Death Quotes - Page 34

When people say they're too busy, ask them If they'll have time to die, and see If dead's gonna give a damn.

Plants are more courageous than almost all human beings: an orange tree would rather die than produce lemons, whereas instead of dying the average person would rather be someone they are not.

A hero stands up to the villain in themselves.

Death... The moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

Well I'd certainly hate to interrupt your pleasant night stroll with my sudden death.

But forever was a useless term, relevant only for the dead.

He saw two stars collapse against one another and a nova form; it flared up and then, as he watched, it began to die out. He saw it turn from a furiously blazing ring into a dim core of dead iron and then he saw it cool into darkness. More stars cooled with it; he saw the force of entropy, the method of the Destroyer of Forms, retract the stars into dull reddish coals and then into dust-like silence. A shroud of thermal energy hung uniformly over the world,over this strange and little world for which he had no love or use.It's dying, he realized. The universe. The thermal haze spread on and on until it became only a disturbance, nothing more; the sky glowed weakly with it and then flickered. Even the uniform thermal disbursement was expiring. How strange and goddamn awful, he thought. He got to his feet, moved a step toward the door.And there, on his feet, he died.They found him an hour later. Seth Morley stood with his wife at the far end of the knot of people jammed into the small room and said to himself, "to keep him from helping with the prayer". "The same force that shut down the transmitter," Ignatz Thugg said. "They knew; they knew if he phrased the prayer it would go through. Even without the relay." He looked gray and frightened. All of them did, Seth Morley noticed. Their faces, in the light of the room, had a leaden, stone-like cast. Like, he thought, thousand-year-old idols.Time, he thought, is shutting down around us. It is as if the future is gone, for all of us.

Old age is catching up with me, or am I catching up with it?

And we remember that there must be a balance. No birth without death. No life without tears. What is taken from the world must be given back, and from him who takes and does not give back, who would tip the balance of the river, from him all will be taken. No one should live forever, but should give his blood to the river when the time comes so that tomorrow another may live. And so it goes.

Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.

Heavy misfortunes have befallen us, but let us only cling closer to what remains, and transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet live. Our circle will be small, but bound close by the ties of affection and mutual misfortune. And when time shall have softened your despair, new and dear objects of care will be born to replace those of whom we have been so cruelly deprived.

Sam studied his brother. At one time he thought Frankie had a good head on his shoulders. Sure, he had a temper. And he was conceited. But he always used common sense. But now he wasn’t so sure if that were true. He had brought him his lifeless fiancé. Like a dog dragging in a dead rabbit looking for praise.

ROSENCRANTZ 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!

Hope was what kept the world going. Hope that one day you would find somebody you could love and trust, hope that you would never lose them; hope that your team won the cup this year; hope that you found that dream job; hope that you would find the money to pay the mortgage. But most of all, hope that one day - whatever you have told yourself over that years - you would find that life really does go on beyond the deathbed.

Isn't it ironic that being immortal would reveal the fool's errand of immortality?

Death comes in endless forms. Of the body. Of the soul. Of the heart. - Catriona Mercant, philosopher and warrior. (circa 1419)

You should be so lucky to be like me. I allow myself to be disturbed too often. I'll probably end up talking to birds in a park. But you'll probably end up with regrets.

He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to depart.

(A murderer about their victim:)"He was an expert in vicarious death. I should like to have been there to see how he enjoyed the real thing.

Seals:The Five Cosmic Seals are five occult Level 333, 666, 999, 1330 and 003 operating 400,000 minuet mystical degrees.

And it occurs to me that there’s no real difference between us, the living and the dead; it’s just a matter of tense: past-dead and future-dead

There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.

There was not an inch of solid ground anywhere in the world for me to call my own. I didn't belong anywhere. Had I disappeared, no one would have noticed.

Penance is a sacrifice, a voluntary punishment to show remorse for a sin. The more grievous the sin, the greater the self-inflicted suffering. For some, the ultimate penance is death. But for others, it simply a means to an end.

