Quotes & Sayings About Death And Life Going On

Janie starched and ironed her face and came set in the funeral behind her veil. It was like a wall of stone and steel. The funeral was going on outside. All things concerning death and burial were said and done. Finish. End. Never-more. Darkness. Deep hole. Dissolution. Eternity. Weeping and wailing outside. Inside the expensive black folds were resurrection and life. — Zora Neale Hurston

Here's the way it works. You're going to find yourself at a crossroads.. There's going to be a dcision you'll have to make, an action to be taken or not, a choice between polar opposites. All of what you are and what you have been and what you could be will be measured on your decision. And the consequences? They don't just affect you. They affect everyone. This is not simple life and death - it's about eternity. Yours. Others'. Do not understimate how far this goes. — J.R. Ward

Going to the gym was never about 'working out' like it is for most people. To me, It was a matter of life or death. It was either me or the weights-and I was going to win. I've always had that competitive streak, whether it was in the gym, on the stage, or In anything else I did. — Rich Gaspari

The war is going on, and I'm singing. But I can't bandage up the wounded like Tala. I can, of course. But so can hundreds of other young women. Let the daring and decisive ones do it, not those like me. No, I'm daring and decisive, too. And I want to sing. It's not my fault that my youth came in time of war! I won't get another youth! And I'm convinced that singing when all around is hatred and death is no less important. Maybe even more important.

This is what I believe: If somewhere on earth the wounded are finished off with rifle butts, that means somewhere else people have to be singing and rejoicing in life! The more death there is around, the more important to counter it with life, love, and beauty! — Mikhail Shishkin

At such times I felt instinctively that a life and death struggle was going on inside me in which I, the owner of the body, was entirely powerless to take part, forced to lie quietly and watch as a spectator the weird drama unfolded in my own flesh. — Gopi Krishna

Where do we get the energy to keep on hoping and praying that things will get better? What makes us believe we DESERVE a happy life to begin with? Is this just an American phenomenon? We just assume that we are entitled to happiness? And when we do get the things we wished so hard for, are we happy? Or do we just want more...? And what about people in less developed countries who's lives are REALLY hard? People who live in places where infant death, widespread disease, rape, general oppression, poverty and starvation are the norm. Why do THEY keep going? Do they hope for happiness too, or do they think there are no other options but to keep living. I need to know. — Jessica Kenley

Sometimes a tragedy must happen to keep a soul on schedule. This is the reason for things that seem to have no reason. This is the reason that we cannot fathom when we are going through it.
Perhaps I will get very sick. People wonder why cancer exists when it is just a clever method to teach people lessons about love and loss. It borrows time or steals it depending on the needs of Heaven. It is a vehicle to get us where we need to be. It calls us home because something needs us there. — Kate McGahan

These friends - and he laid his hand on some of the books - have been good friends to me, and for some years past, ever since I had the idea of going to London, have given me many, many hours of pleasure. Through them I have come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her. I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is. — Bram Stoker

He wonders by what process virtually any discussion about the war seems to profane these ultimate matters of life and death. As if to talk of such things properly we need a mode of speech near the equal of prayer, otherwise just shut, shut your yap and sit on it, silence being truer to the experience than the star-spangled spasm, the bittersweet sob, the redeeming hug, or whatever this fucking closure is that everybody's always talking about. They want it to be easy and it's just not going to be. — Ben Fountain

No more light answers. Let our officers
Have note what we purpose. I shall break
The cause of our expedience to the Queen
And get her leave to part. For not alone
The death of Fulvia, with more urgent touches,
Do strongly speak to us, but the letters too
Of many our contriving friends in Rome
Petition us at home. Sextus Pompeius
Hath given the dare to Caesar and commands
The empire of the sea. Our slippery people,
Whose love is never linked to the deserver
Till his deserts are past, begin to throw
Pompey the Great and all his dignities
Upon his son, who - high in name and power,
Higher than both in blood and life - stands up
For the main soldier; whose quality, going on,
The sides o' th' world may danger. Much is breeding
Which, like the courser's hair, hath yet but life
And not a serpent's poison. — William Shakespeare

It was all written. When life is going to be breathed into you, and when it's going to be taken away. Each person's mission on earth is pre-planned. — Aliyyah Eniath

I was trying to cheat death. I was only trying to surmount for a little while the darkness that all my life I surely knew was going to come rolling in on me some day and obliterate me. I was only to stay alive a little brief while longer, after I was already gone. — Cornell Woolrich

If I had admitted my guilt, it would have been the same as putting my head on the chopping block - lifetime ban. Death penalty. I spent my entire life on the baseball fields of America, and I was not going to give up my profession without first seeing some hard evidence ... right or wrong, the punishment didn't fit the crime, so I denied the crime. — Pete Rose

Making a Fist
For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern
past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."
Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand. — Naomi Shihab Nye

