Beautiful Death Quotes & Sayings

There will be no beautiful widow with Persian eyes sitting at your grave. And teary-eyed kids won't be asking: "Papa, papa, can you hear us? — Ilya Ilf

I knew we were not alone, but there was something in the air, something good and pure that reassured me. It's a beautiful energy, and has been with me ever since. — Caroline Mitchell

She was crouched in the corner of the room, eating something off the floor. It was the old woman dressed in endless black. When she looked up this time there was no question she was there for me. She had the face of my mother but much older, her ancient decayed mouth coming closer for her good-night kiss. I steeled myself against her putrid smell, the mouthful of bitter dust, but as her lips touched mine it was like biting into a purple black plum whose fruit was brilliant red, like an explosion of intense joy. Its childhood smell wrinkled my nose with pleasure, its sweet juices ran down my chin, turning into a beautiful black ocean where I floated safely, not lost as I had imagined, but securely tucked away deep in space. — Mary Woronov

You leave behind your fine poems.
You leave behind your beautiful flowers. And the earth that was only leant to you. You ascend into the Light, O Quechomitl, you leave behind the flowers and the singing and the earth. Safe journey, O friend. — Aliette De Bodard

Who was this girl alone so late at night
in search of a faded cassette illusion to disembowel the clocks of time's intrusion? Those eyes belonged to the most beautiful maniac I've ever met. Our love is a vine of entrails that can follow any coffin anywhere, no matter how deep any gravedigger might travel. — Nicholaus Patnaude

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. — Charles Darwin

There's nothing beautiful here. Only death." "That's only true if you let them make it true, — Richelle Mead

When things are beautiful on the surface it is hard to imagine that dying is appropriate for them. — Tessie Regan

When death can't stand to conquer something, you know it must be beautiful. — Stevie J. Cole

Sorcha took the elevator down to the basement of the fashion house. She glanced at her stunningly beautiful reflection in the mirror and smiled to herself. How fortunate she was to be a vampire - no gray hairs, no wrinkles, no broken nails, no weight problems, and no PMT. What bliss! And how fortunate it was that all the legends about vampires were not true. She could not imagine an existence where she could not see and admire her own likeness - such a life to her would be intolerable and tedious. How could any female, even a vampire, survive without being able to see their own reflection? How could they do their hair and makeup? The very idea was totally preposterous. — Alan Kinross

She wondered If I had woken up, would I have smelled his sadness, his desperation, and his detachment?
His death, her breath.
He told her once, she remembers, these two words have no other rhyme but each other.
If she could go back, she thinks
She would open her eyes, instead of her heart. — Rachel Thompson

I will wait. For as long as it takes, I will wait, a fixed point in time, never moving on, never going back. Time will pass as if nothing at all; the months into years, the years into decades. And one day, one day out of thousands, I will see her again. Not as she will be, but as she once was. Beautiful and dangerous and mine. — Rebecca Harris

You know, at least Gabriel showed up announced like a gentleman. He even told Mila that she looked beautiful. You and your toothpick just show up, scaring me half to death. — Skyla Madi

St. Thomas Aquinas deeply loved this beautiful chant thus understood. It is told of him that he could not keep back his tears when, during Compline of Lent, he chanted the antiphon: "In the midst of life we are in death: whom do we seek as our helper, but Thou, O Lord, who because of our sins art rightly incensed? Holy God, strong God, holy and merciful Savior, deliver us not up to a bitter death; abandon us not in the time of our old age, when our strength will abandon us." This beautiful antiphon begs for the grace of final perseverance, the grace of graces, that of the predestined. How it should speak to the heart of the contemplative theologian, who has made a deep study of the tracts on Providence, predestination, and grace! — Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange

Well when my death is in front,
I just want to turn back to my life,
And say the last thing,
looking in to its lens that,
"Life oh my life,
Nobody would have ever painted
this life as beautiful as i did". Good Bye

-Ravi — Ravi

If God on the Cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste for death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to the mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love. That was Father Martin's answer. — Yann Martel

