A Mother Dying Quotes & Sayings

I think about the people I know with the absolutely largest hearts, people with a stunning capacity for endurance and grace and kindness against the most screaming terrors and pains. My Mom and Dad, for example, enduring the death of their first child at six months old, the boy the brother I never met, dying quietly in his stroller on the porch in the moment that my mother stepped back inside to get a pair of gloves because the crisp brilliant April wind was filled with a whistling cutting wind....

Fifty years later after five more children and two miscarriages she is standing in the kitchen with her usual eternal endless cup of tea and I ask her: How do you get over the death of your child?

And she says, in her blunt honest direct terse kind way,
You don't.
Her face harrowed like a hawk for a moment in the swirling steam of the tea.
p112-13 — Brian Doyle

Our primitive ancestors learnt various behavioral characteristics like jealousy, possessiveness and aggression to ensure the survival of their wild love life in the harsh environment of Mother Nature. And all those behavioral responses eventually got engraved in our genetic blueprint. So, these are not the enemies in the path of a healthy relationship, rather when utilized properly they can even kindle the spark in a dying relationship. — Abhijit Naskar

I am in my mother's room. It's I who live there now. I don't know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I'd never have got there alone. There's this man who comes every week. Perhaps I got there thanks to him. He says not. He gives me money and takes away the pages. So many pages,so much money. Yes, I work now, a little like I used to, except that I don't know how to work any more. That doesn't matter apparently. What I'd like now is to speak of the things that are left, say my good-byes, finish dying. They don't want that. Yes, there is more than one, apparently. But it's always the same one that comes. You'll do that later, he says. Good. The truth is I haven't much will left. When he comes for the fresh pages he brings back the previous week's. They are marked with signs I don't understand ... Here's my beginning. It must mean something, or they wouldn't keep it. Here it is. — Samuel Beckett

And here she was. Lying on the floor of a dusty, empty, locked room thinking how grateful she felt.
She smiled, though it hurt tremendously to do so, thinking how blessed she had been to have spent twelve years with the most precious gifts from God. She felt honored that they called her mother. She knew she had done the best she could teaching them about life and love, faith and family.
Margo lay slowly dying from the wounds inflicted by a monster, but she was at peace. Because though the devil meant it for evil, God turned it to good. — Karen Luellen

Connie went slowly home to Wragby. 'Home!'...it was a warm word to use for that great, weary warren. But then it was a word that had had its day. It was somehow cancelled. All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day to day. Home was a place you lived in, love was a thing you didn't fool yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people, a father was an individual who enjoyed his own existence, a husband was a man you lived with and kept going in spirits. As for sex, the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing. — D.H. Lawrence

What scared Stanley the most about dying wasn't his actual death. He figured he could handle the pain. It wouldn't be much worse than what he felt now. In fact, maybe at the moment of his death he would be too weak to feel pain. Death would be a relief. What worried him the most was the thought of his parents not knowing what happened to him, not knowing whether he was dead or alive. He hated to imagine what it would be like for his mother and father, day after day, month after month, not knowing, living on false hope. For him, at least, it would be over. For his parents, the pain would never end. — Louis Sachar

By the time I rose and started walking again, I didn't begrudge my mother a thing. The truth was, in spite of all that, she'd been a spectacular mom. I knew it as I was growing up. I knew it in the days that she was dying. I knew it now. And I knew that was something. That it was a lot. I had plenty of friends who had moms who - no matter how long they lived - would never give them the all-encompassing love that my mother had given me. My mother considered that love her greatest achievement. — Cheryl Strayed

I once picked up a woman from a garbage dump and she was burning with fever; she was in her last days and her only lament was: My son did this to me. I begged her: You must forgive your son. In a moment of madness, when he was not himself, he did a thing he regrets. Be a mother to him, forgive him. It took me a long time to make her say: I forgive my son. Just before she died in my arms, she was able to say that with a real forgiveness. She was not concerned that she was dying. The breaking of the heart was that her son did not want her. This is something you and I can understand. — Mother Teresa

When I was forty, I was getting divorced, living in a low-class, dirty hotel in New York. My mother was dying of cancer. I owed $20,000. That was about the lowest. I came back to show business, and I couldn't get a job. I was turned down by every small-time agent in New York. — Rodney Dangerfield

You're worried about your mother dying, aren't you," Leah said, putting her cheek on my forearm. "I can tell."
For a moment I hesitated, but I could hear the call for intimacy in her voice, the desire for me to let her enter those grottoes where I tended my own fear of my mother's illness. — Pat Conroy

