It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class—in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding—but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.
Little sleep’s-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,when I come backwe will go out together,we will walk out together among,the ten thousand things,each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.
I know that I shall die struggling for breath, and I know that I shall be horribly afraid. I know that I shall not be able to keep myself from regretting bitterly the life that has brought me to such a pass; but I disown that regret. I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing.
She had no time for sleep, with the weight of the world upon her shoulders. And she feared to dream. Sleep is a little death, dreams the whisperings of the Other, who would drag us all into his eternal night.
We love because we can lose. If there was no threat of separation, no death to shake us to our core, we probably wouldn’t love much at all.
As for my own part I care not for death, for all men are mortal; and though I be a woman yet I have as good a courage answerable to my place as ever my father had. I am your anointed Queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything. I thank God I am indeed endowed with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat I were able to live in any place in Christendom.
…but there they lay, sprawled across the field, craved far more by the vultures than by wives.
It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death for free.
And there are so much easier ways to destroy a woman. You don’t have to rape her or kill her; you don’t even have to beat her. You can just marry her. You don’t even have to do that. You can just let her work in your office for thirty-five dollars a week.
The poets’ scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. Genius survives; all else is claimed by death.
He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all of my days.
I know who you are and I am ready. Not that I want to go, of course, but I will come. Those souls are always light because more of them have been put out.
Right, well, he’d been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, ‘You seem to be feeling better this morning,’ and Isben looked at her and said, ‘On the contrary,’ and then he died.
So I heard the boom of my father’s rifle when he shot my best friend. A bullet only costs about two cents, and anybody can afford that.
He Is Not DeadI cannot say, and I will not sayThat he is dead. He is just away.With a cheery smile, and a wave of the hand,He has wandered into an unknown landAnd left us dreaming how very fairIt needs must be, since he lingers there.And you—oh you, who the wildest yearnFor an old-time step, and the glad return,Think of him faring on, as dearIn the love of There as the love of Here.Think of him still as the same. I say,He is not dead—he is just away.
When you spend any time at all paying attention to the proclivities of the natural world, you realize that nature has no problem including in its sorority the dead, dying, and ailing as fully as the lovely, healthy, and whole.
It is hard to have patience with people who say, ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as wel say that birth doesn’t matter.
For he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.
Outside, beyond the vast red bricked labyrinth of Kremlin walls, a humid night ensnarled the Soviet capital in its spell. Yet here in the womb-like private cinema Josef Stalin sat, eyes transfixed on the screen, as Johnny Weissmuller arced through a canopy of trees boldly screaming his signature jungle call.
Just like the poles of a magnet, some people are drawn to death and others are repulsed by it, but we all have to deal with it.
When I Am Dead, My DearestWhen I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me;Plant thou no roses at my head, Nor shady cypress-tree:Be the green grass above me With showers and dewdrops wet;And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget.I shall not see the shadows, I shall not feel the rain;I shall not hear the nightingale Sing on, as if in pain:And dreaming through the twilight That doth not rise nor set,Haply I may remember, And haply may forget.
When I die, don’t come, I wouldn’t want a leafto turn away from the sun — it loves it there.There’s nothing so spiritual about being happybut you can’t miss a day of it, because it doesn’t last.
But unless we determine to take action,’ said the old man querulously, as if struggling against something deeply insouciant in his nature, ‘then we shall all be destroyed, we shall all die. Surely we care about that?’ ‘Not enough to want to get killed over it,’ said Ford.
We’re all dead the moment we’re born. Just, some of us get there faster than others.
The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it’s just sort of a tired feeling.
As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad . . .
I mentally bless and exonerate anyone who has kicked a chair out from beneath her or swallowed opium in large chunks. My mind has met their environment, here in the void. I understand perfectly.
The sleeping pills in her pillowcase, the dark blank in her blanket, her purse lips purple; she disappears, she disappears. Her fears cuddle warm beside, to tears that went dry in the beat of her heart’s drum. The strum, strum, stern in her veins, she breaks free finally floating to her lost rhythm of peace.
Where does the love go when someone dies? Their last breath disappears into the atmosphere, their body gets buried in the ground, but where does the love go? If love is real, it must go somewhere.
And I could have died right then. And considering how things went, I really should have.
Death, of course, is not a failure. Death is normal. Death may be the enemy, but it is also the natural order of things.
As long as you don’t make waves, ripples, life seems easy. But that’s condemning yourself to impotence and death before you are dead.
It is almost startling to hear this warning of departed time sounding among the tombs, and telling the lapse of the hour, which, like a billow, has rolled us onward towards the grave.
And there stood Basta with his foot already on another dead body, smiling. Why not? He had hit his target, and it was the target he had been aiming for all along: Dustfinger’s heart, his stupid heart. It broke in two as he held Farid in his arms, it simply broke in two, although he had taken such good care of it all these years.
O, never from the memory of my heartYour dear, paternal image shall depart,Who while on earth, ere yet by death surprised,Taught me how mortals are immortalized;How grateful am I for that patient careAll my life long my language shall declare.
It is important to feel the anger without judging it, without attempting to find meaning in it. It may take many forms: anger at the health-care system, at life, at your loved one for leaving. Life is unfair. Death is unfair. Anger is a natural reaction to the unfairness of loss.
When I die, nieces, I want to be cremated, my ashes taken up in a bush plane and sprinkled onto the people in town below. Let them think my body is snowflakes, sticking in their hair and on their shoulders like dandruff.
A little smoke lost in the air, that was the life of a man.
Where music thundered let the mind be still,Where the will triumphed let there be no will,What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.
My lord, you must tell us where the body is, and go with us to the king.HAMLET The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing -GUILDENSTERN A thing my lord?HAMLET Of nothing. Bring me to him. Hide fox, and all after!
The nearer people approach old age the closer they return to a semblance of childhood, until the time comes for them to depart this life, again like children, neither tired of living nor aware of death.
Generosity during life is a very different thing from generosity in the hour of death; one proceeds from genuine liberality and benevolence, the other from pride or fear.
I lost my father this past year, and the word feels right because I keep looking for him. As if he were misplaced. As if he could just turn up, like a sock or a set of keys.
Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn’t seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.
Girls are always saying things like, “I’m so unhappy that I’m going to overdose on aspirin,” but they’d be awfully surprised if they succeeded. They have no intention of dying. At the first sight of blood, they panic.
I think about dying every day, because I can’t stop thinking about living.
A man who takes into consideration the feelings of others even when arranging the manner of his own death shows a nobility of character which compels the admiration of all classes.
But she’s wrong about hell. You don’t have to wait until you’re dead to get there.
Darkling I listen; and, for many a timeI have been half in love with easeful Death…
People don’t ever have to starve to death; there are solutions. We have failed if we can’t eradicate hunger in Africa and Ethiopia.