Quotes & Sayings About Born And Death

EVERYONE JOINS A BAND IN THIS LIFE. You are born into your first one. Your mother plays the lead. She shares the stage with your father and siblings. Or perhaps your father is absent, an empty stool under a spotlight. But he is still a founding member, and if he surfaces one day, you will have to make room for him. As life goes on, you will join other bands, some through friendship, some through romance, some through neighborhoods, school, an army. Maybe you will all dress the same, or laugh at your own private vocabulary. Maybe you will flop on couches backstage, or share a boardroom table, or crowd around a galley inside a ship. But in each band you join, you will play a distinct part, and it will affect you as much as you affect it. And, as is usually the fate with bands, most of them will break up - through distance, differences, divorce, or death. — Mitch Albom

I could have done even better, miss, and I'd know a lot more, if it wasn't for my destiny ever since childhood. I'd have killed a man in a duel with a pistol for calling me low-born, because I came from Stinking Lizaveta without a father, and they were shoving that in my face in Moscow. It spread there thanks to Grigory Vasilievich. Grigory Vasilievich reproaches me for rebelling against my nativity: 'You opened her matrix,' he says. I don't know about her matrix, but I'd have let them kill me in the womb, so as not to come out into the world at all, miss. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Whenever I see an ambulance, I like to think there is a baby being born, rather than a death. — Phil Lester

You only live twice:
Once when you are born
And once when you look death in the face — Ian Fleming

One of the obvious implications is that a person will have to face the fact that she cannot meet other people's expectations. This signals the end of what might be called the "camel" phase of human development. I believe it was Nietschze who suggested that for the first part of life, we are camels, trudging through the desert, accepting on our backs everybody's "shoulds" and "don'ts." Camels only know how to spit; they don't think for themselves or talk back. As the camel dies, a lion is born in its place. Lions discover both their roar and the art of preening. The lion may be a little shaky at first, so support and encouragement are vital. But once the camel begins to die (e.g., signaled by depression), there is no turning back. Symptoms occupy the space between the death of the camel and the birth of the lion. A therapist can be a good midwife during this liminal phase. — Stephen Gilligan

I hate that her headstone has a year on it for when she was born and another for when she died but only a dash for the life she lived in between. — Juliann Garey

For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm lies the large forest planet Oglaroon, the entire "intelligent" population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree they are born, live, fall in love, carve tiny speculative articles in the bark on the meaning of life, the futility of death and the importance of birth control, fight a few extremely minor wars and eventually die strapped to the underside of some of the less accessible outer branches. In — Douglas Adams

When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die ... (90) — Joseph Campbell

I was born in Tyrone, 1956, for something I didn't do. I was innocent. But they gave me life. I still remember the midwife who extradited me. — Kevin McAleer

The thought of death sits easy on the man Who has been born and dies among the mountains. — William Wordsworth

I never asked to be born, and death's no question.
The sun's still shining off the same old lessons,
Then why does life feel like an educated guess?
And my thoughts are like meals ... I'm a sucker for the seconds. — Amir Mohamed

But I was born in the image of God, a man, a creator, with power of life and death, a father, blessed with the gift of the seed of Adam, a sower of seed, to bring forth generations of new life.
This I was, and envying a kettle. — Richard Llewellyn

If we only had eyes to see and ears to hear and wits to understand, we would know that the Kingdom of God in the sense of holiness, goodness, beauty is as close as breathing and is crying out to born both within ourselves and within the world; we would know that the Kingdom of God is what we all of us hunger for above all other things even when we don't know its name or realize that it's what we're starving to death for. The Kingdom of God is where our best dreams come from and our truest prayers. We glimpse it at those moments when we find ourselves being better than we are and wiser than we know. We catch sight of it when at some moment of crisis a strength seems to come to us that is greater than our own strength. The Kingdom of God is where we belong. It is home, and whether we realize it or not, I think we are all of us homesick for it. — Frederick Buechner

When a man lives with the wilderness he comes to an acceptance of death as a part of living, he sees the leaves fall and rot away to build the soil for other trees and plants to be born. The leaves gather strength from sun and rain, gathering the capital on which they live to return it to the soil when they die. Only for a time have they borrowed their life from the sum of things, using their small portion of sun, earth, and rain, some of the chemicals that go into their being - all to be paid back when death comes. All to be used again and again. — Louis L'Amour

All ends are temporary and all life is born from death. — Christopher Pike

One of my main wishes in wanting to write about my mother was to explore the impact of her death on my life, explore our relationship, think about the different versions of myself that I was with and without her. I also had the really strong wish to bring her to life for my children, who were born after she was gone. — Tracy K. Smith

Immortality: "It is impossible to be conscious of being unconscious."