Mother Teresa tells a story of walking past an open drain and catching a glimpse of something moving in it. She investigated and found a dying man whom she took back to a home where he could die in love and peace. 'I live like an animal in the streets,' the man told her. 'Now I will die like an angel' ... — Mother Teresa

I'm not leaving." I said.
"Why not?" he demanded.
"I'm in my last semester of school -it would screw everything up."
"You're a good student -you'll figure it out."
"I don't want to crowd Mom and Phil."
"Your Mother's been dying to have you back."
"Florida is too hot."
His fist came down on the table again. "We both know what's really going on here, Bella, and it's not good for you." He took a deep breath. "It's been months. No calls, no letters, no contact. You can't keep waiting for him. — Stephenie Meyer

Esi stared at her mother then, and it was as though she were seeing her for the first time. Maame was not a whole woman. There were large swaths of her spirit missing, and no matter how much she loved Esi, and no matter how much Esi loved her, they both knew in that moment that love could never return what Maame had lost. And Esi knew, too, that her mother would die rather than run into the woods ever again, die before capture, die even if it meant that in her dying, Esi would inherit that unspeakable sense of loss, learn what it meant to be un-whole. — Yaa Gyasi

We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread, but there are many more dying for a little love ... — Mother Teresa

Mrs. Potter said you were a kind and loving soul, underneath all the rest. I guess that means your heart's so sad that it's hard to get out from under the weight. When I was sad about my mother dying, Granny used to say grief is the heaviest thing to carry alone. So I know all about that -Mike — Pam Munoz Ryan

It is night at the front, a shadow, a shot. The Jew who has just fired
hears a moan ...
And then, mother, the hair stands up on his head, for only a few feet from him in the darkness the enemy voice is reciting in Hebrew the prayer of the dying. Ai, God, the soldier has cut down a Jewish brother! Ai, misery! He drops his rifle and runs into no man's land, insane with shame and grief. Insane, you understand? The enemy fires at him, his comrades shout at him to come back. But he refuses; he stays in no man's land and dies. Ai, misery, ai ... ! — Andre Schwarz-Bart

My mother went on and on about it. Actually she went off on a tangent, I told her about your mother at one point and she went all (H starts doing a lightly French accent) it is not fair for your friend, she is not going to get the important boredoms and mournings and melancholies that are her due and are owing to her just from being the age that she is, for now it will be interrupted by real mournings and real melancholies ... — Ali Smith

Let us not be afraid to be humble, small, helpless to prove our love for God. The cup of water you give the sick, the way you lift a dying man, the way you feed a baby, the way you teach a dull child, the way you give medicine to a sufferer of leprosy, the joy with which you smile at your own at home - all this is God's love in the world today. — Mother Teresa

I felt hollowed out. My mom's death was not useful. I felt a shot of rage at her, and then imagined those last bloody moments in the house, when she realized it had gone wrong, when Debby lay dying, and it was all over, her unsterling life.
My anger gave way to a strange tenderness, what a mother might feel for her child, and I thought, At least she tried. She tried, on that final day, as hard as anyone could have tried.
And I would try to find peace in that. — Gillian Flynn

I remember the shift that occurred after Abby was born - there'd been the great big before, where dying grandparents and natural disasters on the news were sad but mostly distant concerns. But then I became a mother, and when that happens, you cross a line that makes all loss a crushing, personal matter. — DEB CALLETI

In 1965, I went to what was called the worst Bihar famine in India, and I saw starvation, death, people dying of hunger, for the first time. It changed my life. I came back home, told my mother, 'I'd like to live and work in a village.' Mother went into a coma. — Bunker Roy

Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on
— Jane Austen

If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Her kitsch was the image of home, all peace, quiet, and harmony, and ruled by a loving mother and a wise father. It was an image that took shape in her after the death of her parents. The less her life resembled the sweetest of dreams, the more sensitive she was to its magic, and more than once she shed tears when the ungrateful daughter in a sentimental film embraced the neglected father as the windows of the happy family's house shone out into the dying day. — Milan Kundera

The short sharp shock of three thousand mother two hundred mothers. The ones who picked through the supermarket debris for pieces of their dead husbands. The ones who still laundered their gone son's bed sheets by hand. The ones who kept an extra teacup at the end of the table, in case of miracles. The elegant ones, the angry ones, the clever ones, the ones in hairnets, the ones exhausted by all the dying. They carried their sorrow - not with photos under their arms, or with public wailing, or by beating their chests, but with a weariness around the eyes. Mothers and daughters and children and grandmothers, too. They never fought the wars, but they suffered them, blood and bone. — Colum McCann

