In Old High German and in Old English, geist and gaest did not designate a revenant as geist and ghost do today, and scato, the shadow, did not apply to phantoms. We can deduce from this that revenants were not evanescent: they were not images or mists, but flesh and blood individuals, which is confirmed by the Norse literature and the rare texts from other Germanic countries.
Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.
Do you want to know something about tyrants? When faced with death, they weep and they beg just like the rest of us.
All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.
When I think of Simone now, I think of butterfly wings. Beautiful and excruciatingly delicate. Touch them once and they might disintegrate.
Life inspires more dread than death – it is life which is the great unknown.
Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone’s about to die.
The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.
But in battle you cannot tell another when it is his time to enter the World-to-Come, nor is it possible to keep any man in this world when he wishes to leave it behind.
Pride and power fall when the person falls, but discoveries of truth form legacies that can be built upon for generations.
It is a horrible, terrible thing, the worst thing, to watch somebody you love die right in front of you and not be able to do nothing about it.
I wonder if that’s how darkness wins, by convincing us to trap it inside ourselves, instead of emptying it out.I don’t want it to win.
True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.
Nothing is ever truly gone… Not for me, nor for any human being. We can only go forward, unless we are guests in some enchantment that is not is ours. We are condemned to an endless present, and we can never go back-the source of all our joy, and all our sorrow. -Hem at Zelika’s grave
She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.
The idea of being strong for someone else having never entered their heads, I find myself in the position of having to console them. Since I’m the person going in to be slaughtered, this is somewhat annoying.
A halo surrounded the grim reaper nun, Sister Maria. (By the way-I like this human idea of the grim reaper. I like the scythe. It amuses me.)
When my mother passed away several years ago—well, wait a minute. Actually, she didn’t ‘pass away.’ She died. Something about that verb, ‘to pass away’ always sounds to me as if someone just drifted through the wallpaper. No, my mother did not pass away. She definitely died.
He danced with the sky instead, and the sky dropped him like a rotten plum.
Fear of death makes us devoid both of valour and religion. For want of valour is want of religious faith.
God waits only the separation of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward. Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over, and death is so certain an entrance to happiness — to glory?
Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one’s ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone – the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there’s no fairness on earth.
I am Death. I come quickly, I come slowly, but I am not cheated.
The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral.
We’re all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.
Tell me, Doctor, are you afraid of death?I guess it depends on how you die.
Death is contagious; it is contracted the moment we are conceived.
I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.
Would we be so enamored with dystopian fiction if we lived in a culture where violent death was a major concern? It wouldn’t be escapism.
I would request that my body in death be buried not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna during my lifetime
Now death is uncool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.
Death doesn’t really worry me that much, I’m not frightened about it… I just don’t want to be there when it happens.
The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.
My father died suddenly, but also across the years. He was still dying, really – which meant I guess that he was still living, too.
I love to walk. Walking is a spiritual journey and a reflection of living. Each of us must determine which path to take and how far to walk; we must find our own way, what is right for one may not be for another. There is no single right way to deal with late stage cancer, to live life or approach death, or to walk an old mission trail.
Whenever I see an ambulance, I like to think there is a baby being born, rather than a death.
When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of shit
Someday you will die, and until you know that, you’re useless to me.
Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.
You can’t reconcile being pro-life on abortion and pro-death on the death penalty.
I was with a friend of mine recently who was dying and while he was lying there with his family around his bed, I just knew that was it, that was the best you can hope for in life – to have your family and the people who love you around you at the end.
The rapt pupil will be forgiven for assuming the Tsar of Death to be wicked and the Tsar of Life to be virtuous. Let the truth be told: There is no virtue anywhere. Life is sly and unscrupulous, a blackguard, wolfish, severe. In service to itself, it will commit any offense. So, too, is Death possessed of infinite strategies and a gaunt nature- but also mercy, also grace and tenderness. In his own country, Death can be kind.
MOMWholeheartedly,She loved me-And inspired me-With transcending devotion.It was a blessing-To have been her son,To have been loved-Without conditions.Her words of wisdom-Opened my eyes-To the world-And to myself.By seeing the best in me, She empowered me.By believing in me, She transformed me.She grew old-And floated away,But her love remains standing-Eternally by my side.
Death, taxes and childbirth! There’s never any convenient time for any of them.
The effects of loss are acute, and unique to each individual. Not everyone mourns in the same way, but everyone mourns.
The dead man is on the trolley and the woman collapses across his chest. That’s what the ghouls want a shufti at, like at that Princess Diana’s funeral, they want to scrutinise those who really knew her, to drink the misery out of their faces.
That’s peace – real peace. To come to the end – not to have to go on… Yes, peace.
I don’t have a death wish. On the contrary, I’m hanging onto my life like never before.
…Despite the mayhem that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel’s hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let go.
Wild dreams torment me as I lie. And though a god lives in my heart, though all my power waken at his word, though he can move my every inmost part – yet nothing in the outer world is stirred. thus by existence tortured and oppressed I crave for death, I long for rest.
Generations of men are like the leaves.In winter, winds blow them down to earth,but then, when spring season comes again,the budding wood grows more. And so with men:one generation grows, another dies away.
Ah, how much more soothing(that is to say, if one should get the choice)to be wiped off the earth by hell-bound fiendsthan by neurotics.
It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, but it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: music, laughter, the physics of falling leaves, automobiles, holding hands, the scent of rain, the concept of subway trains… if only one could leave this life slowly!
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.
I’m trying to knock the medical profession into accepting its responsibilities, and those responsibilities include assisting their patients with death.
We have nothing that is really our own; we hold everything as a loan.
Ultimately life is disease, death and oblivion. It’s still better than high school.
Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same…They can be neither separated, nor mixed.
Phaedra of Alonso’s death was a never-ending pain that gnawed at his insides. It made him a prisoner in his own cottage.
When people don’t express themselves, they die one piece at a time.
When the first living thing existed, I was there waiting. When the last living thing dies, my job will be finished. I’ll put the chairs on the tables, turn out the lights and lock the universe behind me when I leave.