This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression – and with all this yet to die.
She glanced around at the tombstones. “You’re surrounded by death here. Way too depressing. You really might want to think about getting another job.”“You see death and sadness in these sunken patches of dirt, I see lives lived fully and the good deeds of past generations influencing the future ones.
But the issue is not only life and death but our existence before God and our being judged by him. All of us were sinners before him and worthy of condemnation.
Fear of death is form of stasis horrors. The dead weight of time.
In actuality, it was like the homes of all people who are not really rich but who want to look rich, and therefore end up looking like one another: it had damasks, ebony, plants, carpets, and bronzes, everything dark and gleaming—all the effects a certain class of people produce so as to look like people of a certain class. And his place looked so much like the others that it would never have been noticed, though it all seemed quite exceptional to him.
Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.
Death is so important that God visited death upon his own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God’s grace.
Why won’t they let me be? I just need to rest, that’s all, to rest and sleep some, and maybe die a little.
One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It’s one of the oldest urges in mankind. It’s a way of stalling death.
Death is the force that will create your new life. It is a mechanism of transformation. Welcome it.
Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know – it’s everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again, you could be.
It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that’s that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness, persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop?
It is bitter to lose a friend to evil, before one loses him to death.
Perhaps the easiest way of making a town’s acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die.
We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. (X)
My objection to the death penalty is based on the idea that this is a democracy, and in a democracy the government is me, and if the government kills somebody then I’m killing somebody.
The death penalty, I think, is a terrible scar on American justice, especially the concept of equal justice under law, but also of due process. And it goes state by state, and it’s different in different states.
All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.
I’m not afraid to die. What I’m afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind.
I don’t want to die in darkness any thicker than this. I want to bring some kind of resolution in my life.
Ageing is nothing to be ashamed ofEspecially when the entire race is in it togetherAlthough sometimes it seems that she alone among her friends wants to celebrate getting olderBecause it’s such a privilege to not die prematurely
Nor dread nor hope attendA dying animal;A man awaits his endDreading and hoping all.
That’s all you can do in this world, no matter how strong the current beats against you, or how heavy your burden, or how tragic your love story. You keep going.
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