Part of this experience involves your being able to say to a person who is dying, You are loved. You are beautiful. You are like a newborn babe, going into another realm. Release now anyone, and everything, that is a burden to you. Release everything and know that you have lived your life to the fullest. There is no judgment on you. Go in peace, put a smile on your face, and release any judgments you hold. Relax, and allow your life to have meaning as you embark on the next phase of your identity. — Barbara Marciniak

I was with my dad 20 years ago as he was dying. I was there at the moment of his death, and I kept wondering the whole while what it must feel like from his point of view to still be there thinking, hearing all that was going on as people came and went, and life continued all around him. — Jill McCorkle

She was in herself, like a woman near term,
and did not think of the man, going on ahead,
or the path, climbing upwards towards life.
She was in herself. And her being-dead
filled her with abundance.
As a fruit with sweetness and darkness,
so she was full with her vast death. — Rainer Maria Rilke

If we had fooled her last night, I would have considered my life at a satisfactory end, with all debts paid. I would have wound up on skid row, or maybe I would have been a suicide." He shrugged and smiled sadly. "Now," he said, "if I'm ever going to square things with her, I've got to believe in a Heaven, I've got to believe she can look down and see me, and I've got to be a big success for her to see — Kurt Vonnegut

He thought here you are Joe Bonham lying like a side of beef all the rest of your life and for what? Somebody tapped you on the shoulder and said come along son we're going to war. So you went. But why? In any other deal even like buying a car or running an errand you had the right to say what's there in it for me? Otherwise you'd be buying bad cars for too much money or running errands for fools and starving to death. It was a kind of duty you owed yourself that when anybody said come on son do this or do that you should stand up and say look mister why should I do this for who am I doing it and what am I going to get out of it in the end? But when a guy comes along and says here come with me and risk your life and maybe die or be crippled why then you've got no rights. You haven't even the right to say yes or no or I'll think it over. There are plenty of laws to protect guys' money even in war time but there's nothing on the books says a man's life's his own. Of — Dalton Trumbo

But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It's a mistake of emphasis. — Nicholson Baker

I was trying to put myself in the situation of someone that was going through major loss. Losing someone to death or sickness, and having to go through life on your own afterwords. — Coeur De Pirate

I am going to concentrate on what's important in life. I'm going to strive everyday to be a kind and generous and loving person. I'm going to keep death right here, so that anytime I even think about getting angry at you or anybody else, I'll see death and I'll remember. — Diane Frolov

I Was Always Leaving"

I was always leaving, I was
about to get up and go, I was
on my way, not sure where.
Somewhere else. Not here.
Nothing here was good enough.

It would be better there, where I
was going. Not sure how or why.
The dome I cowered under
would be raised, and I would be released
into my true life. I would meet there

the ones I was destined to meet.
They would make an opening for me
among the flutes and boulders,
and I would be taken up. That this
might be a form of death

did not occur to me. I only know
that something held me back,
a doubt, a debt, a face I could not
leave behind. When the door
fell open, I did not go through. — Jean Nordhaus

The bluejacket girlie rode like a clan warrior, but there was no way she'd escape. It was a private life-and-death contest that had nothing to do with him.
He told himself he should ride on, grateful that the chase would keep them occupied while he took a different path.
But what had he told Rebecca when she'd asked what he meant to do when he returned to the Fells?
'I'm tired of people in power picking on the weak. I'm going to help them. — Cinda Williams Chima

Jenny and I once talked about how we manage to live despite the knowledge that we are all going to die. What's the point of it all? Why bother getting up in the morning when faced with such futility? Or is it the promise of death that inspires life? That we must grab what we can while there's still time? Is it the not knowing if today is the day that keeps us going? But what if this is the day? What if the hour is here? How do you stand? How do you breathe? How do you go on? — Steven Rowley

Fear can change you if you let. Even a proud,strong woman can become a whimpering mess if her fear overwhelms her. Terror reaches inside you and twists your mind, colors your decisions, and limits your options. If I'm going to live my life under the constant threat of death, then I'm going to live it on my terms. And when I do die, I want people to remember me as I am, not as whatever creature my fear wants to turn me into." ... "My circumstances have taken certain choices from me. I'll be damned if I let fear take any more... — Jennifer Blackstream

One was watching the other day a red-tailed hawk, high in the heavens, circling effortlessly, without a beat of the wing, just for the fun of flying, just to be sustained by the air-currents. Then it was joined by another, and they were flying together for quite a while. They were marvellous creatures in that blue sky, and to hurt them in any way is a crime against heaven. Of course there is no heaven; man has invented heaven out of hope, for his life has become a hell, an endless conflict from birth to death, coming and going, making money, working endlessly. This life has become a turmoil, a travail of endless striving. One wonders if man, a human being, will ever live on this earth peacefully. Conflict has been the way of his life - within the skin and outside the skin, in the area of the psyche and in the society which that psyche has created. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