It is not possible to be aware of being unconscious from your own perspective. You cannot be aware of not being aware. You can be less aware/conscious, such as when you are asleep, but not completely unconscious (dead), because time would stand still for you. A billion years could pass, and you would not know it.

How do you know you are dead? It is not possible to be aware of any gaps in life; it is continuous and never-ending from your own point of view.

Death and birth are a continuous event from your own perspective.

You will die physically, but you will be born into a new physical body. Being born happens, or you would not be here now. You were born into this life. It is what we know happens. There is no evidence anything else happens. True or false? — Michael Smith

The earth will never be the same again
Rock, water, tree, iron, share this greif
As distant stars participate in the pain.
A candle snuffed, a falling star or leaf,
A dolphin death, O this particular loss
A Heaven-mourned; for if no angel cried
If this small one was tossed away as dross,
The very galaxies would have lied.
How shall we sing our love's song now
In this strange land where all are born to die?
Each tree and leaf and star show how
The universe is part of this one cry,
Every life is noted and is cherished,
and nothing loved is ever lost or perished. — Madeleine L'Engle

It was when I discovered that there are two kinds of death. There is ceasing to exist, usually accompanied by a funeral and loved ones in mourning. And then there is emotional death born out of necessity and measured solely by the absence of grief it causes: the turning off the lights of oneself in order to shut down the feelings of being alive. — Kerry Kletter

Like dew I was born
Like dew I vanish
..and all that I have ever done
Is but a dream
Within a dream — James Clavell

Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body. It is from there that both babies and cancers are born. — Yann Martel

The living used to wonder what happened after death. She said that whole religions were born and evolved around this one simple uncertainty. — Carrie Ryan

We are Necromancers, born from the pools of hell and gifted with the touch of death. - Irisi, wife of Na'shir and Priestess of Death — Candace Knoebel

The leaf has the appearance of being born and dying, but it is not caught in either. The leaf falls to the earth without any idea of dying, and is born again by decomposing at the foot of the tree and nourishing the tree. The cloud has the appearance of dying in becoming rain, but it feels no sorrow or pain.
[...] When we have awakened understanding, birth is a continuation and death is a continuation[.] — Thich Nhat Hanh

We start, then, with nothing, pure zero. But this is not the nothing of negation. For not means other than, and other is merely a synonym of the ordinal numeral second. As such it implies a first; while the present pure zero is prior to every first. The nothing of negation is the nothing of death, which comes second to, or after, everything. But this pure zero is the nothing of not having been born. There is no individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility
boundless possibility. There is no compulsion and no law. It is boundless freedom. — Charles Sanders Peirce

She isn't a storm or a leader or a king or a war or anyone whose life and death makes noise. The problem is words. There is skin, yes. And then, inside that, there is your language, the casual, inherited magic spells taht make your skin real. It's too late now
even if we could say "Shut up" or "Where's my dinner?" in the first language, the real language, the words weren't born in us. And unless your skin and your language touch each other without interruption, there is no word strong enough to make you understand that it matters that you live. The things that really "stay" are an Orisha, a kind night, a pretended boy, a garden song that made no sense. Those come closer to being enough. — Helen Oyeyemi

If I could find one word
that would shudder the air
like that frightened sob,
that wordless prayer
of my newly-born,
who drew one breath,
and with unopened eyes
sank back into death;
If I could break the world's cold heart
with that cry,
then this grief would lift
and I could die. — Kenneth L. Patton

Think of it, I literally had to touch death and be born again to live a glimpse of the life that I never had. — Sapan Saxena