I am a Jewish mother. My dying words will be, "Put a jumper on — Amanda Craig

You may claim no affiliation with them, but perhaps some have crossed your path.And perhaps you'd like to help us find them."
"Oh,sure.You killed my mother. You can imagine I'm dying to help you out."
Thomas manages to ignore me again. He glances at the first photo projected on the wall. "Know this person?"
I shake my head. "Never seen him before."
Thomas clicks the remote. Another photo pops up. "How about this one?"
"Nope."
Another photo. "How about this?"
"Nope."
Yet another stranger pops up on the wall. "Seen this girl before?"
"Never seen her in my life."
More unfamiliar faces. Thomas goes through them without blinking an eye or questioning my responses. What a stupid puppet of the state. I watch him as we continue, wishing I weren't chained so I could beat this man to the ground. — Marie Lu

My mother died of colon cancer one week after my eleventh birthday, and that fact has shaped my life. All that I have become and much that I have not become, I trace directly or indirectly to her death ... In my professional and personal life, I have lived with the awareness of death's imminence for more than half a century, and labored in its constant presence for all but the first decade of that time. — Sherwin B. Nuland

We drove down Corydon avenue towards my mother's apartment. How are you doing, she asked me? Fine, fine, I said. I wanted to tell her that I felt I was dying from rage and that I felt guilty about everything and that when I was a kid I woke up every morning singing, that I couldn't wait to leap out of bed and rush out of the house into the magical kingdom that was my world, that dust made visible in sunbeams gave me real authentic joy, that my sparkly golden banana-seated bike with the very high sissy bar took my breath away, the majesty of it, that it was mine, that there was no freer soul in the world than me at age nine, and that now I wake up every morning reminding myself that control is an illusion, taking deep breaths and counting to ten trying to ward off panic attacks and hoping that my own hands hadn't managed to strangle me while I slept. — Miriam Toews

I looked at her, exhausted in the hospital bed, and she looked at you, and you looked at me looking at her with eyes that had never known anything else, and for a moment there I swear we saw each other with a clarity that nothing can alter, not time, not heartbreak, not death. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Mother Teresa was once asked by a journalist why she does what she does, that is, how she is able to take the dying poor from the streets of Calcutta, nurse and love them. Her response reflected her deep self-knowledge: "I realized a long time ago that I had a Hitler within me."2 This realization became the basis of her self-transcendence and of her unique holiness. — Wayne Teasdale

In a shuddering voice her father kept asking the pale-faced woman - who looked like her mother and wore her mother's apron but couldn't be her mother - for forgiveness. If she had been dying every minute of every day, they might have been a happy family. The blood consumed every centimeter of apron cloth and Havaa was afraid the wound would become hers if she came too close. Her mother stirred, looked to her father, and wrapped her five fingers over his none. She opened her mouth, but he shook his head, told her to save her breath, and Havaa would always remember how he had shushed what might have been her good-bye so that she could breathe. — Anthony Marra

For years afterward, I had dreams in which my mother appeared in strange forms, her features sewn onto other beings in combinations that seemed both grotesque and profound: as a slippery white fish at the end of my hook, with a trout's gaping, sorrowful mouth and her dark, shuttered eyes; as the elm tree at the edge of our property, its ragged clumps of tarnished gold leaves replaced by knotted skeins of her black hair; as the lame gray dog that lived on the Mueller's property, whose mouth, her mouth, opened and closed in yearning and who never made a sound. As I grew older, I came to realize that death had been easy for my mother; to fear death, you must first have something to tether you to life. But she had not. It was as if she had been preparing for her death the entire time I knew her. One day she was alive; the next, not.
And as Sybil said, she was lucky. For what more could we presume to ask from death - but kindness? — Hanya Yanagihara

What woman worthy of the name Mother would stand on a high moral platform about selling her body if her child were dying of hunger and exposure? Not I. — Jennifer Worth

Oh, trust me Sydney Tar Ponds, you aren't the first Personification to be forgotten by somebody ordinary," Mearth sighed with a falsely-reassuring smile. Alecto stepped back from her, glaring hatefully. "Sydney Tar Ponds," Mearth added, "I've had so many ordinary people as friends in my life that by now I've forgotten all their names. At first it was difficult ... very sad ... to see them always leaving, dying, disappearing, ignoring, but after a while I realized that they weren't worth the trouble. I'd rather be in the company of other Personifications. At least they aren't always dropping dead like houseflies or sailing away to parts unknown. Nil sa saol seo ach ceo, i ni bheimid beo, ach seal beag gearr. Wouldn't you agree?"
"No," Alecto told her. "I think you're insane. — Rebecca McNutt

He felt entombed and stifled and desperately craved oxygen. He vainly raised the question: Why have you forsaken me?