For us, it was never about death. It was about life. Knowing that there was a way out, and that his suffering was not going to become unendurable, was the one thing that allowed Mr. Peterson to go on living, much longer than he would have otherwise wanted. It was the weeks leading up to our pact that were shrouded in darkness and despair; after its inception, life became a meaningful prospect once more. — Gavin Extence

Mohammed knew that most people are terribly cowardly and stupid. That is why he promised two beautiful women to every courageous warrior who dies in battle. This is the kind of language a soldier understands. When he believes that he will be welcomed in this manner in the afterlife, he will be willing to give his life, he will be enthusiastic about going to battle and not fear death. You may call this primitive and you may laugh about it, but it is based on deeper wisdom. A religion must speak a man's language. — Heinrich Himmler

She knew for a fact that she wasn't going to sit around and wait for some miracle to happen. She wasn't going to watch the storm in front of her and pretend like nothing had happened. Yes, Allah is expecting her to be patient and keep on marching forward — Diyar Harraz

Here, then, is the message of Easter, or at least the beginning of that message. The resurrection of Jesus doesn't mean, "It's all right. We're going to heaven now." No, the life of heaven has been born on this earth. It doesn't mean, "So there is a life after death." Well, there is, but Easter says much, much more than that. It speaks of a life that is neither ghostly nor unreal, but solid and definite and practical. The Easter stories come at the end of the four gospels, but they are not about an "end." They are about a beginning. The beginning of God's new world. The beginning of the kingdom. God is now in charge, on earth as in heaven. And God's "being-in-charge" is focused on Jesus himself being king and Lord. The title on the cross was true after all. The resurrection proves it. — N. T. Wright

Will only looked at her. There had been light in his eyes on the stairs, as he'd locked the door, when he'd kissed her
a brilliant, joyous light. And it was going now, fading like the last breath of someone dying. She thought of Nate, bleeding to death in her arms. She had been powerless then, to help him. As she was now. She felt as if she were watching the life bleed out of Will Herondale, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. — Cassandra Clare

I don't know what is the meaning of death, but I am not afraid to die - and I go on, non-stop, going forward [with life]. Even though I, Bruce Lee, may die some day without fulfilling all of my ambitions, I will have no regrets. I did what I wanted to do and what I've done, I've done with sincerity and to the best of my ability. You can't expect much more from life. — Bruce Lee

There's a great documentary on Tupac called 'Resurrection' about the last few years of Tupac's life and how he transformed. And, ironically, how this East Coast rapper became this West Coast icon, back when all that Death Row/Sean Combs stuff was going on. — Marco Rubio

When my mother was alive, I was the daughter first and everything else second ... That's what made her death so painful. My mother was a big part of my life and a big reason why I did what I did. I've always derived a lot of energy from being a good daughter ... When she was gone, I suddenly thought, Why am I doing this? For whom? Losing my mom was really hard on me. I remember going to the Academy Awards shortly after she died and thinking, Well I'm all dressed up, and my mother won't see me. — Goldie Hawn

Shit," he breathed against her lips. "I've been wanting to do this since I first tasted you in the prey room." The reminder that he'd tossed her into a cold, dank dungeon and then scared her to death should have put a damper on things, but it didn't. She was so stressed out, so tired of not knowing if she was going to live or die - she couldn't help but embrace these few precious moments of forgetting the hell that was her life and remembering what it was like to actually live. Boldly, she ran her hands up Riker's arms, letting her fingers map the rough scars and thick veins that wound around his biceps. — Larissa Ione

You will never get a satisfactory answer, no matter how much effort or reason you expend, to these types of questions. You probably can't even hope to acquire even mildly strong evidence either way. You will never know, beyond doubt, in advance, what is going to happen to you when you die. Never! And really why should you care? Why do you give a rat's ass? You're five years old. Don't worry about what happens when you die, worry about what happens when you live for crying out loud! Christ, if I was your age, I'd be out living it up, hitting on chicks, getting drunk, c'mon. You with me kid? — Sergio De La Pava

If we all knew each morning that there was going to be another morning, and on and on and on, we's tend not to notice the sunrise, or hear the birds, or the waves rolling into the shore. We'd tend not to treasure our time with the people we love. Simply the awareness that our mortal lives had a beginning and will have an end enhances the quality of our living. Perhaps it's even more intense when we know that the termination of the body is near, but it shouldn't be. — Madeleine L'Engle

So, O king, does the present life of man on earth seem to me, in comparison with the time which is unknown to us, as though a sparrow flew swiftly through the hall, coming in by one door and going out by the other, and you, the while, sat at meat with your captains and liegemen, in wintry weather, with a fire burning in your midst and heating the room, the storm raging out of doors and driving snow and rain before it. For the time for which he is within, the bird is sheltered from the storm, but after this short while of calm he flies out again into the cold and is seen no more. Thus the life of man is visible for a moment, but we know not what comes before it or follows after it. — Bede