God is our Creator. He is loving, holy, and just. One day he will execute perfect justice against all sin. People are made in the image of God. We are beautiful and amazing creatures with dignity, worth, and value. But through our willful, sinful rebellion against God, we have turned from being his children to his enemies. Still, all people have the capacity to be in a restored loving relationship with the living God. Christ is the Son of God, whose sinless life gave him the ability to become the perfect sacrifice. Through his death on the cross, he ransomed sinful people. Christ's death paid for the sins of all who come to him in faith. Christ's resurrection from the dead is the ultimate vindication of the truth of these claims. The response God requires from us is to acknowledge our sin, repent, and believe in Christ. So we turn from sin, especially the sin of unbelief, and turn to God in faith, with the understanding that we will follow him the rest of our days. — J. Mack Stiles

The doctors are busy with the repulsive but beneficent work of amputation. You see the sharp, curved knife enter the healthy, white body, you see the wounded man suddenly regain consciousness with a piercing cry and curses, you see the army surgeon fling the amputated arm into a corner, you see another wounded man, lying in a litter in the same apartment, shrink convulsively and groan as he gazes at the operation upon his comrade, not so much from physical pain as from the moral torture of anticipation. - You behold the frightful, soul-stirring scenes; you behold war, not from its conventional, beautiful, and brilliant side, with music and drum-beat, with fluttering flags and galloping generals, but you behold war in its real phase - in blood, in suffering, in death. — Leo Tolstoy

I think of death as a glad awakening from this troubled sleep which we call life; as an emancipation from a world, which, beautiful though it may be, is still a land of captivity. — Lyman Abbott

Democracy is talking itself to death. The people do not know what they want; they do not know what is the best for them. There is too much foolishness, too much lost motion. I have stopped the talk and the nonsense. I am a man of action. Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that some day. — Benito Mussolini

Stars," she whispered. "I can see the stars again, my lady."
A tear trickled down Artemis's cheek. "Yes, my brave one. They are beautiful tonight."
Stars," Zoe repeated. Her eyes fixed on the night sky. And she did not move again. — Rick Riordan

I was a witness to lots of death ... Saving a human life was something really, really beautiful ... no matter who they are. Not only Israeli people owe me their lives. I guarantee many terrorists, many Palestinian leaders, owe me their lives - or in other words, they owe my Lord their lives. — Mosab Hassan Yousef

All I'm saying is, technology can potentially do better than nature because of the very fact that it's not always a matter of life or death. If an organism has been fine-tuned to maximize its overall reproductive success, that's not the same thing as embodying the ideal solution to every individual problem it faces. Evolution appears inventive to us because it's had time to try so many possibilities, but it has no margin at all for real risks, let alone anything truly whimsical. We can celebrate our own beautiful mistakes. All evolution can do is murder them. — Greg Egan

A Book of Glass
On the table, a book of glass. In the book only a few pages with no words But scratched in a diamond-point pencil to pieces in diagonal Spirals, light triangles; and a French curve fractures lines to
elisions.

The last pages are simplest. They can be read backwards and
thoroughly. Each page bends a bit like ludicrous plastic. He who wrote it was very ambitious, fed up, and finished. He had been teaching the insides and outsides of things

To children, teaching the art of Rembrandt to them. His two wives were beautiful and Death begins As a beggar beside them. What is an abstract persona? A painter visits but he prefers to look at perfume in vials.

And I see a book in glass - the words go off In wild loops without words. I should Wake and render them! In bed, Mother says each child Will receive the book of etchings, but the book will be
incomplete, after all.
But I will make the book of glass. — David Shapiro

I never learned how to take the beautiful thing in my imagination and put it on paper without feeling I killed it along the way. I did, however, learn how to weather the death, and I learned how to forgive myself for it. — Ann Patchett

Death is not painful. It is the most beautiful experience you will have. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

The Occidental snobbery which is invading us, the gunboats, rapid-fire guns, long-range rifles, explosives ... what else? Everything which makes death collective, administrative and bureaucratic - all the filth of your progress, in fact - is destroying, little by little, our beautiful traditions of the past. — Octave Mirbeau

