Quotes Tagged "death"

The idea of immortality, that like a sea has ebbed and flowed in the human heart, with its countless waves of hope and fear, beating against the shores and rocks of time and fate, was not born of any book, nor of any creed, nor of any religion. It was born of human affection, and it will continue to ebb and flow beneath the mists and clouds of doubt and darkness as long as love kisses the lips of death. It is the rainbow – Hope shining upon the tears of grief.

Your dreamers. You ridiculous children. You dancing grinning fuckups. Here is your bright future. Your earnest, saccharine hope. How does it taste dripping from the neck of everyone you love?

Death seemed to lose its terrors and to borrow a grace and dignity in sublime keeping with the life that was ebbing away.

Just when it seemed my mother couldn’t bear one more needle, one more insane orange pill, my sister, in silence, stood at the end of the bed and slowly rubbed her feet, which were scratchy with hard, yellow skin, and dirt cramped beneath the broken nails, which changed nothing in time except the way my mother was lost in it for a while as if with a kind of relief that doesn’t relieve. And then, with her eyes closed, my mother said the one or two words the living have for gratefulness, which is a kind of forgetting, with a sense of what it means to be alive long enough to love someone. Thank you, she said. As for me, I didn’t care how her voice suddenly seemed low and kind, or what failures and triumphs of the body and spirit brought her to that point— just that it sounded like hope, stupid hope.

I don’t know that our dreams died. Rather, I think that they were abandoned because that leaves us with the dream that maybe, in some nearly impossible way we can somehow still achieve the dream, for without a dream it us who dies.

Springtime brings the consolation of hope. It gives the assurance that death has lost its sting. There is beauty in this hope and this assurance. There is beauty in the woman whose chemo-induced baldness, unswaddled, shines like a pearl, in the man whose palsy makes him shimmy like a Spanish dancer. There is beauty in their defiance and their acceptance. There is beauty in their standing in the hope that death can't steal or destroy.

all the light in any room contains the last breath of the dead

Oh! it is hard to take to heart the lesson that such deaths will teach, but let no man reject it, for it is one that all must learn, and is a mighty, universal Truth. When Death strikes down the innocent and young, for every fragile form from which he lets the panting spirit free, a hundred virtues rise, in shapes of mercy, charity, and love, to walk the world, and bless it. Of every tear that sorrowing mortals shed on such green graves, some good is born, some gentler nature comes.

People act all surprised when someone dies i think thats a sign that they forget we not permanent residents on this  earth

With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. [...] Part of you died each year when leaves fell from the tress and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.

This is what I know - Sam is dead. My brother is dead. My mother is dead. My father is dead. My husband is dead. My cat is dead. My dog, who was dead in 1957, is still dead. Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen. Maybe tomorrow.

Death of a beloved leaves a deep hole in our heart.

سيان ان احيا او اموت، الايمان اقوى من الموت، والموت أهون من الذل فهنيئا لنا الامل الذي هانت بجانبه الحياة. واهلا بصباح جديد من الحرية وليقض الله ما هو قاض..

I think of Gould and his essay every time I have a patient with a terminal illness. There is almost always a long tail of possibility, however thin. What’s wrong with looking for it? Nothing, it seems to me, unless it means we have failed to prepare for the outcome that’s vastly more probable. The trouble is that we’ve built our medical system and culture around the long tail. We’ve created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets—and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan.

Whoever stop dreaming prepares for death.

Nothing is lost. That which seems lost is just not confined to this moment.

He was hoping that things would work out well. The Doctor always tended to hope that things would work out well - his life would have been unbearably stressful if he didn't. Plus, a long lifespan spent traveling in both time and space had given him a certain perspective on hideous situations involving almost certain death. So far none of them had ended that badly.

They are all in the same category, both those who are afflicted with fickleness, boredom and a ceaseless change of purpose, and who always yearn for what they left behind, and those who just yawn from apathy. There are those too who toss around like insomniacs, and keep changing their position until they find rest through sheer weariness. They keep altering the condition of their lives, and eventually stick to that one in which they are trapped not by weariness with further change but by old age which is too sluggish for novelty. There are those too who suffer not from moral steadfastness but from inertia, and so lack the fickleness to live as they wish, and just live as they have begun. In fact there are innumerable characteristics of the malady, but one effect - dissatisfaction with oneself. This arises from mental instability and from fearful and unfulfilled desires, when men do not dare or do not achieve all they long for, and all they grasp at is hope: they are always unbalanced and fickle, an inevitable consequence of living in suspense. They struggle to gain their prayers by every path, and they teach and force themselves to do dishonourable and difficult things; and when their efforts are unrewarded the fruitless disgrace tortures them, and they regret not the wickedness but the frustration of their desires. Then they are gripped by repentance for their attempt and fear of trying again, and they are undermined by the restlessness of a mind that can discover no outlet, because they can neither control nor obey their desires, by the dithering of life that cannot see its way ahead, and by the lethargy of a soul stagnating amid its abandoned hopes.

I can't wait to collapse into perfection

...so I'm not going to be good at answering these binary questions, you see. Because sometimes I am so terrified of getting out of bed, because I don't know what the world will bring, or what I'll see. I am terrified because there is so much darkness out there, there is such cruelty, I am terrified when the phone rings that someone will tell me ... someone I love will have died or the world I thought I knew will be gone for ever and I dread it, I dread the day, I dread what it will bring. And sometimes I cannot wait for the sun to rise, because the world is full of people, of human beings singing their songs and telling their stories, of lie and passion, glory and wonder, and Death is not a thing to fear, but is life's mirror reminding us to live, live, live, and I am honoured, I am so honoured, to travel the world and see the world is a place of people, and to be alive with them, living with them, even at the end.