You too, you took an interest in the world. That was long ago. I want you to cast your mind back to then. The domain of the rules was no longer enough for you; you were unable to love any longer in the domain of the rules; so you had to enter into the domain of the struggle. I ask you to go back to that precise moment. It was long ago, no? Cast your mind back: the water was cold.
You are far from the edge, now. Oh yes! How far from the edge you are! You long believed in the existence of another shore; such is no longer the case. You go on swimming, though, and every movement you make brings you closer to drowning. You are suffocating, your lungs are on fire. The water seems colder and colder to you, more and more galling. You aren't that young anymore. Now you are going to die. Don't worry. I am here. I won't let you sink. Go on with your reading. — Michel Houellebecq

People cannot escape the looming specter of a deathwatch and the imposing emptiness that comes with the termination of their existence. People resist going silently into the night. We seek to howl at the moon and make known our search for a diagrammatic overture that voices our unquantifiable existence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

To learn that his treasures had been lost months ago, and so far away, was no different from learning of the death, similarly distant in time and geography, of a beloved person. Such a death bears a peculiar imprint of doubt. To be told one day that someone has gone off to the other side of the world, and with whom you expect momentarily to be reunited, has actually been dead for many months, during which you have been going on with your life, unaware of this subtraction that has taken place, makes a mockery of the finality of death. Death is reduced to news. And news is always a little unreal - which is why we bear to take in so much of it. — Susan Sontag

I'm going to live until I die and I'm not going to get life and death confused. While I'm on this earth I'm going to LIVE. Why only be half alive? Every minute a person spends worrying about dying is just one minute that fellow might as well have been dead. — David J. Schwartz

I love the psychological thriller piece of it. Because we are trapped in this isolated environment with a deadly virus, what's really interesting is that everyone's darkness comes out because we've got these life-and-death stakes going on. And then, there're these interesting relationships going on, but we can't quite deal with the relationship right now because we've got something better to do, which is survive. — Kyra Zagorsky

A multiverse hurtling toward an inevitable heat death 100 trillion years in the future. An alien race of religious fanatics bent on absorbing all sentient life. Another alien race fighting back. A world of magicians living in secret. And himself, a contractor, a human Vorid that could absorb his enemies and grow stronger. All in less than 24 hours. And here he was, relaxing on his roof. Maybe video games really did desensitize you to this stuff. Except if he died, he wasn't going to pop back to life. — Andrew Ball

Life is too short to hold grudges, plan vengeance, and be angry for too long. And people say things like that all the time, but words like that only take on their meaning when you experience someone close to you passing away. There are truly not enough minutes, hours, days, months, years, to spend any amount of time on being and doing anything other than going into the direction of your happiness. Acceptance is better than correction and joy is better than revenge. Innocent laughter is better than anger. — C. JoyBell C.

Sweetheart, I want you to go somewhere with your life. I know that you can do some wonderful things if you set your mind to it. You're a smart and caring teenager. Much more mature then most seventeen year olds. But death is inevitable for everybody. No matter how much people try to fight it, it's going to happen." Eden looked at me with a serious expression painted on her face. "Death doesn't suit everybody, though. — Barbara C. Doyle

But everyone knows someone who has died, I said.
Why is it so hard to think about dying?
'Because,' Morrie continued, 'most of us walk around as if we're sleepwalking. We really don't experience the world fully, because we're half asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.'
And facing death changes all that?
'Oh, yes. You strip away all that stuff and you focus on the essentials. When you realize you are going to die, you see everything much differently.'
He sighed. 'Learn how to die, and you learn how to live. — Mitch Albom

The moments that precede sleep are very similar to death. We are filled by a torpor and it is impossible to know when the 'I' takes on a different form. Our dreams are our second life. I am incapable of going through the doors that lead us to that invisible world without a shiver. — Paulo Coelho

If I knew you were going to die, I'd make your last moment on earth last forever. I'd take you to the Eiffel Tower in Paris and make sure that you have the most romantic dinner your life. I'd fill your room with hundreds of wild sunflowers, so that even in death, you may carry the scent of something beautiful. If you were to die I'd make sure to drag you through an amusement park and ride all the crazy rides with you, eat all that ice cream with you, win all those stuffed animals for you.
If you were to die, I'd beat up every single person in the world who has ever hurt you. I'd protect you with my life. I'll protect you with everything I own, everything I have, everything I can give. If I knew you were going to die, I'd cut out my own heart for you. I'd cut it out so you could have it. So that you could live. Because I sure as hell can't live without you. — Anonymous

A child's reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its vast sources of recuperation, he is bound to envisage, at once, the very worst; yet at the same time, because of his inability to imagine death, the worst remains totally unreal to him. Gerard went on repeating: "Paul's dying; Paul's going to die"' but he did not believe it. Paul's death would be part of the dream, a dream of snow, of journeying forever. — Jean Cocteau