I'd fought alongside them in that battle, but up close, when they stood quietly watching us, they looked as beautiful as they looked unreal. The angels weren't supposed to feel emotion, but they were weeping. All of them. Their tears stained their flawless faces like rain running in rivulets across stone. — Courtney Allison Moulton

It is an exquisite and beautiful thing in our nature, that, when the heart is touched and softened by some tranquil happiness or affectionate feeling, the memory of the dead comes over it most powerfully and irresistibly. It would seem almost as though our better thoughts and sympathies were charms, in virtue of which the soul is enabled to hold some vague and mysterious intercourse with the spirits of those whom we loved in life. Alas! how often and how long may these patient angels hover around us, watching for the spell which is so soon forgotten! — Charles Dickens

She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, a tiny, bloody angel in the snow, and they were going to destroy her. — Maggie Stiefvater

What matters is to be natural and calm
In happiness and in unhappiness,
To feel as if feeling were seeing,
To think as if thinking were walking,
And to remember, when death comes, that each day dies,
And the sunset is beautiful, and so is the night that
remains ...
That's how it is and how I want it to be ... — Fernando Pessoa

The best graphics are about the useful and important, about life and death, about the universe. Beautiful graphics do not traffic with the trivial. — Edward Tufte

Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident. It is as common as life. — Henry David Thoreau

When I looked, I knew I might never again see so much of the earth so beautiful, the beautiful being something you know added to something you see, in a whole that is different from the sum of its parts. What I saw might have been just another winter scene, although an impressive one. But what I knew was that the earth underneath was alive and that by tomorrow, certainly by the day after, it would be all green again. So what I saw because of what I knew was a kind of death with the marvellous promise of less than a three-day resurrection. — Norman Maclean

When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him. — Madeline Miller

Being a creator of a song I get to take all these broken fragments of failure and chaos and weave together something beautiful and meaningful. Decay. Death. Pain. Fall. And if God is a songwriter then these fallen leaves of mine can be redeemed — Jon Foreman

Yes, death. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace. You can help me. You can open for me the portals of death's house, for love is always with you, and love is stronger than death is. — Oscar Wilde

I sometimes stare into fire or into the night sky alone and wish for a girl or my situation to be different. I also then think why would god who created the beautiful Earth let Humans suffer and act the way they do. But I then realize that god has left you and everyone else a long time ago. This is the reason why I do not live my life for him. Because in the end, the only god who is always guaranteed to call for you by name, is Death. — J.D. Taylor

I would like to disagree. I would like to argue. But that's the problem with the dead. You can't fight with them, you can't reason with them, you can't prove them wrong or yourself right, beg them to choose you, to stay with you, to love you more than death. They are gone. They have left only a big black ugly gash where their beautiful vibrant selves used to be. They no longer give a shit. — K.S.R. Burns

HE LIKED TO COOK AND LAUGH AND SING, COULD START A FIRE WITH HIS HANDS, FIX THINGS THAT WERE BROKEN, AND EXPLAIN HOW TO LAUNCH THINGS INTO SPACE, BUT HE DIED WITHIN NINE MONTHS — Nicole Krauss

My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;
I am only one of my many mouths,
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.
I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death's note wants to climb over
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful. — Rainer Maria Rilke

We have big plans. Oh yes. We're fumbling in the dark, but at least we're in motion. Everyone is working now; Julie and I are just pausing for a moment to enjoy the view, because it's a beautiful day. The sky is blue. The grass is green. The sun is warm on our skin. We smile, because this is how we save the world. We will not let Earth become a tomb, a mass grave spinning through space. We will exhume ourselves. We will fight the curse and break it. We will cry and bleed and lust and love, and we will cure death. We will be the cure. Because we want it. — Isaac Marion

My horizon lightened, I see an old woman. Who is she? Where is she from? Bent over, the ends of her boubou tied behind her, she empties into a plastic bag the left-overs of red rice. Her smiling face tells of the pleasant day she has just had. She wants to take back proof of this to her family, living perhaps in Ouakam, Thiaroye or Pikine.
Standing upright, her eyes meeting my disapproving look, she mutters between teeth reddened by cola nuts: 'Lady, death is just as beautiful as life has been. — Mariama Ba

