All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.
A complete life may be one ending in so full identification with the non-self that there is no self to die.
What branch does not have its leaves and which twig will not have its flowers?
The only advantage of knowledge is that it can justify suffering.
To learn to die is to learn to live. Death is the giver of life.
Who can be worried without the light of a memory?
Life is just one long day separated into sections by sleep. Life never stops happening until you are dead. So whatever happens-love, grief, hate, shame- never disappears. It just gets easier to live with. It just scabs over, waiting for something else significant to happen.
We’re organisms; we’re conceived, we’re born, we live, we die, and we decay. But as we decay we feed the world of the living: plants and bugs and bacteria.
That kind of imagination is why we're not dead.
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.
Each day death corrodes what we call living, and life ceaselessly swallows our desire for the void.
They had...finished their lives before their death – which is not always the end of life and often comes long before the end.
Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.
…Not that it was unjust; not that the scales were forced out of balance. Where there had been good, it showed as clearly. Kindnesses, accomplishments, all those were present, too.
You had once asked me if I was afraid of death. I said I was afraid of not living. I don’t want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.
The Angel of Death is the invisible Angel of Life.
I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death.
Death frees us from the sickness of modern life.
It’s when I have to acknowledge the past and all of those nameless, faceless people I’d assassinated, that I unravel inside.
The sum of his life was a unique melody, hauntingly beautiful and powerful.
