Dying Quotes - Page 6

People are not dying of lack of money but of lack of esteem and awareness. ("Kein Schwein ruft mich an")

The problem with catching dreams is you forget how truly incredible they are when you live with them everyday.

We just did an awesome job of not dying.

The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.

Dead’s not good, but at least it’s simple.

When I was younger, I would cling to life because life was at the top of the turning wheel. But like the song of my gypsy girl, the great wheel turns over and lands on a minor key. It is then that you come of age and life means nothing to you. To live, to die, to overdose, to fall in a coma in the street... it is all the same. It is only in the peach innocence of youth that life is at its crest on top of the wheel. And there being only life, the young cling to it, they fear death… And they should! ...For they are 'in' life.

There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being.

Your relationship or marriage is dead or dying, if you almost always have to remind your partner to miss you (and/or they almost always have to remind you to miss them).

What could be more intimate than dying with someone?

Dying in one’s fourth decade is unusual now, but dying is not. “The thing about lung cancer is that it’s not exotic,” Paul wrote in an email to his best friend, Robin. “The reader can get into these shoes, walk a bit, and say, ‘So that’s what it looks like from here. Sooner or later, I’ll be back here in my own shoes.’ That’s what I’m aiming for, I think. Not the sensationalism of dying and not the exhortations to gather rosebuds but: Here’s what lies up ahead on the road.” Of course, he did more than just describe the terrain. He traversed it bravely.

It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, music, the physics of falling leaves, vanilla and jasmine, poppies, smiling, anthills, the color of the sky, coffee and cashmere, literature, sparks and subway trains... If only one could leave this life slowly!

You can die from kitsch. And we're close to it.

What is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?

At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change of position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death.

Living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value.

She let herself fall backwards into the music, and it was like falling in a dream, without fear.It was like being a raindrop falling into the ocean that had started you.

Apart from being dead its going to be necessary to die. And I'm dealing at the moment with the realization that at my age there is absoutely no way in which I can skirt the matter and come out on the other side.

How can the boy who stirred an entire nation be dying?

When she awakes, she knows where she is. This place, this ancient place sears one’s soul with recognition. 'Heaven' seems an inadequate word for it, but that is what it is known as.

Ever two seconds, somewhere in the world, a child dies of starvation. That means every two seconds there is a story where the main character dies. That's a lot of horrible stories. So if my death looks like a sad story to someone else, I hope those people will use their imagination to think of all the children who don't get special deaths.

Death pulls people from our spaces so often and we accept it as our final payment for having been here and having lived, however big or small. We don’t always have time to notice how things have changed in the absence of some of them. But then death pulls away someone we love, and we find that time. In here, we notice everything; growing grass and fingernails, and songs that end in a minor key. We are too sad to do anything else but watch a clock, applying seconds, minutes, and hours to the trauma and the lacerations. Time, the forever healer, they say. We find the time to wonder how everyone else is moving on, around our paralyzed selves. Ourselves unsure of roads and trees and birds and things. It all blurs and words aren’t words anymore. We find the time to attempt to figure a way to rethink everything we thought about this world and why we came to it.

Maybe you had to be dying to finally get to do what you wanted.I fidgeted around with the puzzle pieces for a while longer, but I wasn't lucky. Nothing seemed to fit without a whole lot of work.Then I had this thought: What if it was enough to realize that you would die someday, that none of this would go on forever? Would that be enough?

It stands to reason that anyone who learns to live well will die well. The skills are the same: being present in the moment, and humble, and brave, and keeping a sense of humor. (361)

I have died at the ripe age of twenty.Smile, for the world didn't get a chance to disappoint me.I have died at the mature age of ninety.Smile, for my life was more than satisfying.I have died suddenly—out of the blue.Smile, for I didn't have to fall ill before you.I have died from a long illness.Smile, for I had the chance to say goodbye.I did not want to leave this Earth.But smile, for I am still here among you.Why are you crying?Can you not see I am smiling?

