I lost Susy thirteen years ago; I lost her mother--her incomparable mother!--five and a half years ago; Clara has gone away to live in Europe and now I have lost Jean. How poor I am, who was once so rich! . . . Jean lies yonder, I sit here; we are strangers under our own roof; we kissed hands good-by at this door last night--and it was forever, we never suspecting it. She lies there, and I sit here--writing, busying myself, to keep my heart from breaking. How dazzling the sunshine is flooding the hills around! It is like a mockery. Seventy-four years ago twenty-four days. Seventy-four years old yesterday. Who can estimate my age today?
For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad.
In every person, there is a doer and a devil. With every passing days, the doer dies and a devil has to rise.
The day she was born,her grandfather made her a ring of silver and a polished stone, because he loved her already.
Because there was only one thing worse than dying. And that was knowing you were going to die. And where. And how. (“Death Ship”)
Can I just say that dying sucks? All that bullshit about seeing the light and having this inner peace, blah, blah, blah. It's crap.
Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on death's silent ship always scan the dock for faces of the long-departed?
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.
If I could make a dream real, I would not kill anything unless it could never be changed at heart.
If you remembered somebody was as real as yourself, how could you kill anybody?
You can't drown yourself that simply. All good suicides involve speed and irreversibility, because the body will always move to protect itself against the sicko mind trying to do it in.
The dead do not harm us, only the alive.
Be sure that head and heart were laid In wisdom down, content to die. Be sure he faced the Starless Sky Unduped, unmurmuring, unafraid. (“The Passing of Bierce”)
I have triumphed over both life and death because I no longer desire to live, nor do I any longer fear to die.
Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays cosily tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
Maybe it's wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either.
but as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certain fatal cliffside fall—falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else's degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves.
Life seemed to him to be a narrow cage, and her iron bars were many and dense, and there was only one way out.
When I die, nieces, I want to be cremated, my ashes taken up in a bush plane and sprinkled onto the people in town below. Let them think my body is snowflakes, sticking in their hair and on their shoulders like dandruff.
Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight, when I come back we will go out together, we will walk out together among, the ten thousand things, each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.
