I have triumphed over both life and death because I no longer desire to live, nor do I any longer fear to die.
Life seemed to him to be a narrow cage, and her iron bars were many and dense, and there was only one way out.
Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
The world begins anew with every birth, my father used to say. He forgot to say, with every death it ends. Or did not think he needed to. Because for a goodly part of his life he worked in a graveyard.
If I should go before the rest of you Break not a flower nor inscribe a stone, Nor when I'm gone speak in a Sunday voice But be the usual selves that I have known. Weep if you must, Parting is hell, But life goes on, So sing as well.
A little smoke lost in the air, that was the life of a man.
I could picture how Caprice was before we lost her. Dark hair, beautiful smile, intelligent hazel eyes, quick wit. Now gone. Just gone. Like a chessboard where suddenly one of the knights disappeared. A blank spot on the board of life that could never truly be replaced because no two things were alike, no two beings alike.
Nothing in life was as ugly as death.
Not only did I rediscover every experience of my life, I had to live each unfulfilled desire as well—as though they’d been fulfilled. I saw that what transpires in the mind is just as real as any flesh and blood occurrence. What had only been imagination in life, now became tangible, each fantasy a full reality. I lived them all—while, at the same time, standing to the side, a witness to their, often, intimate squalor. A witness cursed with total objectivity.
The beauty of the sea is that it never shows any weakness and never tires of the countless souls that unleash their broken voices into its secret depths.
I didn't cry when they buried my father - I wouldn't let myself. I didn't cry when they buried my sister. On Thursday night, with my family asleep upstairs, my eyes filled as Agassi and Marcos Baghdatis played out the fifth set of their moving second-round match.
To realize that all your life—you know, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain—it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream. A dream that you had inside a locked room. A dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams there's a monster at the end of it.
Downfall, failure and death cannot be far from any man who made counterfeit friends his ally and support.
YOU'RE ONLY PUTTING OFF THE INEVITABLE, he said. That's what being alive is all about.
Once the game is over, the King and the pawn go back in the same box.
…the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.
They looked to each other for support, for strength, and at times, motivation, to remember why and for whom they lived.
Death was not the scariest thing out there; no, the denial of it could be far worse.
Sofya now understood the difference between life and existence: her life had come to an end, but her existence could drag on indefinitely. And however wretched and miserable this existence was, the thought of violent death still filled her with horror.
Dark circles under my eyes sink deeper and deeper into my skull, in contrast to my pale skin there is an undeniable resemblance to a fresh corpse.