The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. — Donna Tartt

If God hath made this world so fair,
Where sin and death abound,
How beautiful beyond compare
Will paradise be found! — James Montgomery

You are so high in the tree.
If you jump
you will live a full life
while falling.
You will get married
to a hummingbird
and raise beautiful part-
hummingbirds.
You will die of cancer
in mid-air.
I will not lie. It will be painful.
You are a brave little boy
or girl. — Zachary Schomburg

When I think of death, I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore unless the Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after I'm gone. — Georgia O'Keeffe

There's a tale in the Caballa that suggests that the Angel of Death is so beautiful that upon seeing it (or him, or her) you fall in love so hard, so fast, that your soul is pulled out through your eyes. I like that story. — Neil Gaiman

It's just death and resurrection, over and over again, day after day, as God reaches down into our deepest graves and with the same power that raised Jesus from the dead wrests us from our pride, our apathy, our fear, our prejudice, our anger, our hurt, and our despair. Most days I don't know which is harder for me to believe: that God reanimated the brain functions of a man three days dead, or that God can bring back to life all the beautiful things we have killed. Both seem pretty unlikely to me. — Rachel Held Evans

Beautiful is thy wristlet, decked with stars and cunningly wrought in myriad-coloured jewels. But more beautiful to me thy sword with its curve of lightning like the outspread wings of the divine bird of Vishnu, perfectly poised in the angry red light of the sunset.
It quivers like the one last response of life in ecstasy of pain at the final stroke of death; it shines like the pure flame of being burning up earthly sense with one fierce flash.
Beautiful is thy wristlet, decked with starry gems; but thy sword, O lord of thunder, is wrought with uttermost beauty, terrible to behold or think of. — Rabindranath Tagore

As the surface of the seashore rocks were pitted by by the waves and gathered limpets that further disguised what lay beneath, so time made truth of what appeared to be. The days that passed, in becoming weeks, still did not disturb the surface an assumption had created. The weather of a beautiful summer continued with neither sign nor hint that credence had been misplaced. The single sandal found among the rocks became a sodden image of death; and as the keening on the pier at Kilauran traditionally marked distres brought by the sea, so did silence at Lahardane. — William Trevor

Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death. — Cormac McCarthy

Wonderful art can spring from misery,I'm the last person to deny that.I'd go even further:the best works of art of all time are probably stemmed from the deep human sorrow or hellish frustration,the death of a loved one or a divorce and yes:jealousy.Heartache and impotence as the man-spring for making the unverifiable verifiable and for giving it face.How romantic,beautiful and especially useful pain and misery can be. — Esther Verhoef

What a more beautiful world this would be if we didn't wait til people were dead before we honored their spirit. — Kellie Elmore

Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud ... — Yann Martel

The sunset was that long, achingly beautiful balance of stillness in which the sun seemed to hover like a red balloon above the western horizon, the entire sky catching fire from the death of day; a sunset unique to the American Midwest and ignored by most of its inhabitants. The twilight brought the promise of coolness and the certain threat of night. — Dan Simmons

At the time of death, life may end, but I will continue to live in this beautiful world among my beloved new and old friends. — Debasish Mridha

To Lucy it was an admirable study, the contrast between the man who threw his whole soul into a certain aim, which he pursued with a savage intensity, knowing that the end was a dreadful, lonely death; and the man who was making up his mind deliberately to gather what was beautiful in life, and to cultivate its graces as though it were a flower garden.
"And the worst of it is that it will all be the same in a hundred years," said Dick. "We shall both be forgotten long before then, you with your strenuousness, and I with my folly."
"And what conclusion do you draw from that?" asked Mrs. Crowley.
"Only that the psychological moment has arrived for a whisky and soda. — W. Somerset Maugham

Our greatest hope does not rest in the death of suffering. Neither does our help lie in us having a full and perfect life, with no pain, no brokenness, and no Lyme disease. Instead our hope lies in God and we hope in the fact that this is our temporary home and our forever home with Him in Heaven is perfect. This hope- this beautiful and living hope (I Peter 1:3-4) is for the future but also gives us hope for our present days. — Rebecca VanDeMark

