I have every reason to be sad, but I don’t have any reason to mourn. People grieve when things end. Nothing has ended tonight. One of us has simply gone ahead as we always knew it would have to be.
Maybe you should say goodbye, Cal.”No.”It might be important.”It might make her die.
They say that war is death’s best friend, but I must offer you a different point of view on that one. To me, war is like the new boss who expects the impossible. He stands over your shoulder repeating one thin, incessantly: ‘Get it done, get it done.’ So you work harder. You get the job done. The boss, however, does not thank you. He asks for more.
It doesn’t matter how much his mother loves him; love is not enough to keep any of us alive.
But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust; The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace.
The funny thing about facing imminent death is that it really snaps everything else into perspective.
But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.
Every blade in the field – Every leaf in the forest – lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up.
A complete life may be one ending in so full identification with the non-self that there is no self to die.
I didn’t want any flowers, I only wantedTo lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.How free it is, you have no idea how free——The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.–from Tulips, written 18 March 1961
[…] But then,What is not vain, by God, in lives of men?All is in vain! We play at blind man’s buffUntil hard edges break into out path.Man life’s is error. Where, then, is relief?In shedding tears or wrestling down my grief?
In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground.
Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will did it. I have no broken your heart – you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong.
Don’t wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.
It’s not contagious, you know. Death is as natural as life. It’s part of the deal we made.
He was dead, all right. He had been shot, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled. Either somebody had really had it in for him or four people had killed him. Or else it was the cleverest suicide I’d ever heard of.
We’re reaching for death on the end of a candle We’re trying for something that’s already found us
Which natural gift would you most like to possess? The ability to master other languages (which would have hugely enhanced the scope of these answers).How would you like to die? Fully conscious, and either fighting or reciting (or fooling around).What do you most dislike about your appearance? The way in which it makes former admirers search for neutral words.
Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.
It was a year for the ages, like 79, like 1346, to name just a few. Forget the scythe, Goddamn it, I needed a broom or a mop. And I needed a vacation.
I’m not blessed, or merciful. I’m just me. I’ve got a job to do, and I do it. Listen: even as we’re talking, I’m there for old and young, innocent and guilty, those who die together and those who die alone. I’m in cars and boats and planes; in hospitals and forests and abbatoirs. For some folks death is a release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I’m there for all of them.
I think the saddest thing in the world will be for people who face their death and realize they never lived. That won’t be me.
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
As a medical doctor, I have known the face of adversity. I have seen much of death and dying, suffering and sorrow. I also remember the plight of students overwhelmed by their studies and of those striving to learn a foreign language. And I recall the fatigue and frustration felt by young parents with children in need.
If life is a punishment, one should wish for an end; if life is a test, one should wish it to be short.
There is no harm in patience, and no profit in lamentation. Death is easier to bear (than) that which precedes it, and more severe than that which comes after it. Remember the death of the Apostle of God, and your sorrow will be lessened.
My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.
The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of starsLetting in the light, peephole after peephole— A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.–from Insomniac, written April 1961
Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
How many boys like him were out there in the ether, holding on to their big brothers and sisters who were still alive? How many husbands were floating between life and death, clinging to their wives in this world? And how may millions and millions of people were there in the world like Charlie who wouldn’t let go of their loved ones when they’re gone?
This is a long goodbye, yet not time enough. I have no aptitude for this. I cannot learn this. I would hold on, and hold on, until my hands clutch at emptiness.
Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.
Pentru mine, moartea este doar hotarul unde încetează să mai existe mâine. Numai până acolo poți să iubești, să visezi, să regreți. Brusc, tot ce n-ai făcut va rămâne pentru totdeauna nefăcut.
Doesn’t our knowledge of death make life more precious?’What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It’s an anxious quivering thing
No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.
We never actively remember death,’ Odenigbo said. The reason we live as we do is because we do not remember that we will die. We will all die.
I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve come to learn that predictions don’t mean much. Too much lies outside the realm of medical knowledge. A lot of what happens next comes down to you and your specific genetics, your attitude. No, there’s nothing we can do to stop the inevitable, but that’s not the point. The point is that you should try to make the most of the time you have left.
The amount of death terror experienced is closely related to the amount of life unlived.
It’s been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home — only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.
The two stand in the fast-thinning throng of victims, but they speak as if they were alone. Eye to eye, voice to voice, hand to hand, heart to heart, these two children of the Universal Mother, else so wide apart and differing, have come together on the dark highway, to repair home together and to rest in her bosom.
Yes, it’s a well-known fact about you: you’re like death, you take everything.
At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. I hope this isn’t too melodramatic or self-centred a way of saying that I attempt to write as if I did not care what reviewers said, what peers thought, or what prevailing opinions may be.
The racial terrorism of lynchings in many ways created the modern death penalty. America’s embrace of speedy executions was, in part, an attempt to redirect the violent energies of lynching while ensuring white southerners that black men would still pay the ultimate price.
Does it make you brave to stick your hand in a bear’s mouth? Would you do it again just because you didn’t die?
It hurts when they’re gone. And it doesn’t matter if it’s slow or fast, whether it’s a long drawn-out disease or an unexpected accident. When they’re gone the world turns upside down and you’re left holding on, trying not to fall off.
In the time that we’re here today, more women and children will die violently in the Darfur region than in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel or Lebanon. So, after September 30, you won’t need the UN – you will simply need men with shovels and bleached white linen and headstones.
Would you give up your vengeance against someone you hate if it meant saving someone you love? Would you want your dreams to come true if it meant granting your enemy’s dying wish?
Death, like a host, comes smiling to the door;Smiling, he greets us, on that tranquil shoreWhere neither piping bird nor peeping dawnDisturbs the eternal sleep,But in the stillness far withdrawnOur dreamless rest for evermore we keep.
A coward,’ he declared with dignity, when he’d stopped coughing and had got his breath back, ‘dies a hundred times. A brave man dies but once. But Dame Fortune favours the brave and holds the coward in contempt.’— Dandelion
Have you ever, for even a second, thought about how hard it is for people like me just to stay alive?
Tonight I want to stand on the side of a cliff and look down, dare the wind to gust and knock me off. Everyone thinks that falling to your death is the worst thing that can happen. But that’s a lie. The worst thing is to be alive for no reason.
We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long
But I don’t know what to him about the aftermath of killing a person. About how they never leave you.
I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?How else? Though not till I’m done reading.