Death But Moving Quotes & Sayings

He has only as much ground as his two feet take up, only as much of a hold as his two hands encompass - someone who falls asleep in the winter snow to freeze to death like a child, someone who does nothing but takes walks, yet who could take them anywhere, without moving. — Franz Kafka

Rage - Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls, great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion, feasts for the dogs and birds, and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end. Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed, Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles. — Homer

Demons never die quietly, and a week ago the storm was a proper demon, sweeping through the Caribbean after her long ocean crossing from Africa, a category five when she finally came ashore at San Juan before moving on to Santo Domingo and then Cuba and Florida. But now she's grown very old, as her kind measures age, and these are her death throes. So she holds tightly to this night, hanging on with the desperate fury of any dying thing, any dying thing that might once have thought itself invincible. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Why should I be frightened of dying? I did not know what death truly was; no one did. Who had made dying a bad word? Yes, it was universally considered awful - unwanted, painful, feared - because when it happened it stopped us from moving and being, and we interpreted that as if something had ended. But what if it were actually a beautiful experience? What if, with death, something actually began instead? — Charles Novacek

We can what if ourselves to death, but it won't do anything. The only thing we can do is keep moving even when it feels like you're walking through a pit of cement. — Chelsea M. Cameron

You'll understand what life is if you think about the act of dying. When I die, how will I be different from the way I am right now? In the first moments after death, my body will be scarcely different in physical terms than it was in the last seconds of life, but I will no longer move, no longer sense, nor speak, nor feel, nor care. It's these things that are life. At that moment, the psyche takes flight in the last breath. — Aristotle.

They remain shadows. Two sepia shadows on an old snapshot, two barely moving shadows in my head, shadows whose few
remaining words and acts I have invented. Perhaps I only want their forgiveness for having forgotten them. I remember their deaths, but not their lives. Yet they're inside me, flowing unknown in my blood and moving unrecognized in my skull. — Margaret Laurence

You thought you had the choice to stay still or move forward, but your didn't. As long as your heart kept pumping an your blood kept blowing and your lungs kept filling, you didn't. The pang she felt for Tibby carried something like envy. You couldn't stand still for anything short of death, and God knew she had tried. — Ann Brashares

He was past the jitters about her age, her uncle. He was moving on this. And when it was over, he was going to be shot, he was pretty sure. But he was into her; she had him. He hoped his death would be quick and painless. — Robyn Carr

Three years ago, I had thought I lost my whole world, but it all actuality I was saved. Saved from death and a life full of lies. Three years ago fate stepped in. — Erika Taylor

Death Cab is a militantly analog band. We'll continue moving forward with our sound, but there will be no crossover. — Ben Gibbard

After The Bomb we developed a fairly good system for moving food around and have avoided the kind of massive famines that attract the media. Although of course we've had a fair number of them, particularly in Africa, since The Bomb was written. But we have had a steady level of attrition of malnutrition and malnutrition-related disease. Probably something on the order of 5 to 10 million people starve to death each year, but they're spread out; they're not dramatic news events. — Paul R. Ehrlich

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

Well, this is the hardest part to believe; look, you can suspend me if you want to, but it's the God's honest truth. This man Tompkins came all the way down to where I was bending over the body at the foot of the stairs. I straightened up and covered him with my gun. It didn't faze him in the least, he kept moving right on past me toward the street-door. Not quickly, either; as slowly as if he was just going out for a walk. He said, 'It isn't my time yet. You can't do anything to me with that.' ("Speak To Me Of Death") — Cornell Woolrich

We're so old that the winds of age echo along our ribs and pick at our eye sockets. We could be gone tomorrow. A chill, say, or a little slip on the cliff side. I feel as fragile as a dried flower. I rattle a little in the moving air, but I'm only coherent dust-a shape of what once was. My essence is going. — Sheri S. Tepper

Being an adult, it seemed, was horrible. But being a child was awful too, and moving from one state to the other only meant you were moving closer to death, with so much and so little to talk about all at the same time, and how was that even possible? — Alison Espach