It is easy sometimes to blame genetics, some obesity gene perhaps. But even if this were true, we'll still be referring to the machine. Genetics are predispositions. The body is designed as a closed system, physiologically speaking and unless acted upon by an outside or higher force it maintains its functions. It is designed to sustain its own survival. The psychological (self-ordinate command) is essential for this survival because the body also belongs to a self, one that can overfeed it, starve it or kill it as may be. It is also by material urges that you seek to acquire wealth and by self command, suppose what you consider a higher more fulfilling purpose that you choose to give it all away.
The hard core truth is that despite some obesity gene, you can starve yourself to death if you want, or perhaps if you feel you have an ulterior higher purpose like an anorexic might, to look thin and beautiful in the eyes of the communal. — Dew Platt

It had been a beautiful day for an outdoor ceremony, with the kind of lucid weather she hoped to have at her own funeral. She thought often of her own death, but without fear, loss having been her only belonging in this life. For years, acceptance had been her only means of survival. She knew that no matter how miserable or wretched life became, all she could do with her meek piece of time was sustain it. Decades of guilt, lost faith, the betrayal by those few people she'd let herself love - it was worth enduring these things, if only for the gift of a single, exalted moment. And such moments happened, even frequently, in the lives of people wise enough to see them. — Esi Edugyan

I am always saddened by the death of a good person. It is from this sadness that a feeling of gratitude emerges. I feel honored to have known them and blessed that their passing serves as a reminder to me that my time on this beautiful earth is limited and that I should seize the opportunity I have to forgive, share, explore, and love. I can think of no greater way to honor the deceased than to live this way. — Steve Maraboli

The Clown turned his powdered face to the mirror.
"If to be fair is to be beautiful," he said, "who can compare with me in my white mask?"
"Who can compare with him in his white mask?" I asked Death beside me.
"Who can compare with me?" said Death, "for I am paler still."
"You are very beautiful," sighed the Clown, turning his powdered face from the mirror. — Robert W. Chambers

When the years have all passed, there will gape the uncomfortable and unpredictable dark void of death, and into this I shall at last fall headlong, down and down and down, and the prospect of that fall, that uprooting, that rending apart of body and spirit, that taking off into so blank an unknown, drowns me in mortal fear and mortal grief. After all, life, for all its agonies of despair and loss and guilt, is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing, full of liking and of love, at times a poem and a high adventure, at times noble and at times very gay; and whatever (if anything) is to come after it, we shall not have this life again. — Rose Macaulay

One by one the angels had come to the top of Har Megiddo where I sat, holding her body close to mine after she'd died. I'd fought alongside them in battle, but up close, when they stood quietly watching us, they looked as beautiful as they looked unreal. the angels weren't supposed to feel emotions, but they were all weeping. All of them. Their tear stained their flawless faces like rain running in rivulets across stone. Azrael was the only one of then who came to me, knelt in front of me and took her from my arms. He was the angel of death come to carry his sister home. I din't want to give her up, knowing it would be the last time I ever saw her face. I had died on that wretched hill with her. — Courtney Allison Moulton

Death is beautiful, part of life... No, it is sad. It's sad when anyone dies. Even though every single human dies. So it's really not that sad. — Harris Wittels

Today, girls,' said Miss Renshaw, 'we shall go out into the beautiful Gardens and think about death. — Ursula Dubosarsky

When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death. — Jean Genet

I thought about Stockhausen. What had prompted him to call the attacks a work of art? For him, I thought, it was not a matter of finding death beautiful, but rather seeing that someone had taken liberties in reality that an artist could only dream of. That was both the virtue and the vice of art. In art, you can kill with impunity - destroy the world, perpetrate a holocaust, whip up the apocalypse. But it's only art. You can blow up five million people in an opera and not have anywhere near the impact of blowing up five thousand in reality. Stockhausen seemed to realize this, since the terrorism caused him to feel that being a composer was nothing. In that sense, his words were a moral statement about the limits of art, not an immoral statement about aestheticizing destruction. — Supervert

