems had ended with a single word from my father. A smile from him was sunshine, his scowl a bolt of thunder. He was smart, and generous, and honorable without fail. He could exile a trespasser, check my math homework, and fix the leaky bathroom sink, all before dinner. For the longest time, I thought he was invincible. Above the petty problems that plagued normal people.And now he was gone.
The evil that men do lives after them;The good is oft interred with their bones.
Oh, the torment bred in the race, the grinding scream of deathand the stroke that hits the vein,the hemorrhage none can staunch, the grief,the curse no man can bear.But there is a cure in the house, and not outside it, no,not from others but from them,their bloody strife. We sing to you,dark gods beneath the earth.Now hear, you blissful powers underground –answer the call, send help.Bless the children, give them triumph now.
Pain can kill, all on its own: the body goes into shock and shuts down.
I wish I could recommend the experience of not being killed to everyone.
People are fragile. They die of mistakes, of overdoses, of sickness. But mostly they die of Death.
When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.
The human mind is so limited it can only build an arbitrary heaven — and usually the physical comforts they endow it with are naively the kind that can be perceived as we humans perceive — nothing more. No: perhaps I will awake to find myself burning in hell. I think not. I think I will be snuffed out. Black is sleep; black is a fainting spell; and black is death, with no light, no waking.
O, hereWill I set up my everlasting rest,And shake the yoke of inauspicious starsFrom this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last!Arms, take your last embrace! and, lips, O youThe doors of breath, seal with a righteous kissA dateless bargain to engrossing death!
She was half a wild creature that loved a graveyard, the first taste of misty night air, and the heft of a shovel. She knew how things died. And in her darkest moments, she feared she did not know how to live.
Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences.
You smell so good,No, I don’t, I smell like death.You’re crazy, you’re not dead. You do not smell like death.I was dead a long time.And now you’re not. Hence the alive smell.
If death, said my father, reasoning with himself, is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body;–and if it is true that people can walk about and do their business without brains,–then certes the soul does not inhabit there.
His life had been spent pursuing excellence and amassing a great fortune, but now that it was ending, there was no one he was inclined to share it with.
He said, “Sir, we are in a very bad position! We have lost many soldiers KIA (Killed in Action) and many more are wounded. Sir, today is the twenty third of March, and I suggest that we get the hell out of the entire Hoa Binh area before we all end up as dead men!
And starward drifts the stricken world,Lone in unalterable gloomDead, with a universe for tomb,Dark, and to vaster darkness whirled.(“The Testimony of the Suns”)
An honorable death is well and good, but if the life at stake is not your own, what then?
It is always consoling to think of suicide;it’s what gets one through many a bad night.
Mom always said I was born to sit in the electric chair, but I’m proving her wrong. I’m going to die on my knees, begging for my life.
Odd, isn’t it? You know when your birthday is, but not your death day, even though you pass the date year after year, never suspecting that some day…
They tell us that Suicide is the greatest piece of Cowardice… That Suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in this world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.
In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.
With The Dread, first kiss was the beginning. Second kiss was the end.
I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.
And it was as if fate had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends.
I slept in your ashes last night. It was like you laid your shadow down before you left. It smelled like hearth smoke and winter air. I made a blanket of the empty space. I pressed my cheek against the place where yours had been.
There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?
My religious beliefs teach me to feel as safe in battle as in bed. God has fixed the time of my death. I do not concern myself with that, but to be always ready whenever it may overtake me. That is the way all men should live, and all men would be equally brave.