The beauty of the sea is that it never shows any weakness and never tires of the countless souls that unleash their broken voices into its secret depths.
But death was her curse and her gift, and death had been her good friend these long, long years.
Something inside a man goes to pieces when he has to bury the only person who ever understood him. There is no time to heal that sort of wound.
I’m not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun… let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus… Aphrodite to the extent of the will of each one.
Death was standing behind a lectern, poring over a map. He looked at Mort as if he wasn’t entirely there.Yᴏᴜ ʜᴀᴠᴇɴ’ᴛ ʜᴇᴀʀᴅ ᴏғ ᴛʜᴇ Bᴀʏ Oғ Mᴀɴᴛᴇ, ʜᴀᴠᴇ ʏᴏᴜ? he said.“No, sir,” said Mort.Fᴀᴍᴏᴜs sʜɪᴘᴡʀᴇᴄᴋ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ.“Was there?”Tʜᴇʀᴇ ᴡɪʟʟ ʙᴇ, said Death, ɪғ I ᴄᴀɴ ғɪɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴀᴍɴ ᴘʟᴀᴄᴇ.
I was thinking about how people seem to read the bible a lot more as they get older, and then it dawned on me—they’re cramming for their final exam.
I know LSD; I don’t need to take it anymore. Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley.
…Not that it was unjust; not that the scales were forced out of balance. Where there had been good, it showed as clearly. Kindnesses, accomplishments, all those were present, too.
Though I am a Catholic, a professing one, I have serious doubts about the survival of the human personality after death.
If I could find one wordthat would shudder the airlike that frightened sob,that wordless prayerof my newly-born,who drew one breath,and with unopened eyessank back into death;If I could break the world’s cold heartwith that cry,then this grief would liftand I could die.
There is no death in remembrance. Remember me, Sarah. Remember me, and a part of me will always be with you. – Martha Carrier to her daughter, Sarah Carrier
But before you start pointing fingers, let me ask you: is what I did really so bad? So bad I deserved to die? So bad I deserved to die like that?Is what I did really so much worse than what anybody else does? Is it really so much worse than what you do?Think about it.
Decline is also a form of voluptuousness, just like growth. Autumn is just as sensual as springtime. There is as much greatness in dying as in procreation.
One dies only if he’s not anymore in the hearts and minds of those who know him. – Monkey D. Luffy
He wasn’t ready for death, but if it came today, he would face it with his head held high and Alexander Lightwood’s name on his lips.
Yes, alive,” said Fudge. “That is — I don’t know — is a man alive if he can’t be killed? I don’t really understand it, and Dumbledore won’t explain properly — but anyway, he’s certainly got a body and is walking and talking and killing, so I suppose, for the purposes of our discussion, yes, he’s alive.
Women were different, no doubt about it. Men broke so much more quickly. Grief didn’t break women. Instead it wore them down, it hollowed them out very slowly.
There’s a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a Republican Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches of the Geneva Convention are subject to the death penalty. And that doesn’t mean the soldier that committed them – that means the commanders.
Stop sleeping, Get to work! You will have much time to sleep when you die.
I’m not afraid of death because I don’t believe in it.It’s just getting out of one car, and into another.
When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]
If I lie down on my bed I must be here,But if I lie down in my grave I may be elsewhere.
One false step, and you’ll fall all the way to Tartarus—and believe me, unlike the Doors of Death, this would be a one-way trip, a very hard fall! I will not have you dying before you tell me your plan for my artwork.
She would die, and maybe everyone would forget that she had ever lived.
Because each of you has his or her own death, you carry it with you in a secret place from the moment you’re born, it belongs to you and you belong to it.
Googling me, you talk about being depressed. First of all there’s 18 websites that predict my early death.
One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too old.
It’s only water, she said.Tell that to a drowning man, Giddon said.
I began to feel that all the people I’d ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man’s wife lived on inside him.
Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.
Death comes to me again, a girlin a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.It’s not so terrible she tells me,not like you think, all darknessand silence. There are windchimesand the smell of lemons, some daysit rains, but more often the air is dryand sweet. I sit beneath the staircasebuilt from hair and bone and listento the voices of the living. I like it,she says, shaking the dust from her hair,especially when they fight, and when they sing.
I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life—achieving a sense of peace within oneself.
It was the essence of life to disbelieve in death for one’s self, to act as if life would continue forever. And life had to act also as if little issues were big ones. To take a realistic attitude toward life and death meant that one lapsed into unreality. Into insanity. It was ironic that the only way to keep one’s sanity was to ignore that one was in an insane world or to act as if the world were sane.
Thinking of death–strange, beautiful, terrible and a long way off–made me feel happier than ever.
Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die.
The little things of life, sweet and excellent in their place, must not be the things lived for; the highest must be sought and followed; the life of heaven must be begun here on earth.
They couldn’t keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady.
O weep for Adonis – He is dead. Peace. He is not dead he doth not sleep – he hath wakened from the dream of life
War is not just the business of death, it is the antitheses of life.
That is a dream also; only he has remained asleep, while you have awakened; and who knows which of you is the most fortunate?
All great conversions are born from the sudden revelation of life’s meaninglessness. Nothing could be more moving or more impressive than this sudden apprehension of the void of existence.
There is a very popular opinion that choosing life is inherently superior to choosing death. This belief that life isinherently preferable to death is one of the most widespread superstitions. This bias constitutes one of the most obstinate mythologies of the human species.
Usually time alters and affects everything, but when someone you love dies time cannot change that, no amount of time will ever change that, so time stops having any meaning.
There is no remedy for death—or birth—except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.
Madness doesn’t get off wearing gloves. It needs to feel skin on skin, smell the blood and shit as it brings itself off.
Here lies a gentleman boldWho was so very braveHe went to lengths untold,And on the brink of the graveDeath had on him no hold.By the world he set small store–He frightened it to the core–Yet somehow, by Fate’s plan,Though he’d lived a crazy man,When he died he was sane once more.
Love is like a flower. Its upright when its in harmony and withered when its dead.
I had no idea how to respond, and opted for a smile, which serves me well on most occasions (not if it’s something to do with death or illness, though — I know that now.)
And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.
One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?
She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking.
How terrible, said Eragon, to die alone, separate even from the one who is closest to you.Everyone dies alone, Eragon. Whether you are a king on a battlefield or a lowly peasant lying in bed among your family, no one can accompany you into the void.
A person’s life isn’t orderly …it runs about all over the place, in and out through time. The present’s hardly there; the future doesn’t exist. Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person’s life.
I’m addicted to the heightened awareness I get when there’s a death consequence. My vision is sharper, and I’m more sensitive to sounds, my sense of balance and the beauty all around me. A lot of my creativity comes from this nearly insane obsession. Something sparkles in my mind, and then nothing else in life matters.
From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?
It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.
That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.
Death! Strange that there should be such a word, and such a thing, and we ever forget it; that one should be living, warm and beautiful, full of hopes, desires and wants, one day, and the next be gone, utterly gone, and forever!
Tell your friend that in his death, a part of you dies and goes with him. Wherever he goes, you also go. He will not be alone.
If that’s the case, I understand why emotions are hard for you. You’ve numbed yourself to make room for the grief you carry.