'Call my mother,' he yelled. He had meant to say: I'm dying. Please call a priest.

The shadowy Presence, who had been in a panic, rushed over to him and, disregarding the fact that it was live, pushed the cable aside.

'You're alive,' the Presence said in breathless tones. 'Mamma's here to help.'

The elevator continued to descend, creating a vacuum. Barnes gasped for breath.

'Breathe in, breathe out,' the Presence urged. She tapped his pulse rapidly with two fingers. 'Come on, you can do it. One, two, three. Breathe in. Mamma's here to help.' ... In his delirium he thought that indeed his mother was here to help. However, in all of Barnes's twenty-nine years of so-called living, his mother had never come so comfortingly close as this. — Joseph G. Peterson

I was born late - what my mother calls the last kick of a dying horse. There's three of us children, but I'm 13 or 14 years younger than my brother and sister. — Paul O'Grady

The mother is not dying exactly, but has reached a point in life where death is a familiar on the staircase. — Clive Barnes

I'd never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a man who is said to be "only human," subject to a weakness or a vulnerability. This was a wave of sadness and loss that made me understand that I was a man expanded by grief. — Don DeLillo

I'm a very traditional person. The tattoos are about my grandmother dying and they tell the story about my mother and father, my brothers and my sister, my kids. It's pretty much a family tree on my arm with my life in football too. — Timothy F. Cahill

When you're the sane brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your hands
the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper
if you've promised your dying mother
then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the indifference of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin
the guy who beat the biochemical rap. — Wally Lamb

Kennedy's assassination was the opening salvo in the social revolution of the sixties. In some ways, perhaps, Princess Diana and Mother Teresa dying when they did, and how they did, represent the opening salvos of a social revolution in the nineties. — Marianne Williamson

The Particular End is to carry Christ into the homes and streets of the slums, among the sick, dying, the beggars and the little street children. The sick will be nursed as far as possible in their poor homes. The little children will have a school in the slums. The beggars will be sought and visited in their holes outside the town or on the streets. She would later elaborate and broaden the text to read, "Our particular mission is to labour at the salvation and sanctification of the poorest of the poor, not only in the slums, but also all over the world wherever they may be."10 — Mother Teresa

When my mother was dying, I cooked for her. One of the things I realised was that the smell and look of the food was key. I concentrated on how it looked on the plate. Even if the amount was small, it gave her a nourishment of a different kind. — Simon McBurney

They had pulled me from the hemorrhaging, dying body of my mother and turned me over to the care of the man who was not my father. He had taken me home to their tiny apartment above the old hardware store and done what little he knew to take care of me.
It took less than six weeks for him to realize his mistake. Maybe even less than six hours, but he never abandoned me. He clung to me as though I was the last remnant of some great and powerful love.
And that gave me hope that maybe my mother was really something else and not just some girl who got knocked up by a guy whose name she didn't even know. She was something special, someone worthy of a man's loyalty and devotion.
Rocky Evans — Gwenn Wright

My mother begged doctors to end her life. She was beyond the physical ability to swallow enough of the weak morphine pills she had around her. When she knew she was dying I promised to make sure she could go at a time of her choosing, but it was impossible. I couldn't help. — Polly Toynbee

The truth was, in spite of all that, she'd been a spectacular mom. I knew it as I was growing up. I knew it in the days that she was dying. I knew it now. And I knew that was something. That it was a lot. I had plenty of friends who had moms who - no matter how long they lived - would never give them the all-encompassing love that my mother had given me. — Cheryl Strayed

Right now in this world, a child is dying from an ailment because its family cannot afford to buy charcoal for boiling water.
Right now in this world, a girl is striving to find firewood from trees that no more exist, and water from sources that are poisonous.
Right now in this world, a boy is out fishing in a lake rich with inedible species.
Right now in this world, a mother is drowning in heavy rainfall, to save her belongings.
Right now in this world, a man has lost his dignity because all his eff orts to save have been wiped away to poverty by unforeseen calamities.
Right now in this world, a family is starving because drought has invaded their once fertile land.
Right now in this world, a nation is planning for refugee status due to adverse climate conditions.
Right now in this world, you have a choice to help alleviate environmental problems caused by humankind. — Gloria D. Gonsalves

What this feeling produced was, quite simply, a keen awareness of the nature of human sin. That is what sent me back each month to K's grave. It is also what lay behind the nursing of my dying mother-in-law, and what bade me treat my wife so tenderly. There were even times when I longed for some stranger to come along and flog me as I deserved. At some stage this feeling transformed into a conviction that it should be I who hurt myself. And then the thought struck me that I should not just hurt myself but kill myself. At all events, I resolved that I must live my life as if I were already dead. — Soseki Natsume