Death is a force, not a man in a horse — Dry The River

My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. — Cheryl Strayed

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From it's own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, not falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous,beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Death was democratic. It made no choice between the rich and the poor, the beautiful and the ugly, the young and the old. — Kathleen Winsor

The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity; it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. — Yann Martel

It's natural. Nature is dark and light, birth and death. Everything and its opposite. And in nature there are predators and prey. The hunters and the hunted. The heartbreakers and the heartbroken. The beautiful thing is that Nature lets us choose which we want to be, most people never make the choice though because they don't even know they have it. — Lynn Weingarten

Johnson is wise, Boswell foolish; Johnson warns and abstains, Boswell plunges; Johnson is rather a great man writing than a greatwriter, Boswell is a great writer and an ordinary man; and they are two of a kind, abysmal melancholics and compulsive socializers, afraid of solitude and afraid of death and dissolution, victims of themselves, meant for each other, needing each other, needing evidence and arguments (Boswell is a lawyer, Johnson magisterially dictates to him some of his briefs), making beautiful models of rational discourse out of the useful substance of all they know ... — Marvin Mudrick

It is their nature, beautiful and simple. That you would destroy such beings, Mr. Lincoln, such superior creatures, seems madness to me."
"That you speak of them with such reverence, Mr. Poe, seems madness to me."
"Can you imagine it? Can you imagine seeing the universe through such eyes? Laughing in the face of time and death - the world your Garden of Eden? Your library? Your harem? — Seth Grahame-Smith

S death one of those adventures from which I can't emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists ... A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? Can she remember that summer's day while I cannot? — Rebecca Goldstein

And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and
can be none in the future,
And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn'd to
beautiful results,
And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death,
And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are
compact,
And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each
as profound as any. — Walt Whitman

A beautiful death is for people who lived like animals to die like angels - loved and wanted. — Mother Teresa

The scene is most beautiful without people in it. People just screw things up. Forget the whole thing, the world, all the living people, I tell myself, and it has a ring of truth to it. The dead are better, aren't they? The dead don't betray or harm. They've already done all they can do. I can't figure out what people mean or who they are or whether they can be trusted, so, forget them. Don't even try anymore. For now at least, forget the living. — Jael McHenry

The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me. — Raymond Chandler

Even nature; the restless waves, irregular trees and stars all out of line show that chaos can be beautiful! — Sophia McMaster

Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I've shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I'll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that's a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful. — Maggie Smith

The rims of his eyelids were burning. A blow received straightens a man up and makes the body move forward, to return that blow, or a punch-to jump, to get a hard-on, to dance: to be alive. But a blow received may also cause you to bend over, to shake, to fall down, to die. When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death. Detectives, poets, domestic servants and priests rely on abjection. From it, they draw their power. It circulates in their veins. It nourishes them. — Jean Genet

When I was 16, I felt very relieved to discover cinema. It was like an island where I could see life and death from another perspective. Every young person should be interested in that island. It's a beautiful place. — Leos Carax

So many of the pleasures of recreational scuba diving don't exist for the deep wreck diver. It's not beautiful scenery for the most part; in fact, it's usually very dark. It's physically burdensome. These guys carry almost two hundred pounds of equipment, and should any of that equipment fail, they risk death. — Robert Kurson

And you wish to protect a beautiful princess, with whom you have fallen in love. But do you understand how dire the situation is? He life and the lives of her sisters are hanging in the balance. You yourself risk death if you choose this path."
"I don't care," Oliver said. He stood up and faced the bishop. "I don't care! I love Petunia, and this is what I'm choosing, right here and now. — Jessica Day George

To live in the midst of danger is to know how good life is," his father replied.
"But if we are lost in the danger?" Kino asked anxiously.
"To live in the presence of death makes us brave and strong," Kino's father replied. "That is why our people never fear death. We see it too often and we do not fear it. To die a little later or a little sooner does not matter. But to live bravely, to lobe life, to see how beautiful the trees are and the mountains, yes, even the sea, to enjoy work because it produces food for life - in these things we Japanese are a fortunate people. We love life because we live in danger. We do not fear death because we understand that life and death are necessary to each other."
"What is death?" Kino asked.
"Death is the great gateway," Kino's father said. — Pearl S. Buck