Mr Tulip raised a trembling hand. 'Is this the bit where my whole life passes in front of my eyes?' he said.
NO, THAT WAS THE BIT JUST NOW.
'Which bit?'
THE BIT, said Death, BETWEEN YOUR BEING BORN AND YOUR DYING. — Terry Pratchett

As she was finishing her song, the notes dipped down low - they carried a sadness that was more than a sadness at the death of men; rather it was a sadness at the lives of men, and of women. It reminded those who heard the rising, dipping notes, of notes of hopes that had been born, and, yet, died; of promise, and the failure of promise. — Larry McMurtry

I'd prefer to die in Texas when I'm old. They say most good things end the same way they started, and that's where I entered the world, so that's how I'll leave it. — Crystal Woods

Had Harry been born under a star less kind, he might well have ended up among the city's nomadic visionaries, his days taken up with begging for enough money to buy some liquid oblivion, his nights spent trying to find a place where he could not hear the adversaries singing as they went about their labors of the dark. They had only ever sung one song within earshot of Harry, and that was "Danny Boy," that hymn to death and maudlin sentiment that Harry had heard so often that he knew the words by heart. — Clive Barker

We are born in debt, owing the world a death. This is the shadow that darkens every cradle. Trauma is what happens when you catch a surprise glimpse of that darkness, the coming annihilation not only of the body and the mind but also, seemingly, of the world. — David J. Morris

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hopes that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.
(Epitaph for Joy Davidman) — C.S. Lewis

Take care what you say! I'll have no hard words. Wretch! If I am a wretch, who made me one? If I hate you and myself and the world, who made me hate it? I was born free - as free as you are. Why should I be sent to herd with beasts, and condemned to this slavery, worse than death? Tell me that, Maurice Frere - tell me that! — Marcus Clarke

Our heart knows why we are here. Whoever listens to his heart, follows the signs, and lives his Personal Legend, will understand that he is taking part in something, even if he doesn't comprehend it rationally. There is a tradition which says that, the second before our death, we realize the true reason for our existence. And at that moment, Hell and Heaven are born. — Paulo Coelho

What is faith? It is a memory. Of a time when all was perfect in the world. When there was no fear and no judgment and no death. It is a memory of a time before we were born, a beacon to guide us back from the end to the beginning, to the memory of where we came from. It is a memory of a promise made before the earth was formed, before the stars glittered in the primordial sea. A promise that says that we will remember what we have learned on this journey so that we may return full circle, the same and yet different. Older. Wiser. Filled with compassion for others. And for ourselves. What is faith? It is the memory of love. — Kamran Pasha

All things being at God's disposal, and the decision of salvation or death belonging to him, he orders all things by his counsel and decree in such a manner, that some men are born devoted from the womb to certain death, that his name may be glorified in their destruction. — John Calvin

Michael and Gabriel-
"Creatures of an unremembered beginning, born of light and sent to protect this place and live among men of free will. To comfort them in death and guide their souls to a new form." Angels — Jon Steele

[N]ature repairs one thing from another and allows nothing to be born without the aid of another's death. — Lucretius

Our passion is what we have been designed to do so as not to get bored between being born and death. — Ben Tolosa

All the history of the stage is a struggle, the gasping of a beautiful child born at the point of death. The moralists, censorship and oppression, technology, and now poverty have all tried to destroy her. Only we, the actors and audiences, have kept her alive. — Gene Wolfe

When love plus death surrounds you, there is a transformation, an immense mutation, as if a new being is born. You are never the same again. But people do not love, and because they do not love they can't experience death the way I experienced it. Without love, death does not give you the keys to existence. With love, it hands over to you the keys to all that is. — Osho

Death was silence, loss, guilt. And anger. But life led that way, anyway. From birth, it was a slow, long march to the grave. Who said that? She couldn't remember now. But it was true. They were born dying. If they were very lucky, the dying was called aging. They reached toward if as if they were satellites in unstable orbits. And then when they got there, they were just dead. One moment in time separated the living from the ghosts. — Michelle Sagara West

On the pitiless earth where lovers are often separated in death and are always born
divided, the total possession of another human being and absolute communion throughout an entire
lifetime are impossible dreams. — Albert Camus

Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says 'you're next.' Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries. — Christopher Hitchens