The experience of death is going to get more and more painful, contrary to what many people believe. The forthcoming euthanasia will make it more rather than less painful because it will put the emphasis on personal decision in a way which was blissfully alien to the whole problem of dying in former times. It will make death even more subjectively intolerable, for people will feel responsible for their own deaths and morally obligated to rid their relatives of their unwanted presence. Euthanasia will further intensify all the problems its advocates think it will solve. — Rene Girard

Just think about this: haven't we been going just to and fro? The whole world rather. Years back, it was good to take vitamin supplements and today they are considered hampering body's natural immune. Sometime back, people were desperate to land up in high paying jobs, today there is a big entrepreneurship fad. Back in years, it was a pride to be settled in the city, now people are giving up all responsibilities to settle at a peaceful country side.
What are we all really doing? We are moving from pillar to post, forward and backward on theories. We are all as confused as the next person. And unfortunately, we are all going to leave this world with barely being able to decipher much. — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

I want to tell you something today, something that I have known for a long while, and you know it too; but perhaps you have never said it to yourself. I am going to tell you now what it is that I know about you and me and our fate. You, Harry, have been an artist and a thinker, a man full of joy and faith, always on the track of what is great and eternal, never content with the trivial and petty. But the more life has awakened you and brought you back to yourself, the greater has you need been and the deeper the sufferings and dread and despair that have overtaken you, till you were up to your neck in them. And all that you once knew and loved and revered as beautiful and sacred, all the belief you once had in mankind and our high destiny, has been of no avail and has lost its worth and gone to pieces. Your faith found no more air to breathe. And suffocation is a hard death. Is that true, Harry? Is that your fate? — Hermann Hesse

In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means. Nevertheless, every man desires to reach old age; in other words, a state of life of which it may be said: "It is bad to-day, and it will be worse to-morrow; and so on till the worst of all." If — Arthur Schopenhauer

The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on - only henceforth in my absence. (It's the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall. — Christopher Hitchens

I started as a GED instructor, I created my own GED program and I realized that a lot of young people that don't do we'll academically, it's not that they don't have the competency to do it or the skill set to do it, it's just that they weren't motivated to learn. They weren't interested in school so I started just talking to students and just really going in on them like yo this is life or death. — Eric Thomas

We assume that we've come so far as compassionate citizens of the world if we do choose to read the news, yet the attitude towards life can be one where we put blinders on and forget that there are civil wars going on. It's easy to forget that there are so many people starving to death every single day. — Anne Hathaway

It is told that Buddha, going out to look on life, was greatly daunted by death. "They all eat one another!" he cried, and called it evil. This process I examined, changed the verb and said, "They all feed one another," and called it good. — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

By the age of twenty, you know you're not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you're not going to be a dentist or any kind of professional. And by thirty, darkness starts moving in- you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy and successful. By thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life, and you become resigned to your fate ...
... I mean, why do people live so long? What could be the difference between death at fifty-five and death at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five? Those extra years ... what benefit could they possibly have? Why do we go on living even though nothing new happens, nothing new is learned, and nothing new is transmitted? At fifty-five, your story's pretty much over. — Douglas Coupland

There are guys bleeding to death who don't know it, they're smiling, they're talking, they don't feel pain because they're in shock, they ask you for some water and then they're dead. On D-day I ran past a guy lying on his spilled guts with his eyes closed and his thumb in his mouth. Eisenhower's speech had been read to us over the loudspeaker by our commander when we crossed the channel that morning. What valor and inspiration were in his words- all about how we were embarked on a great crusade, that the hopes and prayers of a liberty loving people were going with us ... I got gooseflesh when he asked for the blessing of almighty god on this great and noble undertaking. But how to reconcile that with spilled guts on a beach and flies in the eyes of some dead nineteen year old kid who traded his life for some words on paper? — Elizabeth Berg

On inspection it turned out to be a tiny toad, a quarter of an inch long, hopping mightily after an escaping millipede, itself no bigger than a thread, both going for all they were worth until they disappeared in the grass. Then a wolf spider, stratling in size and hairiness, streaked over the gravel, either chasing something smaller or being chased by something bigger, I couldn't tell which. I reckoned there must be a million minor dramas playing out around the place without ceasing. Oh, but they were hardly minor to the chaser and the chasee who were dealing in the coin of life and death. I was a mere bystander, an idler. They were playing for keeps. — Jacqueline Kelly

Every man that ever lived craved perfect happiness, the detective poignantly reflected. But how can we have it when we know we're going to die? Each joy was clouded by the knowledge it would end. And so nature had implanted in us a desire for something unattainable? No. It couldn't be. It makes no sense. Every other striving implanted by nature had a corresponding object that wasn't a phantom. Why this exception? the detective reasoned. It was nature making hunger when there wasn't any food. We continue. We go on. Thus death proved life. — William Peter Blatty

He was going on about baptism. A birth and a death and a marriage, he said. A touch of water and these children are given the whole of life. — Marilynne Robinson