Well, you’re not exactly social, are you, Mandy Valems?”“Oh yeah, sure, because I’m just surrounded by genius to be social with in this day and age,” Mandy replied with razor-sharp sarcasm. “Hey, I don’t need anyone else! I’ve got you, you’re my friend, and you’ll be with me forever!”“…You won’t be with me forever, though…” said Alecto cynically. “I’m like a spider’s web; anyone who is friends with me gets dragged into my troubles and eventually dies.”“…Poetic, dear friend,” Mandy sighed, shaking her head. “Morbid, but poetic.

The endWhen I die bang on cansRomp around in leaps and boundsLet whips crack in the airCall in clowns and acrobats!I want my coffin to go on a donkeyDecked out in Andalusian styleYou can't refuse anything to a dead manAnd I want, by all means, go on a donkey

The flame of the inn is dim tonight,Too many vacant chairs.The sun has lost too much of its light,Too many songs have taken flight,Too many ghosts on the stairs.Charon, here's to you as man against man,I wish I could pick 'em the way you can!

Only the debris of wreckage, and not much of that, was left behind by the sharks who fed on tragedy: the fishermen, too, mourned the death of a living child.

But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills,And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me,And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’dTo dwell in presence of immortal youth,Immortal age beside immortal youth,And all I was, in ashes. - Tithonus

To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.

The letter said that they were two feet high, and green, and shaped like plumber's friends. Their suction cups were on the ground, and their shafts, which were extremely flexible, usually pointed to the sky. At the top of each shaft was a little hand with a green eye in its palm. The creatures were friendly, and they could see in four dimensions. They pitied Earthlings for being able to see only three. They had many wonderful things to teach Earthlings, especially about time. Billy promised to tell what some of those wonderful things were in his next letter.Billy was working on his second letter when the first letter was published. The second letter started out like this:The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "so it goes.

Shall a mangrave his sorrows upon a stone when he hath but need to write them onthe water? Nay, oh /She/, I will live my day, and grow old with mygeneration, and die my appointed death, and be forgotten.

The fate of humanity is a common destiny of death.

He was a dying man looking down on the surgeons trying to save him.

There is love in holding and there is love in letting go.

We are only mortal flesh.

You too, you took an interest in the world. That was long ago. I want you to cast your mind back to then. The domain of the rules was no longer enough for you; you were unable to love any longer in the domain of the rules; so you had to enter into the domain of the struggle. I ask you to go back to that precise moment. It was long ago, no? Cast your mind back: the water was cold. You are far from the edge, now. Oh yes! How far from the edge you are! You long believed in the existence of another shore; such is no longer the case. You go on swimming, though, and every movement you make brings you closer to drowning. You are suffocating, your lungs are on fire. The water seems colder and colder to you, more and more galling. You aren't that young anymore. Now you are going to die. Don't worry. I am here. I won't let you sink. Go on with your reading.

Perhaps it is only when we realize and celebrate the intrinsic value of every human life that celebrity - true celebrity - shines most brightly. On our deathbeds, none of us will speak of the jobs we’ve held or the stuff we’ve acquired in our lifetimes; here bull markets and Nielsen ratings are irrelevant. A life-threatening illness jettisons pretension in no time flat. Death is the great equalizer. Death dares us to define what really matters.

Maybe they did what they had to do to live, and tried to get a little love and have a little fun before the darkness took them.

If your hope dieth, your duties die, your endeavors die, your joys die, and your souls die. And if your hope be not acted, but lie asleep, it is next to dead, both in likenss and preparation( 585).

You could fill a catalog with all you long for - for him to come back, for a do-over, for a different ending in which not only were you strong and said good-bye but he lived and made a success of his life and decades later you could look back together on your twenties and laugh at all your follies, for his voice on the other end of the phone call, for one more of those Albuquerque nights when it was easy to fall asleep knowing he was just in the next room.

O serpent heart hid with a flowering face!Did ever a dragon keep so fair a cave?Beautiful tyrant, feind angelical, dove feather raven, wolvish-ravening lamb! Despised substance of devinest show, just opposite to what thou justly seemest - A dammed saint, an honourable villain!