Prudent people are very happy; 'tis an exceeding fine thing, that's certain, but I was born without it, and shall retain to my day of Death the Humour of saying what I think. — Mary Wortley Montagu

The real monsters are born, not made. They are the ones who watch behind friendly faces. The ones who come for the innocent trying to steal everything they have, be it their most treasured possessions, their honour or their lives. Not because they must, not because their very existence relies on it but simply because there is a thrill in it for them. To watch a man pierced by wrath and greed die a lonely death, to watch a woman pierced by lust and anger whimper away in fear. It thrills them to watch man burn and bleed. Real monsters love to turn the sound of beautiful life into many a terrified scream. — Narayan Liu

Because this woman sobbed in the way that all women sob, whether they do it outwardly or whether they keep it silently locked up inside themselves. They sob because they realise, one day, that they were born on a planet of men, and that short of death or spinsterhood they can never escape. Effie's Aunt Rachel used to say, 'Even the slaves could run away, but where can women go? — Graham Masterton

Death is not the worst thing. It is His gift to us, and end to want and pain. On the day that we are born the Many-Faced God sends each of us a dark angel to walk through life beside us. When our sins and our sufferings grow to great to be borne, the angel takes us. — George R R Martin

If a man considers that he is born, he cannot avoid the fear of death. Let him find out if he has been born or if the Self has any birth. He will discover that the Self always exists, that the body that is born resolves itself into thought and that the emergence of thought is the root of all mischief. Find from where thoughts emerge. Then you will be able to abide in the ever-present inmost Self and be free from the idea of birth or the fear of death. — Ramana Maharshi

With the birth of Akash, in his sudden, perfect presence, Ruma had felt awe for the first time in her life. He still had the power to stagger her at times
simply the fact that he was breathing, that all his organs were in their proper places, that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small, sturdy limbs. He was her flesh and blood, her mother had told her in the hospital the day Akash was born. Only the words her mother used were more literal, enriching the tired phrase with meaning: "He is made from your meat and bone." It had caused Ruma to acknowledge the supernatural in everyday life. But death, too, had the power to awe, she knew this now-that a human being could be alive for years and years, thinking and breathing and eating, full of a million worries and feelings and thoughts, taking up space in the world, and then, in an instant, become absent, invisible. — Jhumpa Lahiri

I have heard it said - usually behind my back - that Black Lesbians are not normal. But what is normal in this deranged society by which we are all trapped? I remember, and so do many of you, when being Black was considered not normal, when they talked about us in whispers, tried to paint us, lynch us, bleach us, ignore us, pretend we did not exist. We called that racism.
I have heard it said that Black Lesbians are a threat to the Black family. But when 50 percent of children born to Black women are born out of wedlock, and 30 percent of all Black families are headed by women without husbands, we need to broaden and redefine what we mean by family.
I have heard it said that Black Lesbians will mean the death of the race. Yet Black Lesbians bear children in exactly the same way other women bear children, and a Lesbian household is simply another kind of family. Ask my son and daughter. — Audre Lorde

When Death hath poured oblivion through my veins,
And brought me home, as all are brought, to lie
In that vast house, common to serfs and Thanes,
I shall not die, I shall not utterly die,
For beauty born of beauty
that remains. — Madison Cawein

Four years ago the clocks started turning back. I open my eyes and see nothing. I feel nothing below or above me. I feel the absence of things. The absence of my flesh, my bones, my body, my mind. All that is left is awareness. I see nothing but the absence of colour. It's not a black darkness. It's simply nothing. The interior of a black hole. I recall news of a black hole lingering along the edges of our solar system. All that time ago. Four years ago. When the clocks started turning back. I hear nothing. Until there is a something. A small thing. A voice. I listen. There are more voices. The sounds are human. How long has it been since I've heard a human? The sounds scratch along my now present attention. They carve into my hearing. They are horrid, wretched things. Voices screaming. Growing loud and desperate. How many voices? Billions. This is the birth of our species. We are born screaming. It's all we know to do. We have screamed for eternity. Within this empty space. — F.K. Preston

Man is born in a day, and he dies in a day, and the thing is easily over; but to have a sick heart for three-fourths of one's lifetime is simply to have death renewed every morning; and life at that price is not worth living. — Gilbert Parker

