Living without protecting what needs to be protected is the same as death…
I’ve gotten death threats, yes. I have. I think anytime you shine a spotlight on homosexuality or minorities and you try and say they are as normal or as worthy as acceptance as others, the people who are on the fringe don’t like that and they will come after you. And they have come after me.
You and I have a connection that nothing, not on heaven or earth, or even hell, could ever break. If you want to talk to me, talk to me. I’ll hear you…
Of all the miracles Po had seen in the time and space of its death, Po thought this–the absorption of another, the carrying of it–was the most bewildering and remarkable of all. Whenever Bundle separated again, Po was left with an ache of sadness that reminded the ghost of the body it had left behind.
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.
Between death and a new birth, we know that our body, down to its smallest particles, is formed out of the cosmos. For we ourselves prepare this physical body, bringing together in it the whole of animal nature; we ourselves build it.
And like that, I said goodbye to my grandmother like we were two people who met in a coffee shop, shared a lifetime of stories and left wanting more, but knowing we’d meet there again.
And after a while…I mean, how do you choose? Who gets to live? Part of life is that…well, some people have to die. My powers aren’t a prescription you can get filled as needed.
Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all.
Yet for quixotic reasons–namely, that I enjoyed writing obits–I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city’s dead. For even less money. It was a strange and inexplicable career move.
It’s only in drugs or death we’ll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.
[HAMILTON]I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory
… is it truly possible to steal a life, if… the Self is eternal and cannot die? Should this be so, then one who ‘murders’ does no more than transgress against the will of another, whose choice it is to live. At bottom, a murderer offends not against the body, but against the spirit.
It’s time, Old Captain, lift anchor, sink!The land rots; we shall sail into the night;if now the sky and sea are black as inkour hearts, as you must know, are filled with light.Only when we drink poison are we well —we want, this fire so burns our brain tissue,to drown in the abyss — heaven or hell,who cares? Through the unknown, we’ll find the new. (Le Voyage)
…In the end, there’s no sort of difference between dying from ignorance and dying under the feet of thousands of men who have regained their freedom. You close your eyes, and then there’s nothing anymore. And death is never difficult. It requires neither a hero nor a slave. It eats what it’s served.
I am not a snowflake. I am not a sweet, infantilising symbol of fragility and life. I am a strong, fierce, flawed adult woman. I plan to remain that way, in life and in death.
Think about that for a moment. They died for you. Now take a good look at the life you’re living and tell me: Did they do the right thing?
His [Death] voice is cold at first, John. It seems unfeeling. But if you listen without fear, you find that when he speaks, the most ordinary words become poetry. When he stands close to you, your life becomes a song, a praise. When he touches you, your smallest talents become gold; the most ordinary loves break your heart with their beauty.
Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.
It struck Mort with sudden, terrible poignancy that Death must be the loneliest creature in the universe. In the great party of Creation, he was always in the kitchen.
Birth is okay and death is okay, if we know that they are only concepts in our mind. Reality transcends both birth and death.
Life comes to the miners out of their deaths, and death out of their lives.
Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.
I think people believe in heaven because they don’t like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don’t like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish.
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
Do you wrestle with dreams? Do you contend with shadows? Do you move in a kind of sleep? Time has slipped away. Your life is stolen. You tarried with trifles, Victim of your folly.
People of Panem, we fight, we dare, we end our hunger for justice!” There‘s dead silence on the set. It goes on. And on. Finally, the intercom crackles and Haymitch‘s acerbic laugh fills the studio. He contains himself just long enough to say, “And that, my friends, is how a revolution dies.
It was no accident, no coincidence, that the seasons came round and round year after year. It was the Lord speaking to us all and showing us over and over again the birth, life, death, and resurrection of his only begotten Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ, our Lord. It was like a best-loved story being told day after day with each sunrise and sunset, year after year with the seasons, down through the ages since time began.
Pulvis et umbra sumus. It’s a line from Horace. ‘We are dust and shadows’. Appropriate, don’t you think? Will said. It’s not a long life, killing demons; one tends to die young, and then they burn your body – dust to dust, in the literal sense. And then we vanish into the shadows of history, nary a mark on the page of a mundane book to remind the world that once we existed at all.
You can approach ‘The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death’ in a variety or combination of ways: as a startlingly eccentric hobby; as a series of unresolved murder mysteries; as the manifestation of one woman’s peculiar psychic life; as a lesson in forensics; as a metaphor for the fate of women; as a photographic study.
I look back to where my life had been. It’s always risky to think of letting go. That’s why this is the perfect ending. Nothing left to reconcile.
Because there was only one thing worse than dying. And that was knowing you were going to die. And where. And how. (“Death Ship”)
A dead Christ I must do everything for; a living Christ does everything for me.
What then is tragedy? In the Elizabethan period it was assumed that a play ending in death was a tragedy, but in recent years we have come to understand that to live on is sometimes far more tragic than death.
The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity – it’s envy.
Hope is a horrible thing, you know. It’s a plague. It’s like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and someone just keep pulling it and pulling it.STATE OF WONDER
Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.
I find relief from the questions only when I concede that I am not obliged to know everything. I remind myself it is sufficient to know what I know, and that what I know, may not always be true.
And you know, there’s less charm in life when you think about death–but it’s more peaceful.
I’ve changed my ways a little, I cannot nowRun with you in the evenings along the shore,Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment,You see me there.
But my point, you see is that death is misunderstood. The loss of one’s life is not the greatest loss. It is no loss at all. To others, perhaps, but not to oneself.
I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race – that rarely do I even simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant…I AM HAUNTED BY HUMANS.
Cassandra wondered at the mind’s cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life’s end, her grandmother’s head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on death’s silent ship always scan the dock for faces of the long-departed?
A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.
And then his noise falls completely silent-And he stops struggling-And looking right into my eyes-He dies.My Todd dies.
And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star they won’t tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they’re old enough to bear it and when they learn they’ll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed
For to fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise without really being wise, for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For no one knows whether death may not be the greatest good that can happen to man.
Do I fear death? No, I am not afraid of being dead because there’s nothing to be afraid of, I won’t know it. I fear dying, of dying I feel a sense of waste about it and I fear a sordid death, where I am incapacitated or imbecilic at the end which isn’t something to be afraid of, it’s something to be terrified of.
The boy was lying, fast asleep, on a rude bed upon the floor; so pale with anxiety, and sadness, and the closeness of his prison, that he looked like death; not death as it shews in shroud and coffin, but in the guise it wears when life has just departed; when a young and gentle spirit has, but an instant, fled to Heaven: and the gross air of the world has not had time to breathe upon the changing dust it hallowed.
Monarchs ought to put to death the authors and instigators of war, as their sworn enemies and as dangers to their states.
How fortunate we were who still had hope I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die
With every year that I grow older, I also draw closer to (my loved ones) to the day when we will once again be together. So I march through the deepening shadows, serene and unafraid, because I know that at the end of my journey they will be waiting for me.
If it means my death, I don’t care, because even death will be a sort of freedom.
You never would get through to the end of being a father, no matter where you stored your mind or how many steps in the series you followed. Not even if you died. Alive or dead a thousand miles distant, you were always going to be on the hook for work that was neither a procedure nor a series of steps but, rather, something that demanded your full, constant attention without necessarily calling you to do, perform, or say anything at all.