In the beloved community of 'Our Father,' the same desperate love that a mother has for her baby or that a child has for his or her daddy is extended to all our human family. Biological love is too small a vision. Nationalism is far too myopic. A love for our own relatives or the people of our own country is not a bad things. But our love does not stop at the border. We now have a family that includes by transcends biology and geography. We have family in Iraq, Peru, Afghanistan and Sudan. We have family members who are starving and homeless, dying of AIDS and living in the midst of war. This is the new family of our Father. — Shane Claiborne

I don't want to die, Buddy.' She put her head on his chest. 'I know this cancer probably won't kill me. But I think about dying all the time. I dream about it. What do you think? Do I get to see Pat on the other side, or do I just lie there in the dirt forever?'
... Buddy wrapped his arms around her and drew her close. 'I think dead is dead,' he said softly, near her ear. 'But that's not so bad. I think of it as following. Following the rest of them ... My mother and father. Your sister. Your mom. But not just them. All of them. All of us. People ... Maybe it's just a way to feel less lonesome about the whole thing, but I think of dying as a path we all go down separately at first, but eventually, together. — Anita Diamant

How do you explain to your friend's mother why a night out with friends has left her daughter dying from an ecstasy overdose? — A.C. Flanagan

Alice Roosevelt Longworth was only a few years older than my mother but outlived her by a decade, dying in 1980. From the time they met, in 1917, they were lifelong friends of sorts, though each was a bit wary of the other. — Katharine Graham

The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty
it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God. — Mother Teresa

As the Roman Empire came to its close, all the old gods of the pagan world were seen as demons by the Christians who rose. It was useless to tell them as the centuries passed that their Christ was but another God of the Wood, dying and rising, as Dionysus or Osiris had done before him, and that the Virgin Mary was in fact the Good Mother again enshrined. Theirs was a new age of belief and conviction, and in it we became devils, detached from what they believed, as old knowledge was forgotten or misunderstood. — Anne Rice

We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race - we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations. But all moral problems can be illustrated by one misquotation: 'Greater love hath no man than a mother cat dying to defend her kittens.' Once you understand the problem facing that cat and how she solved it, you will then be ready to examine yourself and learn how high up the moral ladder you are capable of climbing. — Robert A. Heinlein

Many people are very, very concerned with the children in India, with the children in Africa where quite a number die, maybe of malnutrition, of hunger and so on, but millions are dying deliberately by the will of the mother. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today. Because if a mother can kill her own child - what is left for me to kill you and you kill me
there is nothing between. — Mother Teresa

I told my mother he looked like a deflated balloon. Greta said he looked like a small gray moth wrapped in a spider's web. That's because everything about Greta is more beautiful, even the way she says things. — Carol Rifka Brunt

I love you Camden. I love you so damn, fucking much and it's so right and it's so wrong because people are dying, and we're almost dying and Gus is out there and my mother and we can't trust anybody and all I can think about is you. All I can think about is how much I love you and how badly I fucked everything up and I I don't deserves you but I need you." I made a fist with my hands and pounded it against his chest, hard, my tears flowing. "I fucking need you and I need you to forgive me. I need that more than anything in the world! I need you to make me good."
He swallowed hard, letting me hit him, his fingers strong on my jaw. "Ellie, Ellie, Ellie. You are good, deep down you always have been. You don't need me for that. — Karina Halle

DESPERATELY SEEKING EPIC You're my father. I don't know much about you. I know your name is Paul James, you're a thrill seeker, and once upon a time you did stunts and people called you 'Epic.' I've been told you don't know about me. That it's complicated. But for me it's simple. Here's the thing: I'm twelve years old . . . and I'm dying. And as much as this could crush my mother, I have to meet you before I go. In time, I'm sure she'll understand. She's still in love with you. So, Epic, if you read this, please come back. You don't have to be my dad. You don't even have to tell me you love me or you're sorry. Just come see me. — B.N. Toler

He thought he would light the fire when he got inside, and make himself some breakfast, just to pass away the time; but he did not seem able to handle anything from a scuttleful of coals to a teaspoon without dropping it or falling over it, and making such a noise that he was in mortal fear that it would wake Mrs. G. up, and that she would think it was burglars and open the window and call "Police!" and then these two detectives would rush in and handcuff him, and march him off to the police-court. He was in a morbidly nervous state by this time, and he pictured the trial, and his trying to explain the circumstances to the jury, and nobody believing him, and his being sentenced to twenty years' penal servitude, and his mother dying of a broken heart. So he gave up trying to get breakfast, and wrapped himself up in his overcoat and sat in the easy-chair till Mrs. G came down at half-past seven. — Jerome K. Jerome

Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind your gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth's wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death.
How would that be? Just how would that be? — Stephen King

I grew up in the Southwest Bronx. Father an accountant, mother a schoolteacher. Brother was six years older, which explains why I gobbled crystal meth at 12, smoked hashish at 13, and was shooting smack at 17, which explains how I got Hepatitis C, which was the basis of my first book, which was a humor book about dying. — Dave Barry

When Mother had told me that animals found quiet, unexposed places to die, I had always imagined they knew they were dying, and accepted it, almost gracefully. Now I saw that this wasn't so at all: they crept into corners in the hope of surviving, they only knew they were weakened and exposed, easy prey, and their instinct was to find a hidden place and try to outlive whatever it was they were suffering. It had been a mistake to imagine they wanted to be alone, to die in peace. Animals have no knowledge of death; for them, death is the unexpected end of life, something they resist by instinct, for no good reason. In that sense, their existence has an almost mechanical quality. — John Burnside

I breathe in. The water will wash my wounds clean. I breathe out. My mother submerged me in water when I was a baby, to give me to God. It has been a long time since I thought about God, but I think about him now. It is only natural. I am glad, suddenly, that I shot Eric in the foot instead of the head. — Veronica Roth

We walk on the ground and give sparse recognition to the mud that will be the eternal homes for the bodies that we praise so much. Ground might not worth much but it holds billions of history and some of humanity's greatest treasures, One day it will become our permanent home. Maybe we should begin a mud religion and give reverence to the dirt, in the end, it is the dirt, ground and Mother Earth that wins and reigns supreme throughout the centuries. — Crystal Evans

Well to me growing, up I've had my own psychological war with my parents dying at such a young age. My mother was killed by a drunk driver, then two months later my father drowned. He was out with his friends drinking and on medication for depression, and he didn't come out of the water alive. Growing up with sexual abuse and having to be in gangs and dealing with my own trauma; finding the cultural identity when I was 16, and learning those traditional ways saved me from hurting myself. — Adam Beach

When I was 17 years old, I put out an album while my mother was dying of cancer. That right there alone is a struggle. That's hard. That's tough for anybody. — Lil' Mama

Oh God, what do we do?"
"Do?" Levi said, looking oddly triumphant, like his plans for the night had finally materialized, Like he had been hoping for some disaster like this to happen so he didn't have to be bored anymore. Like even a dying girl in his bathtub was better than calling his mother to confirm that his grandfather actually was dead, and that what he had heard on the answering machine wasn't a mere auditory hallucination. "We save her, of course. — Matthew J. Hefti

I'm a good girl. I'm a nice girl. I'm a straight-A, strait-laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody's boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my parents' shit and brother's shit and I'm not a girl anyhow, I'm over forty fucking years old, and I'm good at my job and I'm great with kids and I held my mother's hand when she died,after four years of holding her hand while she was dying, and I speak to my father ever day on the telephone
every day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because here it's pretty gray and a big muggy too? It was supposed to say "Great Artist" on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say "Such a good teacher/daughter/friend" instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL. — Claire Messud

I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband - I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid - I see these sights on the earth; 5
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny - I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea - I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill'd, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these - All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent. — Walt Whitman

We're setting up mechanisms where we can kill human beings with drones and missiles where you're sitting at a console and pressing the button. We never have to hear their whimpering, or hear them begging for their mother, or dying in horrible realities around us. I don't know if that's necessarily such a good thing. — George R R Martin

I love you every day. And now I will miss you every day. — Mitch Albom

need to talk about my mother," one of the women said. Her name was Susan. She was blond, very pretty, a stockbroker. Her mother was dying of cancer. "I have this horrible feeling of never having even known her. All my life, my father . . . was like a god to me. I worshipped him. I couldn't understand why he ever married my mother. He was so special and she's just . . . I always thought she was just this ordinary, everyday . . . I had no sense of her dignity, her nobility, really. She raised five kids and kept a house and gave him the support he needed and totally subjugated herself to him, to all of us, really, to our needs, and now when I think . . . She's even — Judith Rossner

In this place that we live
my West, my father's North, and my mother's new hemisphere
rabbits in a burning field of grass can catch on fire. They run to a clear place where there is no fire, but, in doing so, light it up because their fur is burning. That way, in trying to save themselves, they spread the fire more ... And it speeds to everyone. — Alberto Alvaro Rios

Becoming a mother hasn't necessarily changed how I shoot, but it certainly has made me more sensitive, and it certainly makes it much harder for me to photograph dying children. — Lynsey Addario

