Death Quotes - Page 32

It’s a cruel fact of war that it takes little more than applying pressure to one finger to end another person’s life. More than that, it’s a cruel fact of life that we are hardwired to follow the crowd in a moment of panic.

Because there was only one thing worse than dying. And that was knowing you were going to die. And where. And how. (“Death Ship”)

Don't fear the gods,Don't worry about death;What is good is easy to get, andWhat is terrible is easy to endure.

His eyes close, and he draws a long breath. When they open again, they’re colder than ever. “And that’s where you’d be disappointed, Lou.There is no good to be found in Death.

That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

The dead never truly die. They simply change form.

You've got to think of the fine times you had with your mate, not the moment of his perishin'. Every tear you shed now only wets his windin' sheet and disturbs his rest

On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world.

The unknown," said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, "the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion. ... Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, unpredictable, inevitable -- the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?"That we shall die."Yes, There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer. ... The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

There are two kinds of people in this world, son. Those who save lives, and those who take lives.""And what of those who protect and defend? Those who save lives by taking lives?""That's like trying to stop a storm by blowing harder. Ridiculous. You can't protect by killing.

Sometimes life is like living in a chamber of Liquid Oxygen. Liquid don't allow you to live and Oxygen don't let you die.

We were all survivors—every last one of us who limped our way out to the sidewalks that afternoon and spit in Death’s cold face.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

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?

He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurer's trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colossal confidence game. The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the cinematic illusion than the so-called realistic film, because the cartoon reveled in its own illusory nature, exulted in the impossible--indeed it claimed the impossible as its own, exalted it as its own highest end, found in impossibility, in the negation of the actual, its profoundest reason for being. The animated cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the impossible--therein lay its exhilaration and its secret melancholy. For this willful violation of the actual, while it was an intoxicating release from the constriction of things, was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an attempt to outwit mortality. As such it was doomed to failure. And yet it was desperately important to smash through the constriction of the actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible stream in, because otherwise--well, otherwise the world was nothing but an editorial cartoon.

Fear can't be reasoned with. Neither can hate. They're like love. They're almost identical emotions.

In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility – but the other side of love, its cruelty, sterility and duplicity. In a way, the decadents did accept Nordau's idea of the artist as monster. But in nature, the glory and panacea of romanticism, they found nothing. Theirs is an aesthetic that disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty. Decadent work is always morbid, but its attraction to death is through art. What they refused was the condemnation of that monster. And yet despite the decadent celebration of artifice, these stories record art's failure in the struggle against natural horror. Nature fights back and wins, and decadent writing remains a remarkable account of that failure.

Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.

There were corpses here and there and pools of blood. I remember seeing a butterfly flutter up and down that street. Summer does not abdicate.

As a general rule, if anyone ever asks you to put stockings on a ninety-year old deceased Romanian woman with oedema, your answer should be no.

So, apart from casting runes, what other hobbies do you have? Forbidden rituals, human sacrifices, torturing? –

Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.

It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness alike were really only appreciable with one's legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave.

Once I could imagine my soulI could imagine my death.When I imagined my deathmy soul died. ThisI remember clearly.My body persisted.Not thrived, but persisted.Why I do not know.

I understand now that nobody could have saved Ty but Ty. There’s no one else to blame. Not you. Not me. Ty was holding all the cards.

The prospect of death is nature's way of encouraging us to strive for greatness.

You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of it [dignity]. It's never dignified, always brutal. What's dignified about dying? It's never dignified. And in obscurity? Offensive. Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And it's fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it.

Life is a great mystery.

It's like killing each other is the only thing we know how to do.

Nudity and explicit sex are far more easily available now than are clear images of death. The quasi-violence of movies and television dwells on the lively acts of killing – flying kicks, roaring weapons, crashing cars, flaming explosions. These are the moral equivalents of old-time cinematic sex. The fictional spurting of gun muzzles after flirtation and seduction but stop a titillating instant short of actual copulation. The results of such aggressive vivacity remain a mystery. The corpse itself, riddled and gaping, swelling or dismembered, the action of heat and bacteria, of mummification or decay are the most illicit pornography.The images we seldom see are the aftermath of violent deaths. Your family newspaper will not print photos of the puddled suicide who jumped from the fourteenth floor. No car wrecks with the body parts unevenly distributed, no murder victim sprawled in his own juices. Despite the endless preaching against violent crime, despite the enormous and avid audience for mayhem, these images are taboo.