She was tired in her bones, but she rallied her energy one last time and told him of they years in Rifthold, of stealing Asterion horses and racing across the desert, of dancing until dawn with the courtesans and thieves and all the beautiful, wicked creatures in the world. And then she told him about losing Sam, and of that first whipping in Endovier, when she'd spat blood in the Chief Overseer's face, and what she had seen and endured in the following year. She spoke of the day she had snapped and sprinted for her own death. Her heart grew heavy when at last she got to the evening when the Captain of the Royal Guard prowled into her life, and a tyrant's son had offered her a shot at freedom. She told him what she could about the competition and how she'd won it, until her words slurred and her eyelids drooped. — Sarah J. Maas

When I was a child, which was a shorter period of time for me than it was for most people, my mother sometimes implied that she might take me with her if she decided to consummate her romance with Death. My mother is beautiful, and to anyone who never lived with her, she seems to be a genteel and pleasant lady, if slightly aloof. — Dean Koontz

Our love affairs with sin are not just a matter of morality, though, but of joy. This is not just about faithfulness to God, but about finding our deepest, most satisfying fulfillment. Many people think following Jesus means surrendering our happiness. You can either enjoy a fun, passionate, and exciting life here for a short time or live a bland, boring, but safe life forever with God. That lie is a quiet, but violent concentration camp, fencing men and women in, keeping them away from God, and torturing them with lesser pleasures that only lead to a swift and yet never-ending death. If you want to be truly happy - even in this life, surrounded by everything beautiful, fun, and exciting in this world - you want to be found with Jesus. — Marshall Segal

My big concern is me and what do I do now until the time of my death. That is valid. That is useful. That is beautiful. That is creative. — Maurice Sendak

The walk felt long, but I kept telling my lungs to shut up, that they were strong, that they could do this. I could see him as I approached: His hair was parted neatly on the left side in a way that he would have found absolutely horrifying, and his face was plasticized. But he was still Gus. My lanky, beautiful Gus. — John Green

Strigoi don't see beauty. Only death. You found something beautiful. One thing that's beautiful. — Richelle Mead

You kissed me, and I opened my eyes and thought you were Death. You were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and I clung to the memory of you because it gave me comfort - the only bit of happiness I had ever had. You were my secret fantasy, my lover. My story ... Lord Death is you, and the woman he stalks ... is me."
"Why have you come," he asked, "when you now know the truth?"
"Because when you saved me, you forged a link between us. I don't believe it will ever break."
"Bella," he whispered, "I couldn't allow you to take your life. Couldn't bear the thought of existing in a world that you did not. — Charlotte Featherstone

Tis torture, and not mercy. Heaven is here Where Juliet lives, and every cat and dog And little mouse, every unworthy thing, Live here in heaven and may look on her, But Romeo may not. — William Shakespeare

I get to watch you inhale. I get to make you breathe. It's like you're coming back from death, and it's a goddamn beautiful thing to see. — J.M. Darhower

She couldn't quite see herself in it. When they were done, I read the Shakespeare sonnet that begins "Fear no more the heat o' the Sun," partly because it was appropriate to the occasion and one of the most beautiful poems in the language, but also because I hoped it might hide from my loved ones the fact that I myself had nothing to say, that while part of me was here with them on this beloved shore, another part was wandering, as it had been for months, in a barren, uninhabited landscape not unlike the one in my dream. I realized I'd felt like this for a while. Though life had gone on since my mother's death - Kate had gotten married, I'd finally published another book and gone on tour with it - some sort of internal-pause button had been pushed, allowing another part of me, one I'd specifically kept sequestered to deal with my mother, to fall silent. Since her death, Barbara and I had gone through all her things and settled her affairs, but we'd barely spoken of her. — Richard Russo

I hadn't understood funeral pyres before, but now I do. It's ghastly to burn someone you love but watching the smoke going into the sky, I think that's rather beautiful now. And I wish Tess could be up in the sky. Somewhere with color and light and air. — Rosamund Lupton