Death is believed to be inauspicious in some foreign lands to the west of us; to them it signifies the end of everything. But nothing ever really dies. No material can ever truly escape the universe. It just changes form. In that sense, death is actually also the beginning of regeneration; the old form dies and a new form is born. If the south is the direction of death, then it is also the direction of regeneration. — Amish Tripathi

Like the pro-slavery forces who invaded Kansas, the pro-abortion forces in Washington and elsewhere want us to believe that abortion is not murder; that being born is worse than death; that the unborn baby is property, not a person. — Tim Huelskamp

We are born and then we die. And in between lies only this strange darkness that we can't break. — Cristian Mihai

There is a profound difference between fighting to avoid death and fighting in order to live. Men who fight to avoid death preserve their dignity and one and all - men, women and children - defend it jealously, tenaciously, fiercely ... When men fight to avoid death they cling with a tenacity born of desperation to all that constitutes the living and eternal part of human life, the essence, the noblest and purest element of life: dignity, pride, freedom of conscience. They fight to save their souls. But after the liberation men had to fight in order to live ... It is a humiliating, horrible thing, a shameful necessity, a fight for life. Only for life. Only to save one's skin. — Curzio Malaparte

God sent the Egyptians ten plagues that became increasingly harder, one after the other, starting with blood, and ending with the death of the first born. Similarly, debt sometimes starts with charging just a couple of extra dollars to our credit cards when we want something we can't afford to pay cash for. Before long, it might turn into a second mortgage on our house. Debt can kill our future and take our house with it. — Celso Cukierkorn

So we may well believe that the King's men were shriven on the night before they fought. Something of the young man's vision had penetrated to his captains and his soldiers. Something of the new ideal of the Round Table which was to be born in pain, something about doing a hateful and dangerous action for the sake of decency
for they knew that the fight was to be fought in blood and death without reward. They would get nothing but the unmarketable conscience of having done what they ought to do in spite of fear
something which wicked people have often debased by calling it glory with too much sentiment, but which is glory all the same. This idea was in the hearts of the young men who knelt before the God-distributing bishops
knowing that the odds were three to one, and that their own warm bodies might be cold at sunset. — T.H. White

For the Athenians of that day did not look for an orator or a general who would enable them to live in happy servitude; they cared not to live at all, unless they might live in freedom. For every one of them felt that he had come into being, not for his father and his mother alone, but also for his country. And wherein lies the difference? He who thinks he was born for his parents alone awaits the death which destiny assigns him in the course of nature: but he who thinks he was born for his country also will be willing to die, that he may not see her in bondage, and will look upon the outrages and the indignities that he must needs bear in a city that is in bondage as more to be dreaded than death. — Demosthenes

It is never too late to ask yourself, 'Am I ready to change the life I am living? Am I ready to change within?' Even if a single day in your life is the same as the day before, it surely is a pity. At every moment and with each new breath, one should be renewed and renewed again. There is only one way to be born into a new life: to die before death. — Elif Shafak

For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is - limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death - He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile. — Dorothy L. Sayers

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

They say that in the second before our death, each of us understands the real reason for our existence, and out of that moment, heaven or hell is born. — Paulo Coelho

Only Esmeralda was not weeping. Instead she wore that wooden look that whites mistake for churlishenss or indifference. Woodrew knew it was neither. It was familiarity. This how real life is constituted, it said. This is grief and hatred and people hacked to death. This is the everyday we have known since we were born and you Wazungu have not. — John Le Carre

But if Hugh dies first, would I ever be able to stop saying, "we" and say "I"? I doubt it. I do not think that death can take away the fact that Hugh and I are "we" and "us," a new creature born of the time of our marriage vows, which has grown along with us as our marriage has grown. Even during the times, inevitable in all marriages, when I have felt angry, or alienated, the instinctive "we" remains. And most growth has come during times of trial. — Madeleine L'Engle

The incarnation means that for whatever reason God chose to let us fall . . . to suffer, to be subject to sorrows and death - he has nonetheless had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine. . . . He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He himself has gone through the whole of human experience - from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. . . . He was born in poverty and . . . suffered infinite pain - all for us - and thought it well worth his while.4 Isaiah — Timothy J. Keller