There is a balance, a kind of standoff between the time continuum and the human entity, our frail bundle of soma and psyche. We eventually succumb to time, it's true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, pass it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going. Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second ... We were the only crucial clocks, our minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time. — Don DeLillo

We look to artists to feel for us, to suffer and rejoice, to describe the heights of their passionate response to life so that we can enjoy them from a safe distance. . . . We look to artists to stop time for us, to break the cycle of birth and death and temporarily put an end to life's processes. It is too much of a whelm for any one person to face up to without going into sensory overload. Artists, on the other hand, court that intensity. We ask artists to fill our lives with a cavalcade of fresh sights and insights, the way life was for us when we were children and everything was new.39 — Cameron J Anderson

Until we walk with despair, and still have hope, we will not know that our hope was not just hope in ourselves, in our own successes, in our power to make a difference, in our image of what perfection should be. We need hope from a much deeper Source. We need a hope larger than ourselves.
Until we walk with personal issues of despair, we will never uncover the Real Hope on the other side of that despair. Until we allow the crash and crush of our images, we will never discover the Real Life beyond what only seems like death. Remember, death is an imaginary loss of an imaginary self, that is going to pass anyway.
This very journey is probably the heart of what Jesus came to reveal. — Richard Rohr

I dream of a peaceful world. Music is the best means I have to work on that dream. Each time I have the opportunity to play, it is another chance to tell the truth. Life on the planet has come down to such an acute degree of ADD it is terrifying. We are constantly being bombarded from all directions with information - most of it useless that serves to bifurcate the mind. I am afraid that people are going to go from birth to death and never know they were here or why they were here. — Charles Lloyd

His first thought as he stared death in the face was that he was never going to meet his daughter. At least not on this side of the Fade. His second and final was that he couldn't believe he'd never told Blay he loved him. In all the minutes and hours and nights of his life, in all the words he'd spoken to the male over the years they'd known each other, he'd only ever pushed him away. And now it was too late. — J.R. Ward

Whatever we say and mean by life is just a journey toward death. If you can understand that your whole life is just a journey and nothing else, then you are less interested in life and more interested in death. And once someone becomes more interested in death, he can go deep into the very depths of life; otherwise, he is just going to remain on the surface. — Rajneesh

The Master gives himself up to whatever the moment brings. He knows that he is going to die, and her has nothing left to hold on to: no illusions in his mind, no resistances in his body. He doesn't think about his actions; they flow from the core of his being. He holds nothing back from life; therefore he is ready for death, as a man is ready for sleep after a good day's work. — Laozi

Au contraire, he's the person you wanted to be. One who was less arrogant, and undisciplined as a youth. One who was less like me. The Jean-Luc Picard you wanted to be, the one who did not fight the Nausicaan, had quite a different career from the one you remember. That Picard never had a brush with death, never came face to face with his own mortality, never realised how fragile life is or how important each moment must be. So his life never came into focus. He drifted for much of his career, with no plan or agenda, going from one assignment to the next, never seizing the opportunities that presented themselves. He never lead the away team on Milika Three to save the ambassador, or take charge of the Stargazer's Bridge when its Captain was killed. And no one ever offered him a command. He learned to play it safe. And he never, ever got noticed by anyone. — Q

People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought experiment. At the campfire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there.
Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a fulltime job looking the other way. — Martin Amis

This is the worst day of my life'. I groaned and put my head in my hands.
'You can't possibly know that. You might have something really awful going to happen to you later on. All your children burned to death or your nose cut off in a revolving door'. — Victoria Clayton

Then there are also the quiet deaths. How about the day you realized you weren't going to be an astronaut or the queen of Sheba? Feel the silent distance between yourself and how you felt as a child, between yourself and those feelings of wonder and splendor and trust. Feel the mature fondness for who you once were, and your current need to protect innocence wherever you make might find it. The silence that surrounds the loss of innocence is a most serious death, and yet it is necessary for the onset of maturity.

What about the day we began working not for ourselves, but rather with the hope that our kids have a better life? Or the day we realize that, on the whole, adult life is deeply repetitive? As our lives roll into the ordinary, when our ideals sputter and dissipate, as we wash the dishes after yet another meal, we are integrating death, a little part of us is dying so that another part can live. — Matthew Sanford

Those who die young, they are cheated," she said. "Not cheated out of life, because life is a penance, but the young, they're cheated because they don't know it's coming. They don't have time to move closer, to return home. When you know you're going to die, you try to be near the bones of your own people. You don't even think you have bones when you're young, even when you break them, you don't believe you have them. But when you're old, they start reminding you they're there. They start turning to dust on you, even as you're walking here and there, going from place to place. And this is when you crave to be near the bones of your own people. My children never felt this. They had to look death in the face, even before they knew what it was. Just like you did, no? — Edwidge Danticat

The tallest slugger touched my forehead, and I ignited like a sparkler on the Fourth of July. Shards of dazzling light rippled under my skin. I was the constellation Grus. The Trifid Nebula. I was the Big Bang, expanding endlessly through time and space forever.
"I thought I was dying. That I was going to expire on a cold slab, trapped inside an UFO, my body filled with every light that had ever existed. I couldn't imagine a better way to die. — Shaun David Hutchinson