One of my greatest joys is poetry. I read it almost every day, and I've even taken a stab at writing some of my own. A poem I wrote for my mother when she was dying really helped me get through that hard time. — Maria Shriver

I am thinking of one woman and the rest is blotto. I say I am thinking of her, but the truth is I am dying a stellar death. I am lying there like a sick star waiting for the light to go out. Years ago I lay on this same bed and I waited and waited to be born. Nothing happened. Except that my mother, in her Lutheran rage, threw a bucket of water over me. My mother, poor imbecile that she was, thought I was lazy. She didn't know that I had gotten caught in the stellar drift, that I was being pulverized to a black extinction out there in the farthest rim of the universe. — Henry Miller

... of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines ... Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred ... As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God, but the face of his enemy. It is ... a faith that ... has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. — David Bentley Hart

Our memories and the events of our lives are untidy things. We wish that we could file them away and shut the door, or we wish the opposite - that they would stay with us forever. You want to banish the remembrance of a tight hold on your ankle, a rope under a bed, the amber-colored medicine bottles of your father, the door your mother slams after a night of too much wine and jealousy. You want to keep close to you always that first sweet kiss, a maple leaf, that growing sense of yourself; you want to hold the sight of your dying father on that last boat trip, the calm you remember as your mother held you. Her voice. — Deb Caletti

Whoo-oop! I'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw! - Look at me! I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother's side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whiskey for breakfast when I'm in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I'm ailing! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood's my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentlemen! - and lay low and hold your breath, for I'm bout to turn myself loose! — Mark Twain

It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O'Keeffe I'd once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple of weeks after we left the Mayo Clinic, and then, once she was admitted to the hospice wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to the others, more modest and true. I imagined my mother in October; I wrote the scene in my mind. And then the one of my mother in August and another in May. Each day that passed, another month peeled away. — Cheryl Strayed

When he arrived, he found that the two most important women in his life - his mother and his young wife - were dying. At 3:00 a.m. on February 14, Valentine's Day, Martha Roosevelt, still a vibrant, dark-haired Southern belle at forty-six, died of typhoid fever. Eleven hours later, her daughter-in-law, Alice Lee Roosevelt, who had given birth to Theodore's first child just two days before, succumbed to Bright's disease, a kidney disorder. That night, in his diary, Roosevelt marked the date with a large black "X" and a single anguished entry: "The light has gone out of my life. — Candice Millard

Shall we go to Paris next spring? You will certainly be well by then. I agree that Dr. Tapper is far more intelligent and sensible than many of his profession. If he tells you that you are not to be slogging through the Wissahickon in this weather, you must deisit with your daily slog. Your lungs are fragile, my love. I would not have you expiring for a sight of interesting lichen. Love is one of two things worth dying for.I have yet to decide on the second.It is most certainly not colorful fungus.
I shall be home as soon as this business is settled, certainly no more than a week.My mother complains that you will not have her to dinner. Good for you. Take pity on Hamilton's new wife and have her to tea.Fire the cook, please.I cannot face another dish of sweetbreads.
With all my love always,
Edward — Melissa Jensen

I'd much rather be hold up with a ball of yarn, tucked inside the safety of the house with my mother. Out there, you must come to grips with the rot and bone, bloom and disintegration. It's part of the world, this ruthlessness, this severed leg, this sun-bleached skull. I can't really stand it. All the signs point toward change, and all that means is death. - 140-141 — Robin Romm

Just know that there's bad men in the world, and dying fast by your mother is a better way than theirs. — Mindy McGinnis

To transport this way along bouncy mountain roads is not the way to die. Every woman deserves the simple dignity of dying in a bed with clean sheets and an electric light at hand. They wanted me to participate in a horrible abomination. I simply will not countenance the lack of respect for the poor mother of those boys. Imagine how she would feel if she woke up and saw her sons piled at her side.
-spoken by Sara to Matt regarding a victim of Amanita Phalloides [poisoning — Joe Niemczura

When my grandmother - may she attain the Kingdom of Heaven - was dying, my mother, as was then the custom, took me to her bedside and, as I kissed her right hand, my dear grandmother placed her dying left hand on my head and said in a whisper, yet very distinctly: "Eldest of my grandsons! Listen and always remember my strict injunction to you: In life never do as others do." Having said this, she gazed at the bridge of my nose and, evidently noticing my perplexity and my obscure understanding of what she had said, added somewhat angrily and imperiously: "Either do nothing - just go to school - or do something nobody else does Whereupon she immediately, without hesitation and with a perceptible impulse of disdain for all around her, and with commendable self-cognizance, gave up her soul directly into the hands of His Faithfulness, the Archangel Gabriel. — G.I. Gurdjieff