I don't feel so sad when somebody dies, Julio, because they fly away to explore the stars and planets. When it's our turn we join them in exploring the universe.

What do you think of when you think of mourning?' Jenny asks.The question snaps me back to attention. I answer without really thinking. "I guess 'Funeral Blues' by W.H. Auden. I think it was Auden. I suppose that's not very original.''I don't know it.''It's a poem.''I gathered.''I'm just clarifying. It's not a blues album.'Jenny ignores my swipe at her intelligence.'Does your response need to be original? Isn't that what poetry is for, for the poet to express something so personal that it ultimately is universal?'I shrug. Who is Jenny, even new Jenny, to say what poetry is for? Who am I for that matter?'Why do you thin of that poem in particular?'"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, / Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, / Silence the pianos and with muffled drum / Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.' I learned the poem in college and it stuck.

What was I was dying for? The sins of the past? The wrongs of the present? Did it even matter?

Sex doesn't satisfy for a lifetime, the more you have it, the more you want it. And the more you have it, the more you die out.

I’ve got money!” Eve exclaimed in a frantic frenzy of hope, her eyes dancing wildly with the notion that there was some way out of this. “I mean, I don’t know what use money is to the Grim Reaper, but I’ve got a ton of cash! It’s in a hat box under my bed! I’ve got a bright red Lexus in the garage, I’ve got my engagement ring upstairs, it’s real gold… there must be something we can trade off with…”“You can’t bribe me away, I’m afraid,” said Mr. Azrael. “Money means nothing where I come from.

The Line welcomed rain and sun. Seeds germinated in mass graves, between skulls and femurs and broken pick handles, tendrils rose up alongside dog spikes and clavicles, thrust around teak sleepers and tibias, scapulas, vertebrae, fibulas and femurs.

He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.

You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead.

It is a far far better thing that I do than anything I have ever done it is a far far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

You were right to come to see a dying man. It is right that these moments should have witnesses. Everyone has his dream; I would like to live till dawn, but I know I have less than three hours left. It will be night, but no matter. Dying is simple. It does not take daylight. So be it: I will die by starlight

Certain aspects of dying are still a mystery to me now, but as I grow and study life more, the end of my life becomes more of a certain truth.

It is early, early morning. It's that time when it's still dark but you know the day is coming. Blue is bleeding through black. Stars are dying.

Death is perfectly safe. (55)

[C]oncepts of dying in to a heaven or hell seem a good deal more political than spiritual. (124)

Reading Aloud to My Father I chose the book haphazardfrom the shelf, but with Nabokov's firstsentence I knew it wasn't the thingto read to a dying man:The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began,and common sense tells us that our existenceis but a brief crack of lightbetween two eternities of darkness.The words disturbed both of us immediately,and I stopped. With music it was the same --Chopin's Piano Concerto — he asked meto turn it off. He ceased eating, and dranklittle, while the tumors briskly appropriatedwhat was left of him.But to return to the cradle rocking. I thinkNabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss.That's why babies howl at birth,and why the dying so often reachfor something only they can apprehend.At the end they don't want their handsto be under the covers, and if you should putyour hand on theirs in a tentative gestureof solidarity, they'll pull the hand free;and you must honor that desire,and let them pull it free.

I had heard the wind from the mountains calling me last night, telling me it was my time to go, and I woke up, knowing what to do.

It isn't dying I'm afraid of, it isn't that at all; I know what it is to die, I've died already. It is the endless obliteration, the knowledge that there will never be anything else. That's what I can't stand, to try so hard and to end in nothing. You know what I mean, don't you? ... I really loved to write.

the word dyting is not synonymous with the word useless

I glimpsed the man's face with the shine of death on it. They laid him down there in the open. They had brought him there to be close to his death, I understood this also at the same moment. For who would wish to see a companion gasp his last on a jolting cart? We desire to keep the dying and the newly dead close before our eyes so as to give them full meed of pity. Our Lord was brought down to be pitied, on the Cross He was too far away.