Something wild was going on in that coffin ... .I was growing shoots and leaves and blossoms. Moss. Bugs. Worms. She leaned over my corpse to kiss my lips, but they were warm instead of cold, and then she realized the dead girl wasn't me at all. Who was that? Who was that dead girl squirming with life? And then she realized- That was her. Our bodies had been switched. Mine for hers. — Laura Kasischke

If I were wise, I shouldn't tell you. But I won't be wise, Harry, not for this time. I'll be just the opposite. So now mind what I say! You will hear it and forget it again. You will laugh over it, and you will weep over it. So look out! I am going to play with you for life and death, little brother, and before we begin the game I'm going to lay my cards on the table. — Hermann Hesse

I look out again at the sun-my first full gaze. It is blood-red and men are walking about on rooftops. Everything above the horizon is clear to me. It is like Easter Sunday. Death is behind me and birth too. I am going to live now among the life maladies. I am going to live the spiritual life of the pygmy, the secret life of the little man in the wilderness of the bush. Inner and outer have changed places. Equilibrium is no longer the goal-the scales must be destroyed. Let me hear you promise again all those sunny things you carry inside you. Let me try to believe for one day, while I rest in the open, that the sun brings good tidings. Let me rot in splendor while the sun bursts in your womb. I believe all your lies implicitly. I take you as the personification of evil, as the destroyer of the soul, as the maharanee of the night. Tack your womb up on my wall, so that I may remember you. We must get going. Tomorrow, tomorrow ... — Henry Miller

One life, one death. For all of us. Those are the numbers. I'm going to die and there's no avoiding it. I can go looking for it early by driving smashed out of my skull or swimming with sharks, sure, but staying with you isn't like that. It wouldn't be stupid and reckless and dumb, it wouldn't be me missing out on part of my life and skipping to the middle of the book. It'd just be me finding the guy I love early. It'd me hitting the jackpot. I'm not walking away from a piece of luck like that. I'm not walking away from you. — Jane Davitt

Hope was what kept the world going. Hope that one day you would find somebody you could love and trust, hope that you would never lose them; hope that your team won the cup this year; hope that you found that dream job; hope that you would find the money to pay the mortgage. But most of all, hope that one day - whatever you have told yourself over that years - you would find that life really does go on beyond the deathbed. — Phil Ford

I could hear and indescribable seething roar which wasn't which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realised that I had died and reborn numberless times but just didn't remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly eas, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it.
I realised it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein, like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled.
I thought I was going to die the very next moment. — Jack Kerouac

Horror grows impatient, rhetorically, with the Stoic fatalism of Ecclesiastes. That we are all going to die, that death mocks and cancels every one of our acts and attainments and every moment of our life histories, this knowledge is to storytelling what rust is to oxidation; the writer of horror holds with those who favor fire. The horror writer is not content to report on death as the universal system of human weather; he or she chases tornadoes. Horror is Stoicism with a taste for spectacle. — Michael Chabon

In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we are all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quietly now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone Else's words ... I was going to die, if not sooner then later whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. — Audre Lorde

We're actually doing something scripted that's totally, you know, we kind of know what's going on, however, we're having to live life and death as the art. — Josh Holloway

Save your world. Love it. Protect it, and respect it and don't let haters represent it.
Don't leave the saving to anyone else, ever, because, exhibit A - why, hello there - it's way too much for one person. And if you want to skip out on the responsibility train, my whole life - and death - will have been in vain.
It's yours. It's all yours for taking!
You're not going to waste it now, are you? — James Patterson

There are times when you don't belong and you think you're going to kill yourself. Once I went to a hotel. Later that night I made a plan. The plan was I would leave my family when my second child was born. And that's what I did. I got up one morning, made breakfast, went to the bus stop, got on a bus. I'd left a note. I got a job in a library in Canada. It would be wonderful to say you regretted it. It would be easy. But what does it mean? What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. There it is. No-one's going to forgive me. It was death. I chose life. -Laura Brown- — Michael Cunningham

Like students going to school, the planes on their bombing missions fly over Beijing each morning. And each time I hear their engines attack the air I feel a certain slight tension, as if I were witnessing the invasion of Death, though this heightens my consciousness of the existence of Life. — Lu Xun

Life is full of toil, sacrifice, and pain, and from the time we stop growing, we know that we've begun dying. We watch helplessly as year by year, our bodies age and fail, while our survival instincts compel us to keep on going-which means living with the terrifying knowledge that ultimately death is inescapable. — Jim Butcher