Death is like giving birth. Birth can be painful. Sometimes women die from giving birth. However, when the baby is born, all that pain (that was endured) vanishes in an instant. Love for that tiny baby makes one forget the pain, the fear. And as I've said before, love between mother and child is the highest experience, the closest to divine love.
You might wonder about the parallel I'm making between birth and death. But I say to you, the fear and pain accompanying an awful death is over quickly. Beyond that portal one is suddenly in the light, in oneness and bliss ... Just as a woman heals rapidly after childbirth and then is able to fall in love with her baby, those who pass over also are able to fall in love with a new life."-Kuan Yin (From "Oracle of Compassion: the Living Word of Kuan Yin — Hope Bradford

I will make them pay. Each and every one of them. I will get revenge on every last one of them and make them wish they were never born. And when I'm done, and I won't be done until they suffer, I will leave the job like you wanted and raise our child. I love you, Dante, and I will avenge your death. — Jaime Whitley

So passed away Sorrow the Undesired
that intrusive creature, that bastard gift of shameless Nature who respects not the social law; a waif to whom eternal Time had been a matter of days merely, who knew not that such things as years and centuries ever were; to whom the cottage interior was the universe, the week's weather climate, new-born babyhood human existence, and the instinct to suck human knowledge. — Thomas Hardy

I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift, and I regret the prospect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man's destiny - if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image - tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I've tried to demonstrate in my examination of the postliterate culture, the story begins only when the book closes. — Marshall McLuhan

SLEEP IS NOT, DEATH IS NOT; WHO SEEM TO DIE LIVE. HOUSE YOU WERE BORN IN, FRIENDS OF YOUR SPRING-TIME, OLD MAN AND YOUNG MAID, DAY'S TOIL AND ITS GUERDON, THEY ARE ALL VANISHING, FLEEING TO FABLES, CANNOT BE MOORED. - Ralph Waldo Emerson — Ransom Riggs

Man is born for uprightness. If a man lose his uprightness and yet live, his escape from death is mere good fortune. — Confucius

My father was temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious - to the point of psychoneurosis. From him I inherited the seeds of madness. The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born. — Edvard Munch

The whole life of Christ was a continual Passion; others die martyrs but Christ was born a martyr. He found a Golgotha even in Bethlehem, where he was born; for to his tenderness then the straws were almost as sharp as the thorns after, and the manger as uneasy at first as his cross at last. His birth and his death were but one continual act, and his Christmas day and his Good Friday are but the evening and morning of one and the same day. And as even his birth is his death, so every action and passage that manifests Christ to us is his birth, for Epiphany is manifestation. — John Donne

Human beings are born to experience pure love, and they never get it. They are searching to experience it from birth until death. — Mata Amritanandamayi

Death gets a bad rap. People think that euthanasia is putting their pets "down" when it really is lifting us up. In the first moment, when we come back to earth, we remember the comfort of the Heaven we came from and this is why we cry when we are born. When we are born in Heaven we come in laughing not crying! In birth we have the passage and then the pain. In death we have the pain and then the passage. — Kate McGahan

What kind of spiritual triumph it was I can neither write nor speak; it can only be compared with that where life is born in the midst of death, and is like the resurrection of the dead. — Jakob Bohme

No one fights dirtier or more brutally than blood; only family knows it's own weaknesses, the exact placement of the heart. The tragedy is that one can still live with the force of hatred, feel infuriated that once you are born to another, that kinship lasts through life and death, immutable, unchanging, no matter how great the misdeed or betrayal. Blood cannot be denied, and perhaps that's why we fight tooth and claw, because we cannot - being only human - put asunder what God has joined together. — Whitney Otto

I wanted dad's life to be seen in that perspective, not the closeup, not the man children feared and who later drank himself to death, but the broad view, a human who was born on earth, pure and innocent, as all are at birth, and who lived a life as all humans do and died his death. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Every evening, I died, and every evening, I was born. — Chuck Palahniuk

Who breathes must suffer, and who thinks must mourn; And he alone is bless'd who ne'er was born. — Matthew Prior