Geraldine keeps her eyes trained on him as she slowly reaches into her purse, wrapping her fingers around her gun. “…Callo, I’m so sorry that your life ended up this way,” she sighs as she gets out of her side of the car, her feet burning from the cold as her high heels sink into the fallen snow. “Aren’t you scared?”“I’m you, Geraldine… I fell into the same trap as you, anyway,” Callo answers. His large eyes are shining with tears, but he doesn’t seem afraid in the least. “…The dead don’t feel anything, you know… not even guilt or regret. So, what is there to be afraid of?

Dreams link us to those who have already left this life.

When we're alive, life consumes us. But when we die, all of the color and the motion is gone so quickly, it's as though it can no longer stand to be wasted on us.

The mental pictures I have of my parents and grandparents and my childhood are beginning to break up into small fragments and get blown away from me into empty space, and the same wind is sucking me toward it ever so gently, so gently as not even to raise a hair on my head (though the truth is that there are very few of them to be raised). I'm starting to take the idea of death as the end of life somewhat harder than before. I used to wonder why people seemed to think that life is tragic or sad. Isn't it also comic and funny? And beyond all that, isn't it amazing and marvelous? Yes, but only if you have it. And I am starting not to have it. The pictures are disintegrating, as if their molecules were saying, "I've had enough," ready to go somewhere else and form a new configuration. They betray us, those molecules, we who have loved them. They treat us like dirt.

Sometimes we grieve the living more than the dead.

Or perhaps it is because it is so NECESSARY for you to win. It is like a drowning man catching at a straw. You yourself will agree that, unless he were drowning he would not mistake a straw for the trunk of a tree.

The Society wants us to be afraid of dying. But I'm not. I'm only afraid of dying wrong.

with ringworm, lice bites, and a million bugs. Men so sick they are dying

Epitaph n: an inscription on a tomb showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.

I have seen many die, surrounded by loved ones, and their last words were ‘I love you.’ There were some who could no longer speak yet with their eyes and soft smile left behind that same healing message. I have been in rooms where those who were dying made it feel like sacred ground. (26)

Okay.' I can feel the letters vomit off my tongue.O.K.A. Y.I watch the vet insert the syringe into the catheter and inject the second drug. And then the adventures come flooding back:The puppy farm.The gentle untying of the shoelace.THIS! IS! MY! HOME! NOW!Our first night together.Running on the beach.Sadie and Sophie and Sophie Dee.Shared ice-cream cones.Thanksgivings.Tofurky.Car rides.Laughter.Eye rain.Chicken and rice.Paralysis.Surgery.Christmases.Walks.Dog parks.Squirrel chasing.Naps.Snuggling.'Fishful Thinking.'The adventure at sea.Gentle kisses.Manic kisses.More eye rain.So much eye rain.Red ball.The veterinarian holds a stethoscope up to Lily's chest, listening for her heartbeat.All dogs go to heaven.'Your mother's name is Witchie-Poo.' I stroke Lily behind her ears the way that used to calm her. 'Look for her.'OH FUCK IT HURTS.I barely whisper. 'She will take care of you.

A sematary," I say. "A what?" Viola says, looking round at all the square stones marking out their graves. Must be a hundred, maybe two, in orderly rows and well-kept grass. Settler life is hard and it's short and lotsa New World people have lost the battle."It's a place for burying dead folk,"

Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?

Of course, it’s now obvious why he was so angry that day. People don’t move into hospice to live but to die. And that half an egg sandwich I ended up making him–that sandwich was the last meal he ate in our Haight-Ashbury apartment, our one true home.

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.

I was facing him before the last word was out, but I should have been dead by then. In a way I did die, right there, all that time ago, and this is a ghost who has been telling you stories and drinking your wine. You don't understand. Never mind.