But we all die, and all death is violent, the overthrowing of the state of life, so why did that year [1968]seem so terrible? Are King or Kennedy or some peasant folk in a village more important than the starved-out of Biafra, the names on the Detroit homicide list? Maybe I'm playing an intellectual game, marking out one year or two on a calendar as special in horror so I can add that they were also special in significance, and thus compensate for the horror, or even redeem it. Humans are fond of finding ways to be grateful for their suffering, calling falls fortunate and deaths resurrection. It's not a bad idea, I guess: since you're going to have the suffering anyway, you might as well be grateful for it. Sometimes, though, I think if we didn't expect the suffering, we wouldn't have so much of it. — Marilyn French

And the whole constant mantra about how 'long-term relationships are hard work' and 'everything has its ups and downs' and 'you're going to be annoyed by their toenails' and 'stick with it' and 'the grass only looks greener' and so on. It's actually very hard to tell when you should split up with someone. All I knew was I was waking up every morning thinking this can't be it, until death. When your relationship is making you feel life's too long, something's gone awry. — Mhairi McFarlane

This hand says you spend the rest of your life with me," he said, holding out his left hand, "and this one says I spend the rest of my life with you. Choose."
She bit her lip, tears welling in her eyes. She took both of his hands in hers and he shuddered. "I will die protecting you," he says.
There was a look of dismay on her face. "Just like a man of this kingdom, Finnikin. Talking of death, yours or mine, is not a good way to begin a-"
Isaboe gave a small gasp when he leaned forward, his lips an inch away from hers. "I will die for you," he whispered.
She cupped his face in her hands. "But promise me you'll live for me first, my love. Because nothing we are about to do is going to be easy and I need you by my side. — Melina Marchetta

Um ... " Hazel faltered. "You mean you won't ... you're not going to-"
"Claim your life?" Thantos asked. "Well, let's see ... "
He pulled a pure-black iPad from thin air. Death, tapped the screen a few times, and all Frank could think was: Please don't let there be an app for reaping souls.
"I don't see you on the list," Thantos said. "Pluto gives me specific orders for escaped souls, you see. For some reason, he has not issued a warrant for yours. Perhaps he feels your life is not finished, or it could be n oversight. If you'd like me to call and ask-"
"No!" Hazel yelped. "That's okay."
"Are you sure?" Death asked helpfully. "I have video-conferencing enabled. I have his Skype address here somewhere ... — Rick Riordan

She's a-going," he says. "Her mind is set on it." It's a hard life on women, for a fact. Some women. I mind my mammy lived to be seventy or more. Worked every day, rain or shine; never a sick day since her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her and then she went and taken that lace-trimmed night-gown she had had forty-five years and never wore out of the chest and put it on and laid down on the bed and pulled the covers up and shut her eyes. "You all will have to look out for pa the best you can," she said. "I'm tired. — William Faulkner

You know better than I," he said, "that all courts-martial are farces and that you're really paying for the crimes of
other people, because this time we're going to win the war at any price. Wouldn't you have done the same in my place?"
General Moncada got up to clean his thick horn-rimmed glasses on his shirttail. "Probably," he said. "But what
worries me is not your shooting me, because after all, for people like us it's a natural death." He laid his glasses on
the bed and took off his watch and chain. "What worries me," he went on "is that out of so much and thinking about them so much, you've ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness." He took off his wedding ring and the medal of the Virgin of Help and put them alongside his glasses and watch.
"At this rate," he concluded, "you'll not only be the most despotic and bloody dictator in our history, but you'll shoot
my dear friend Ursula in an attempt to pacify your conscience. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

To tell the truth, I don't really understand the causes behind my runner's blues. Or why now it's beginning to fade. It's too early to explain it well. Maybe the only thing I can definitely say about it is this: That's life. Maybe the only thing we can do is accept it, without really knowing what's going on. Like taxes, the tide rising and falling, John Lennon's death, and miscalls by referees at the World Cup. — Haruki Murakami

If you don't start going after WHAT YOU WANT, then you will NEVER GET WHAT YOU WANT! Do you want to be on your death bed wondering, 'WHAT IF? WHAT IF I would've quit letting life pass me by and just went for it?!' JUST GO FOR IT! LIVE ALL OUT! — Shay Dawkins

In reality, we don't die, but merely change. Energy reveals and hides itself repeatedly as it flows along. The flame of life flickers on and off, again and again. How could the flame going out for a brief time signify extinction? There is no life and death separate from the infinite life energy of the cosmos. The phenomena of life energy merely change and cycle in accordance with the law of infinite energy. — Ilchi Lee

Before you were born, you were nothing more than an indistinguishable lump of unformed matter. After death, you simply will return to that nebulous state. You are going to become the raw material out of which new beings will be fashioned. Will there be pain in this natural process? No! Pleasure? No! Now, is there anything frightening in this? Certainly not! And yet, people sacrifice pleasure on earth in the hope that pain will be avoided in an after-life. The fools don't realize that, after death, pain and pleasure cannot exist: there is only the sensationless state of cosmic anonymity: therefore, the rule of life should be ... to enjoy oneself! — Marquis De Sade