I had a very funny and depressing talk with my seventy-four-year-old mother. I decided, she doesn't have a bucket list - she has a kick-the-bucket list. — Lori Lesko

They died crying in their minds like little babies. They forgot the thing they were fighting for the thing they were dying for. They thought about things a man can understand. They died yearning for the face of a friend. They died whimpering for the voice of a mother a father a wife a child. They died with their hearts sick for one more look at the place where they were born please god just one more look. They died moaning and sighing for life. They knew what was important. They knew that life was everything and they died with screams and sobs. They died with only one thought in their minds and that was I want to live I want to live I want to live. — Dalton Trumbo

Nobody was ever really ready to turn off their mother's machine, no matter what they thought; to turn off the light of their childhood and walk away, just as if they were turning out a light and leaving a room. — Fannie Flagg

I spent the past week here in India getting a sense of the reality of HIV and AIDS in people's lives. Fathers and mothers are dying, leaving children with no support. Stigma and discrimination is ruining the family lives. There is an urgent need for education, information, and increased awareness of HIV and AIDS. The response needs to be now. We cannot afford to become fatigued. — Ralph Fiennes

Mother's estate - our estate - a thousand acres centered in a million more. Lawns the size of small prairies with grass so perfect it beckoned a body to lie on it, to nap on its soft perfection. Noble shade trees making sundials of the Earth, their shadows circling in stately procession; now mingling, now contracting to midday, finally stretching eastward with the dying of the day. Royal oak. Giant elms. Cottonwood and cypress and redwood and bonsai. Banyan trees lowering new trunks like smooth-sided columns in a temple roofed by sky. Willows lining carefully laid canals and haphazard streams, their hanging branches singing ancient dirges to the wind. — Dan Simmons

A few minutes ago, I felt as if I was back in Paris,
sitting in a park.
It is funny how our mind sometimes wanders
back to times past.

When each of my parents was dying,
floating in a sea of pain medication,
their minds drifted back to their early twenties
when they were newly in love.
They both talked as if they were lost,
and they had to find each other.

In one corner of my house,
I display some things that my parents cherished:
my mother's china
and my father's fishing gear.
I don't know if there is an afterlife,
but if their ghosts visit me someday,
then their cherished things will be waiting for them.
I also display photographs of my late parents,
not when they were old,
but when they were a newlywed couple,
young, happy, smiling
and full of hope
and love. — Jeffrey A. White

I'm fine.My father's an arse, and my mum is dying and-oh my God,I'm so pissed." St. Clair looked at me again. His eyes were glassy like black marbles. "Pissed.Pissed.Pissed."
"We know you're pissed at your dad," I said. "It's okay. You're right, he's a jerk." I mean what was I supposed to say? He just found out his mother has cancer.
"Pissed is British for 'drunk,'" Mer said.
"Oh," I said. "Well. You're definitely that, too."
Meanwhile,The Couple was fighting. "Where have you been?" Rashmi asked. "You said you'd be home three hours ago!"
Josh rolled his eyes. "Out.We've been out. Someone had to help him-"
"And you call that helping? He's completely wasted. Catatonic. And you! God,you smell like car exhaust and armpits-"
"He couldn't drink alone."
"You were supposed to be watching out for him! What if something happened?"
"Beer. Liquor. Thatsswhat happened. Don't be such a prude,Rash. — Stephanie Perkins

It had been so silent in the wake of that commotion, a kind of potent silence that seemed to contain everything. The songs of the birds and the creak of the trees. The dying snow and the unseen gurgling water. The glimmering sun. The certain sky. The gun that didn't have a bullet in its chamber. And the mother. Always the mother. The one who would never come to me. — Cheryl Strayed

I always felt bad for Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa lived a whole life helping starving children and dying villages, but she could never be declared a saint 'cause she never actually performed a miracle. And it was towards the end, she was desperate to perform a miracle, so she would go up to starving children and go, 'What's that behind your ear? It's a quarter! — Gilbert Gottfried

In 2008, while the film version of my book 'Choke' was coming to market, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. That meant that I had to appear in public to promote a comedy about a son trying to save his dying mother - the plot of Choke - while privately I was caring for my own dying mother. It was torture. — Chuck Palahniuk

Marisa! Marisa! The cry was torn from Lord Asriel, and with the snow leopard beside her, with a roaring in her ears, Lyra's mother stood and found her footing and leapt with all her heart, to hurl herself against the angel and her daemon and her dying lover, and seize those beating wings, and bear them all down together into the abyss. — Philip Pullman

- You have never known a Woman's body!
- I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying. — Roland Barthes