And then came Mrs Fletcher, snapping her scissors, the soft scrunch of the blades through thick hanks, the gradual sensation of lightness. Now every scrap of hair that Powell had touched was gone.
Here the whole world (stars, water, air,And field, and forest, as they wereReflected in a single mind)Like cast off clothes was left behindIn ashes, yet with hopes that she,Re-born from holy poverty,In lenten lands, hereafter mayResume them on her Easter Day.(Epitaph for Joy Davidman)
I was giving up. I would have given up – if a voice hadn’t made itself heard in my heart. The voice said I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen everyday. I will put in all the hard work necessary. Yes, so long as God is with me, I will not die. Amen.
The Jetavana Temple bells ring the passing of all things. Twinned sala trees, white in full flower, declare the great man’s certain fall. The arrogant do not long endure: They are like a dream one night in spring. The bold and brave perish in the end:They are as dust before the wind.
Some people simply bury their heads in the sand and refuse to think about the sorrow of the world, but this is an unwise course, because, if we are entirely unprepared, the tragedy of life can be devastating.
If you go to your death rather than do everything you might to prevent what is happening, you are merely committing suicide and trying to make yourself feel better about it. That is the act of a coward. It is beneath contempt.
That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we’re old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner or later we’ll lose everyone we love. We’re never the same. But somehow we’re all right. We go on.
After March in 1945, the Japanese felt threatened by possibility of the people of Indochina rising against them. Therefore, they stated:“We of the Imperial Japanese Army have only invaded other Asian countries in order to remove the European and American white man from Asia! Stick with us Japanese and together we shall make Asians great while we kick the whites out of the entire region!”(A Gracious Enemy & After the War Volume Two)
Do you wanna play? Everyone’s dead, so I got bored. Did you come to play with me?–Wrath
But on paper, things can live forever. On paper, a butterfly never dies.
There are two events in everybody’s life that nobody remembers. Two moments experienced by every living thing. Yet no one remembers anything about them. Nobody remembers being born and nobody remembers dying. Is that why we always stare into the eye sockets of a skull? Because we’re asking, “What was it like?” “Does it hurt?” “Are you still scared?”.
The more death, the more birth. People are entering, others are exiting. The cry of a baby, the mourning of others. When others cry, the other are laughing and making merry. The world is mingled with sadness, joy, happiness, anger, wealth, poverty, etc.
Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!
There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.
Wait, said Butler. Just wait, Holly. Artemis has a plan. He squinted through the green dome. What is your plan, Artemis?All Artemis could do was smile and shrug.
Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness, of fear; then she wished that it were already the next day. Immediately afterwards she realized that that wish was futile because the death of her father was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening endlessly.
Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
Death, I had discovered long ago, was available in varying flavors, and none of them particularly palatable.
When I was 16, I felt very relieved to discover cinema. It was like an island where I could see life and death from another perspective. Every young person should be interested in that island. It’s a beautiful place.
Could I tell them I was sorry their loved one was dead, when he’d tried to kill me? There was no rule of etiquette for this; even my grandmother would have been stymied.
[B]e comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.
It is unfortunate for the gods that, unlike us, they cannot commit suicide.
I used to love youI still doSo SelfishI love the old youThe you that didnt shoot drugs…The you that didnt get beat on by menYou laugh in my face and call me a foolBut its trueI still love youSometimes,I can see the old youWhen your eyes flashWhen you almost look alive
Tell her thisAnd more,—That the king of the seasWeeps too, old, helpless man.The bustling fatesHeap his hands with corpsesUntil he stands like a childWith surplus of toys.
There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room
Death truly does have life, and walks with and lives through us everyday.
You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.
We are born and then we die. And in between lies only this strange darkness that we can’t break.
He: What’s the matter with you?Me: Nothing.Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say surprised in the way that they are forever surprised, but there was nothing the matter with her.
…a third [of three] had died in his bunk of natural causes–for a dagger in the heart quite naturally ends one’s life.
There are only two things worse then an empty canvas: death and taxes.
No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.
Oh Lestat, you deserved everything that’s ever happened to you. You better not die. You might actually go to hell.
How many more times would I have embraced him that night, how many more times would I have kissed him, if I had known the name of that stranger lover who was already in Montreal, who had already bought his stadium ticket from a scalper for the 5,000 tomorrow. That implacable lover who was going to turn Billy’s eyes away from me forever.
Death is the true inspiring genius, or the muse of philosophy, wherefore Socrates has defined the latter as θανάτου μελέτη. Indeed without death men would scarcely philosophise.
I’m so sorry, Henri, I whisper in his ear. I close my eyes. I love you. I wouldn’t have missed a second of it, either. Not for anything, I whisper. I’m going to take you back yet. Somehow I am going to get you back to Lorien. We always joked about it but you were my father, the best father I could have ever asked for. I’ll never forget you, not for a minute for as long as I live. I love you, Henri. I always did.
And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
Everyone you have ever loved in your life becomes a part of your soul. They never leave. They’re always inside you, and you can bring them out whenever you want.
Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.
[W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy.
But he calls down a blessing on the blossom of the may, Because it comes in beauty, and in beauty blows away.
In her mind’s eye she saw it, saw it all at last: the rolling armies and the flames of battle; the graves and pits and dying cries of a hundred million souls; the spreading darkness, like a black wing stretching over the earth; the last, bitter hours of cruelty and sorrow, and the terrible, final flights; death’s great dominion over all, and, at the last, empty cities, becalmed by the silence of a hundred years. Already these things were coming to pass.
To enter into the realm of contemplation, one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience as joy, as being. [Every form of intuition and experience] die to be born again on a higher level of life.
I was surprise to see the world didn’t stop just cause my boy did.
The events unfolded with such speed and efficiency that Anderson found himself in a state of shock. His anger with Bevin and McPhearson was quickly replaced with a sense of impending doom. An unbelievable stream of events had taken place since his training exercises in the Pacific.
The connections we make in the course of a life–maybe that’s what heaven is.
It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.
I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one loses one’s good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.
I’ve been asked by lots of people, What happens if you do kill yourself? They want to know about what it would be like for other people around you, like the person who would find your body, the other kids at school, whoever would have to clean up the blood, what your family holidays would be like.
Death was final and absolute and there was nothing anyone could do to change it.
Not since North Korean media declared Kim Jong-il to be the reincarnation of Kim Il Sung has there been such a blatant attempt to create a necrocracy, or perhaps mausolocracy, in which a living claimant assumes the fleshly mantle of the departed.