Don’t fear the gods,Don’t worry about death;What is good is easy to get, andWhat is terrible is easy to endure.
I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am.
The amazing miracle of death, when one second you’re walking and talking, and the next second you’re an object.
Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but is serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment.
When a person has lived generously and fought fiercely, she deserves more than sadness at the end.
I find it very difficult to let a friend or beloved go into that country of no return. I answer the heroic question, Death, where is thy sting? with It is here in my heart, and my mind, and my memories.
Grimly, she realized that clocks don’t make a sound that even remotely resembles ticking, tocking. It was more the sound of a hammer, upside down, hacking methodically at the earth. It was the sound of a grave.
This is how it is in life and love. In life and love we are with people for a while, and then we join other people, people we have not met, and we walk with them, and we leave behind all the things we used to be. Sometimes we leave people behind too… This happens everyday. Everyday this happens and scarcely anybody cares.
It’s all right, Tessa, you can go. We love you. You can go now.”Why are you saying that?”She might need permission to die, Cal.”I don’t want her to. She doesn’t have my permission.
We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?
If you love someone, you’re not supposed to want them to come back. Better a peaceful sleep in the earth than the life of a zombie–not really dead but not really alive, either.
At the end of our lives, we step across the threshold or death and enter into a new and better world. I believe that. It’s just that simple.
It’s easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die.
Smiling at death seems like a pretty bold act. And so I smile like a damned fool.
Dare my guilty heart admit the horrible acknowledgement that I love you still?
Nobody is ready for death. If you ask Joe Blow on the street, he aint gonna tell you he thinks he’ll live forever. But when the end is near you’ll realize you’ve been believing that all along. It’s like getting caught with your pants down. That’s why you gotta live, little one. Yeah stop and smell them roses.
Losing a mate to death is devastating but it’s not a personal attack like divorce. When somebody you love stops loving you and walks away, it’s an insult beyond comparison.
Sweets to the sweet, farewell! I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife; I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid, And not have strewed thy grave.
Surplus meant unnecessary. Not required.You couldn’t be a Surplus if you were needed by someone else. You couldn’t be a Surplus if you were loved.
As a man is taught, so he believes. Thoughts being things, they may be planted like seeds in the mind of the child and completely dominate his mental content. Given the favourable soil of the will to believe, whether the seed-thoughts be sound or unsound, whether they be of pure superstition or of realizable truth, they take root and flourish, and make the man what he is mentally.
We think birth is a miracle and death is a tragedy, but really they’re flip sides of the same coin – anything born is gonna die.
Living with AIDS is like always having the sword of Damocles over your head. The disease is scarier than death itself. The disease is so messy, so devastating, so pervasive. It robs you of everything you hold dear.
Facing death calmly is praiseworthy only if one faces it alone. Death together is no longer death, even for unbelievers. The source of sorrows lies not in leaving life, but in leaving that which gives it meaning. When love is our whole life, what difference is there between living together and dying together ?
America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe just about anything could happen in America.
That we’re going to die is something we know from the moment we are born, That’s why, in some ways, it’s as if we were born dead.
Sin, death, and hell have set their marks on him,And all their ministers attend on him.
The two great risks are risking too much but also risking too little. That’s for each person to decide. For me, not risking anything is worse than death. By far.
Not from Hades’ black and universal lake can you lift him. Not by groaning, not by prayers. Yet you run yourself out in a grief with no cure, no time-limit, no measure. It is a knot no one can untie. Why are you so in love with things unbearable?
Life sometimes reminds us that it is sometimes heartless by giving something or someone we really need to someone who does not need or even want them or it.
I’d always written how grief was hollow. How it was a vast cavern of nothing. But I was wrong. Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn’t the absence of everything you lost – it was the combination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn.- Florence Day
The Vietnamese soldier said, “Before I spoke to her, I had given her a cooked ration of rice. Instead of her being grateful for the meal, she abused me! What gives with these Kampuchean People?”(A Gracious Enemy & After the War Volume Two)
Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.
I feel the terror of idleness,like a red thirst.Death isn’t just an idea.
You ask ‘Are you a man or a demon?’ Neither, I say. I have woken up, and the rest of you are sleeping, and that is the only difference between us.
Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death.
We know about the wildlife for God’s sake!” screamed Aideen. “We’re being attacked by a feckin’ pack of chimpanzees right now! Get us out of here!
And this evening when I close my eyes against the darkness and think about her, I’ll imagine iridescent wings fluttering, if only for a moment, against cloudless blue skies.
Oh God, Oh God we’re all gonna die doesn’t really fit the definition of banter, now does it?
It used to be thought that hell was a lack of God, but hell is a lack of death.
…there’s not enough of anything to go around except people and death.
What do women do when they get together? We sit around and talk! Men, not so much. My theory is that this difference is genetic and dates back to the hunter-gatherer societies, when the men had to be quiet as they hunted, lest they scare away the bison and then everyone starved to death and it was all their fault.
The human body is robust. It can gather strength when it’s in mortal danger.
This book is dedicated to my children, Pi, Coco, and Jay. When your grandkids are old enough to read this book, tell them how much I loved you.
Death is more merciful than hope itself! There is nothing surprising in this, for death is divinely appointed, while hope is the creation of human folly. Both end in frustration. Am I destined to lead a life of endless frustration?-(The Beginning and the End)
My mother always wanted to live near the water, she said. She said it’s the one thing that brings us all together. That I can have my toe in the ocean off the coast of Maine, and a girl my age can have her toe in the ocean off the coast of Africa, and we would be touching. On opposite sides of the world.
Hope could not outlast the breather. Love, however . . . Love was something not even death could conquer, because at the end of everything, even life, he was hers.
If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need, then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
If we knew a person was going to die, we’d hold harder to the memories.Fire corrected him, in a whisper. The good memories.
Yet the story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, descending, until one day we turn and make our way back.
God is a meticulous clockmaker. So precise is His order that everything on earth happens in its own time. Neither a minute late nor a minute early. And for everyone without exception, the clock works accurately. For each there is a time to love and a time to die.
There are times when I’m doing QI and I’m going, ‘Ha ha, yeah, yeah,’ and inside I’m going ‘I want to fucking die. I … want … to … fucking … die.'(Source : RHLSTP #18 – @87min32s)
Death is not a checkmate…it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.