Not one of the creatures of blood can escape death. We all face it, and succumb to it. It follows us like a dark shadow. Yet if we live in terror of it, then we do not live at all. Yes we are born alone, and yes we will die alone. But in between, Tae, we live. We know joy. — David Gemmell

there are indestructible things that accompany the body to death as if they had been born with it. And one of them is what is created between a man and a woman who have experienced certain moments together. — Clarice Lispector

And some day there will be nothing left of everything that has twisted my life and grieved it and filled me so often with such anguish. Some day, with the last exhaustion, peace will come and the motherly earth will gather me back home. It won't be the end of things, only a way of being born again, a bathing and a slumbering where the old and the withered sink down, where the young and new begin to breathe. Then, with other thoughts, I will walk along streets like these, and listen to streams, and overhear what the sky says in the evening, over and over and over. — Hermann Hesse

The girl you were died; the potion of death was what all of us women swallow sooner or later. Have you noticed how at puberty the Amazon-like energy we are born with fades and we turn into doubt-filled creatures with clipped wings? The woman left trapped in the silo is also you, a prisoner of the restrictions of adult life. The female condition is a disgrace, Isabel, it's like having rocks tied to your ankles so you can't fly. — Isabel Allende

And behold, he shall be born of Mary, at Jerusalem which is the land of our forefathers, she being a virgin, a precious and chosen vessel, who shall be overshadowed and conceive by the power of the Holy Ghost, and bring forth a son, yea, even the Son of God.
And he shall go forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind; and this that the word might be fulfilled which saith he will take upon him the pains and the sicknesses of his people.
And he will take upon him death, that he may loose the bands of death which bind his people; and he will take upon him their infirmities, that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.' -Alma the Younger (Alme 7:10-12) — Joseph Smith Jr.

Why do we as humans always tend to remember the worse things about people? We may know someone for many years, know them as vibrant and healthy, yet when they fall ill and pass away, we can only picture them at their sickest, as though they were born and lived their whole lives wearing a death mask. — K. Martin Beckner

[How does it happen that this man, so distressed at the death of his wife and his only son, or who has some great lawsuit which annoys him, is not at this moment sad, and that he seems so free from all painful and disquieting thoughts? We need not wonder; for a ball has been served him, and he must return it to his companion. He is occupied in catching it in its fall from the roof, to win a game. How can he think of his own affairs, pray, when he has this other matter in hand? Here is a care worthy of occupying this great soul, and taking away from him every other thought of the mind. This man, born to know the universe, to judge all causes, to govern a whole state, is altogether occupied and taken up with the business of catching a hare. — Blaise Pascal

The seeds of life - fiery is their force, divine their birth, but they are weighed down by the bodies' ills or dulled by limbs and flesh that's born for death. That is the source of all men's fears and longings, joys and sorrows, nor can they see the heaven's light, shut up in the body's tomb, a prison dark and deep. — Virgil

Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers - and before it can be his, it is hers alone. She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it. — Margaret Sanger

I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die. — Adrienne Rich

If death were the exception and not the rule, and we were not so swiftly to follow, these separations would be intolerably sad. We know no more of our next change of life than we knew of this before we were born into it; but that which we call death is merely change, who can doubt? — Celia Thaxter

Sometimes the serpent is represented as a circle eating its own tail. That's an image of life. Life sheds one generation after another, to be born again. The serpent represents immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again. There is something tremendously terrifying about life when you look at it that way. And so the serpent carries in itself the sense of both the fascination and the terror of life. — Joseph Campbell

What is it that you ever wanted in life?
Who cares about you?
Who laughs with you?
Who shared your hopes and dreams?
To top it all, maybe just maybe,
When you are near your death,
All that you ever wanted is to ask forgiveness to whom you have sinned,
to tell them that they should take care of themselves, wish them to be safe, and to ask mercy from God to let you enter His Kingdom.
And barely wouldn't even care what will happen with your facebook account.
Well maybe we can start with start living simple
And could stop living like a pro,
Because nothing in this world is worth of value to the One up above.
Don't you know that none of us is born perfect,
And no one else will be? — The Eldest

We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents, or the country of our birth.
We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time and conditions of our death.
But within this realm of choicelessnness, we do choose how we live. — Joseph Epstein

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him ... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create
so that
without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating. — Pearl S. Buck