I keep finding myself stifled by the company of others and then crippled by loneliness when I leave them. I am terrified and I don’t even know of what, because I have lost everything already.
Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.
My father’s death has given me a lot. It has given me a lifelong love of women, of their grittiness and hardness – traits that we are not supposed to value as feminine. It has also given me a love of men, of their vulnerability and tenderness – traits that we do not foster as masculine or allow ourselves to associate with masculinity.
I shouldn’t have sat on death row 30 years. All they had to do was test the gun. But when you think you are high and mighty and you’re above the law, you don’t have to answer to nobody, but I’ve got news for you.
What is a man’s life but a prelude to his death? And what is death but a long sleep, a most welcome forgetfulness.
Undo it, take it back, make every day the previous one until I am returned to the day before the one that made you gone. Or set me on an airplane traveling west, crossing the date line again and again, losing this day, then that, until the day of loss still lies ahead, and you are here instead of sorrow.
Who wanted to be smiled at by the girl that trailed shadows like pets, conjured snakes and waited for Death, her bridegroom, to steal her from these walls?
Not flowers—never flowers in Terrasen. Instead, they carried small stones to graves to mark their visits, to tell the dead that they still remembered.Stones were eternal—flowers were not.
The dead has only one place to go… up. Wherever you bury them, they will go the same way, up
Let him submit to me! Only the god of death is so relentless, Death submits to no one—so mortals hate him most of all the gods. Let him bow down to me! I am the greater king, I am the elder-born, I claim—the greater man.
The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them.
The world is too brutal for me—I am glad there is such a thing as the grave—I am sure I shall never have any rest till I get there.
Tell him,’ the colonel said, smiling, ‘that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.
The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn’t want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.
It’s an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous.
Hazel has to realize that her mom was wrong when she said, “I won’t be a mother anymore.” The truth is, after Hazel dies (assuming she dies), her mom will still be her mom, just as my grandmother is still my grandmother even though she has died. As long as either person is still alive, that relationship survives. (It changes, but it survives.)
Do people look the same when they go to heaven, mommy?I don’t know. I don’t think so.Then how do people recognize each other?I don’t know, sweetie. They just feel it. You don’t need your eyes to love, right?
Since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.
As it fades, I see the truth – in plain sight, yet hidden all along. We are all children of blood and bone. All instruments of vengeance and virtue. This truth holds me close, rocking me like a child in a mother’s arms. It binds me in its love as death swallows me in its grasp.
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.And when you have reached the mountaintop,then you shall begin to climb.And when the earth shal claim your limbs,then shall you truly dance.
She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love– nothing, now, but bones.
There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision.
Before that beautiful heart that harmed none and loved too much-stopped.
Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.
We do not gain or surrender our personhood as we age. We live one life from conception to death.
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
My God, if I had a heart, I would write my hate on ice, and wait for the sun to show.
When Sherri asks questions about who would find me if I killed myself and what their reaction would be, I think that whoever knew me would be sad. But then everybody would get over it. I would fade away. I don’t think I’m that important to anyone. Nobody’s opinion about me killing myself would stop me from doing it.
RequiescatTread lightly, she is nearUnder the snow,Speak gently, she can hearThe daisies grow.All her bright golden hairTarnished with rust,She that was young and fairFallen to dust.Lily-like, white as snow,She hardly knewShe was a woman, soSweetly she grew.Coffin-board, heavy stone,Lie on her breast,I vex my heart aloneShe is at rest.Peace, Peace, she cannot hearLyre or sonnet,All my life’s buried here,Heap earth upon it.
Now that her spirit had left, I’d thought she would feel light. Then I realized it was the spirit that carries the weight of the body and not the other way around.
My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.
But one wants the idea of Death, you know, as something large and unknowable, something that allows a person to stretch himself out. Especially one wants it if one is tired. Or perhaps what one wants is simply a release from sensation, from all consciousness for ever….
A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death. Overcoming our fears and wild misconceptions about death will be no small task, but we shouldn’t forget how quickly other cultural prejudices–racism, sexism, homophobia–have begun to topple in the recent past. It is high time death had its own moment of truth.
Ros was dead.He had loved heroin more than it loved him. I was shocked beyond imagining; he was the first of my friends to fall.
The summer kings are gods, and we are finally, in the end, just men.
I forgive you, I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.
DEATH: Mostly they aren’t too keen to see me. They fear the sunless lands. But they enter your realm each night without fear.MORPHEUS: And I am far more terrible than you, sister.
It was all very strange, Mr. Gray thought, as he wiped the coffee canister clean with a sponge. Very, very mysterious. You were born; you lived a whole life; and at the end, you wound up in a coffee canister.Ah, well, he said out loud quietly. That’s just the way things are. Life’s a funny business. Death, he supposed, was the punch line.
Why should I be sad? Everyone has to die. If you have a body, it’s too late to cry. It’s only funerals I can’t stand.
The sum of his life was a unique melody, hauntingly beautiful and powerful.
Celebrity is death – celebrity – that’s the worst thing that can happen to an actor.
If my survival caused another to perish, then death would be sweeter and more beloved.
Could she smell my breath? Could she hear my cursed circular heart beat revolving like the crime it is in my deathly chest?
Some things are private. Some things needed to be said, even when the person who needed to hear them couldn’t hear anything. Ever again.
A ‘civilization’ that makes such a ridiculous fuss about alleged ‘war crimes’ – acts of violence against the actual or potential enemies of one’s cause – and tolerates slaughterhouses and vivisection laboratories, and circuses and the fur industry (infliction of pain upon creatures that can never be for or against any cause), does not deserve to live.
She couldn’t tell where his pupils ended and the irises began; looking into those eyes was like looking into a well where children had drowned.
Cyrano: The leaves—Roxane: What color—Perfect Venetian red! Look at them fall.Cyrano: Yes—they know how to die. A little wayFrom the branch to the earth, a little fearOf mingling with the common dust—and yetThey go down gracefully—a fall that seemsLike flying!
Fie had never expected to die quiet.Young, maybe. On the end of a sword, also likely. And doing what she did best: picking a fight over something easier left alone.
But you said so yourself,the poor lass will die of it…Do you really want her to die?’Yes, I’d rather she died than have a bad life.
For how imperiously, how coolly, in disregard of all one’s feelings, does the hard, cold, uninteresting course of daily realities move on! Still we must eat, and drink, and sleep, and wake again, – still bargain, buy, sell, ask and answer questions, – pursue, in short, a thousand shadows, though all interest in them be over; the cold, mechanical habit of living remaining, after all vital interest in it has fled.
I thought you died, but writing this, I’m not sure you did.
I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.
Live your life in such a way that you’ll be remembered for your kindness, compassion, fairness, character, benevolence, and a force for good who had much respect for life, in general.
I became a firefighter because I wanted to save people. But I should have been more specific. I should have named names.
Death comes in a flash, and that’s the truth of it, the person’s gone in less than 24 frames of film.
They say death and taxes are the only things that are inevitable. The truth is, you can not pay your taxes. I’ve done it, and there’s consequences, but it can be done. Death you’re not going to get out of, and you kind of got to deal with it.
We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.
The birth of a legend is the death of a hero. Every man wishes to die a hero. A hero’s death is glorious!