Let Death Bless Me With You

Life is supposed to be fast, not slow. Spirits fly when worms are crawling; birds sing when the dead are moaning.

the gods seldomgivebut so quicklytake.

Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination try to visualize a world without death.

By the time it was over, we knew the dead were the lucky ones.

Now, as they pressured perfect footprints into the snow that had been accumulating all day, his father took Harry's hand."Heshele, how are you?""OK, I guess.""Are you very sad?""I don't know. I know I should be. But what does it mean to be sad?"His father stopped. He cupped his free hand to let the snow gather. It quickly turned from an inviting white coating to black-specked gray water."Sadness is in my hand. In a second, a thing of beauty becomes dirty water; innocence leaves a child's eyes; he who strived for immortality lies forgotten under weeds. Sad is missing the love that death has sealed in the ground or that life has denied life to.""Then I'm sad. When you took my hand, I remembered how he took my hand when we went to the pier to fish. And I thought: That will never happen again. And then I thought: Up until now I never understood the word never, and there was a lump in my throat.

We now have the advantage of a few years more of life, but death is still standing at the end of the road.

Grandfather : Death is nothing to be afraid of.Renee : It's not death I'm afraid of.Grandfather: What is it,

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.

Death reduces all men to the same rank. It strips the rich of his millions and the poor man of his rags . . .Death knows no age limits, no partiality. It is a thing that all men fear.

Every dead body that is not exterminated, gets up and kills. The people it kills, get up and kill!

But when it comes down to it, we all die alone.

In Egypt: Under no conditions, under threat of death could anyone kill a cat. People were exceuted for even killing a cat accidentally. And when a cat died, the whole family, and probably their closest friends, went into mourning, the measure of their personal loss signalled by their shaving off their eyebrows.

True spiritual love is not a feeble imitation and anticipation of death, but a triumph over death, not a separation of the immortal form from the mortal, of the eternal from the temporal, but a transfiguration of the mortal into the immortal, the acceptance of the temporal into the eternal. False spirituality is a denial of the flesh; true spirituality is the regeneration of the flesh, its salvation, its resurrection from the dead.

Experience has thought me that there is only one short step between Love and Hate, as there is between Life and Death.

If I die, I will wait for you, do you understand? No matter how long. I will watch from beyond to make sure you live every year you have to its fullest, and then we’ll have so much to talk about when I see you again… (Bones)

Seek for the endless life in the world, because with death, there remains neither the seeker nor the sought! The other world is altogether an illusion! Stop deceiving yourself; seek for the endless life in the world!

Death is the most sophisticated form of beauty, and the most difficult to accept.

I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly . . . I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.

I have more than once tried to analyse this apparently deliberate form of self-torture that seems common to so many people in face of the extinction of a valued life, human or animal, and it springs, I think, from a negation of death, as if by summoning and arranging these subjective images one were in some way cheating the objective fact. It is, I believe, an entirely instinctive process, and the distress it brings with it is an incidental, a by-product, rather than a masochistic end.

After I die if I am buried I will rot. If I am burnt I will become ash but if my body is donated I will live to give life and happiness to many." "Live life after death - pledge to donate your body.

Strong people don't put others down. They lift them up and slam them on the ground for maximum damage.

What you see and what you listen to will determine how high you will go.

Sometimes I felt the bloated Toad, hideous and pampered with the poisonous vapours of the dungeon, dragging his loathsome length along my bosom: Sometimes the quick cold Lizard rouzed me leaving his slimy track upon my face, and entangling itself in the tresses of my wild and matted hair: Often have I at waking found my fingers ringed with the long worms which bred in the corrupted flesh of my Infant.

But was any future, anyone's future, unfraught by hazards of some sort? The only security was death. So long as one wanted to go on living on had to accept the risks. Well, she accepted them...

The rich that are rejoicing having conquered life, should beware & rethink, for no man can conquer death.

Tonight I saw myself in the dark window asthe image of my father, whose lifewas spent like this,thinking of death, to the exclusionof other sensual matters,so in the end that lifewas easy to give up, sinceit contained nothing: evenmy mother's voice couldn't make himchange or turn backas he believedthat once you can't love another human beingyou have no place in the world.

Inside a home you left me, a blue orphanage. Inside a bluish mosaic, space to live.

Live each day as if life can end any time.

She nailed it to the wall with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence has always been written.