Quotes Tagged "death"

Wherever you look there is so much loss and folly to contemplate.

In the moment before I crossed over, I knew that the priests and magicians of Egypt were fools and charlatans for promising to prolong the beauties of life beyond the world we are give. Death is no enemy, but the foundation of gratitude, sympathy, and art. All of life's pleasures, only love owes no debt to death.

Does anyone else day dream about what it would be like if specific age groups just dropped dead all across the world?

Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.

After I am dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.

He held her and rocked her, believing, rightly or wrongly, that Ellie wept for the very intractability of death, its imperviousness to argument or to a little girl’s tears; that she wept over its cruel unpredictability; and that she wept because of the human being’s wonderful, deadly ability to translate symbols into conclusions that were either fine and noble or blackly terrifying. If all those animals had died and been buried, then Church could die (any time!) and be buried; and if that could happen to Church, it could happen to her mother, her father, her baby brother. To herself. Death was a vague idea; the Pet Sematary was real. In the texture of those rude markers were truths which even a child’s hands could feel.

And will 'a not come again? And will 'a not come again? No, no, he is dead, Go to thy death bed: He will never come again.

Each day death corrodes what we call living, and life ceaselessly swallows our desire for the void.

Though she would have preferred long ago to have died, fled, gotten it all over with, the body--Jesus, how the body!--took its time. It possessed its own wishes and nostalgias. You could not just turn neatly into light and slip out the window. You couldn't go like that. Within one's own departing but stubborn flesh, there was only the long, sentimental, piecemeal farewell. Sir? A towel. Is there a towel? The body, hauling sadness, pursued the soul, hobbled after. The body was like a sweet, dim dog trotting lamely toward the gate as you tried slowly to drive off, out the long driveway. Take me, take me, too, barked the dog. Don't go, don't go, it said, running along the fence, almost keeping pace but not quite, its reflection a shrinking charm in the car mirrors as you trundled past the viburnium, past the pin grove, past the property line, past every last patch of land, straight down the swallowing road, disappearing and disappearing. Until at last it was true: you had disappeared.

One mile farther and I come to a second grave beside the road, nameless like the other, marked only with the dull blue-black stones of the badlands. I do not pause this time. The more often you stop the more difficult it is to continue. Stop too long and they cover you with rocks.

Glory is the sunshine of the dead

The lapse of ages changes all things - time - language - the earth - the bounds of the sea - the stars of the sky, and everything 'about, around, and underneath' man, except man himself, who has always been and always will be, an unlucky rascal. The infinite variety of lives conduct but to death, and the infinity of wishes lead but to disappointment. All the discoveries which have yet been made have multiplied little but existence.

Till her appointed course be run; Till on the darkness faint her breath Flown to the silent void, and Death Sit crowned upon the ashen sun. (“The Testimony of the Suns”)

They had...finished their lives before their death – which is not always the end of life and often comes long before the end.

Happiness is the change that comes over me when I describe the world It comes over the world Happiness is the change that comes over me when I'm afraid It comes over the world For instance I can be afraid of and for the world afraid because the world consists among other things of me so swiftly dying

Everybody was dying, or already dead, or leaving other people, and the year was dying into winter, and the only thing to do was make some noise.

In ten years time I’ll be… (dead) sixty.

As he watches the sun rise, what grieves him is that he failed her. He thinks of the terror she felt. They tell him it was quick, as if that will somehow confine the horror.

The man now retrieved a linen cloth and stuffed it deep into Katherine’s mouth. “Death,” he whispered to her, “should be a quiet thing.

Auntie Phyl's last months in the care home were extra pieces. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate enough to die swiftly and suddenly, in full possession of our faculties and our fate, but more and more of us will be condemned to linger, at the mercy of anxious or indifferent relatives, careless strangers, unwanted medical interventions, increasing debility, incontinence, memory loss. We live too long, but, like the sibyl hanging in her basket in the cave at Cumae, we find it hard to die.