He'd been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower.

once ruffle-skirted vanity table where I primped at thirteen, opening drawers to a private chaos of eyeshadows lavender teal sky-blue, swarms of hair pins pony tail fasteners, stashes of powders, colonies of tiny lipsticks (p.39)

You will be the first test subject, Tobias. Beatrice, however...." She smiles. "You are too injured to be of much use to me, so your execution will occur at the conclusion of this meeting."I try to hide the shudder that goes through me at the word "execution," my shoulder screaming with pain, and look up at Tobias. It's hard to blink tears back when I see the terror in Tobias's wide, dark eyes."No," says Tobias. His voice trembles, but his look stern as he shakes his head. "I would rather die.""I'm afraid you don't have much of a choice in that matter," replies Jeanine lightly.Tobias takes my face in this hands roughly and kisses me, the pressure of his lips pushing mine apart. I forget my pain and the terror of approaching death and for a moment, I am grateful that the memory of that kiss will be fresh in my mind as I meet my end.

Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.

Death may be peaceful but the circumstances leading to it are more often than not anything but. They slept that day with their eyes open, with death as the companion of their dreams. Maybe you would like to imagine that they were looking at each other, heads twisted at grotesque angles or at the fading sun. Their bodies were just empty vessels and their eyes were windows that showed only a vacant home. Maybe it was because they had passed on into a world where the sun never set or maybe even a world where nothing existed but an infinite pool of darkness. You can choose to believe anything you want up to the time Death comes for you. After that, well, we can only imagin

Certainly there is life and there is death, but even in death, if we look closely enough, we will find grace.

When someone you love...when they die, you want it undone. You'd do anything to have them back, and it's easy to believe that if only this had happened or that had happened, everything would be fine. And that's what makes you angry. What makes you hate. You don't want to believe that sometimes bad things happen just because they do.

I want to look at you as you kill me.

It’s a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.

We have talked about Suzy and about her last days, but it's as if our lives stopped then and there. If I say anything to him about feeling lonesome, he goes outside and does some little chore. I can't tell if he is secretly blaming me, or himself, or just too full of pain to talk. That was the one thing we could always do together. I wish for the old days. I wish for the struggling days and the days of Geronimo, and the days of birthing Charlie with no one but Jack to help me. How happy and in love we were then. I want to be in love again, but all I feel is darkness and shadows. Everything is changed and different

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,And field, and forest, as they wereReflected in a single mind)Like cast off clothes was left behindIn ashes, yet with hopes that she,Re-born from holy poverty,In lenten lands, hereafter mayResume them on her Easter Day."(Epitaph for Joy Davidman)

What I've always taken away from his words is the sense that we all have something that confines us, that seeks to define us, label us, belittling us in the process, shortchanging our potential. Can it be that that is our sanctuary, our refuge, our way to liberty?

Nevertheless now have I asked thee but only of the fire and wind, and of the day where-through thou hast passed, and of things from which thou canst not be separated, and yet canst thou give me no answer of them.

In the ghost house in the last days of the accident season, we were never going to die.

Child, [death] is with us always,” said Cadfael, patient beside him. “Last summer ninety-five men died here in the town, none of whom had done murder. For choosing the wrong side, they died. It falls upon blameless women in war, even in peace at the hands of evil men. It falls upon children who never did harm to any, upon old men, who in their lives have done good to many, and yet are brutally and senselessly slain. Never let it shake your faith that there is a balance hereafter. What you see is only a broken piece from a perfect whole.” “Such justice as we see is also but a broken shred. But it is our duty to preserve what we may, and fit together such fragments as we find, and take the rest on trust.

I'm sick of the images trapped in my headI'm sick of being preoccupied with the dead

Writing keeps death at bay. Every book I write is a triumph over death. ... If we did not know we’d die, we’d wander around and sleep like cats.

Integrity of life is fame's best friend,Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end.