I woke up one morning, and I couldn't move my arm. It was the oddest thing, the paralysis. I called up a friend and said, "I think I've had a stroke," and, in fact, that's what my doctor told me. It wasn't terrible, but it was enough to scare me. Now I think about death all the time. I have my death arm, my right arm. — Doris Lessing

My characters who come back from death are worse for wear. In some ways, they're not even the same characters anymore. The body may be moving, but some aspect of the spirit is changed or transformed, and they've lost something. — George R R Martin

When a child dies, a parent loses a part of themselves," he said. "Your whole world ceases to exist and you're nothing but a shell of the person you once were. Your mom has dealt with it in her way, me in mine, and you in yours." He lifted his hand off John's gravestone and rose. "Your mom hates the world, I avoid it, and you try to save it. — Nicole Williams

His life had been tied to the past. He'd seen himself a point on a moving wavefront, propagating through sterile history - a known past, a projectable future. But she was the breaking of the wave. Suddenly there was a beach, the unpredictable ... new life. Past and future stopped at the beach: that was how he'd set it out. But he wanted to believe it too, the same way he loved her, past all words - believe that no matter how bad the time, nothing was fixed, everything could be changed and she could always deny the dark sea at his back, love it away. And (selfishly) that from a somber youth, squarely founded on Death - along for Death's ride - he might, with her, find his way to life and to joy. — Thomas Pynchon

Destroy everything. That's all well and fine, but you got to offer something in it's place. Since I always have a point and purpose to what I do, thats why people accuse me of being calculated. it's the way I am. I always know my next move. I could never conjure up a death wish, this is all I have is life. I don't know what comes next, and frankly I'm in no rush to find out. I don't believe in playing a martyr just for the sheer hell of it. And for something as chidish as Rock 'N' Roll is not on. — John Lydon

I know now what was happening to me, what was overwhelming me, what was about to consume and almost destroy me. Didier had even given me a name for it - assassin grief, he'd once called it: the kind of grief that lies in wait and attacks you from ambush, with no warning and no mercy. I know now that assassin grief can hide for years and then strike suddenly on the happiest day, without discernible reason or exegesis. But on that day, ... almost a year after Khader's death, I couldn't understand the dark and trembling mood that was moving in me, swelling to the sorrow I'd too long denied. I couldn't understand it, so i tried to fight it as a man fights pain or despair. But you can't bite down on assassin grief and will it away. The enemy stalks you, step for step, and knows your every move before you make it. The enemy is your own grieving heart and, when it strikes, it can't miss. — Gregory David Roberts

You said you see patterns," Lexi said. "What did you mean by that?"
"The day my mother died, I felt the wind on my face and I looked up at the clouds. I could see this amazing pattern forming, always moving, but immediately I knew something was very wrong. It was there, right in front of me. Who sees forecasts of danger or death in clouds?" Airiana pressed her fingers to her eyes. She had the beginnings of a wicked headache.
"You do, obviously," Lissa said.

-Lexi, Airiana, & Lissa — Christine Feehan

Women in particular seem to say things like, "I'm sure I'd be the one screaming and not moving in an emergency." I don't think that's the case. People who've been through really horrible life-or-death situations say that nobody behaves the way they would have expected. But that said, there are predictors. — Amanda Ripley

If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death Perhaps the world can teach us as when everything seems dead but later proves to be alive. — Pablo Neruda

Then Almitra spoke again and said, and what of Marriage master? And he answered saying: You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore. You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days. Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God. But let there be spaces in your togetherness, and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another, but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone. — Kahlil Gibran

But any picture could deal with the problem of light. The problem with this picture is greater than that of reflective surfaces - it's one of death. You invite a profound theme into your work when you choose cut flowers. You are talking about mortality and time moving forward. You are saying that everything, everything we see and experience and love happens uniquely and happens only once. When you take a picture of a flower in a glass you are, paradoxically, capturing evanescence. You are also showing the indifference of Nature. There is no mourning in a flower photograph, only a shrugging of the shoulders. — Whitney Otto

...why can't I stop all the moving and look out over the vast arrangements and find by the contours and colors and qualities of light where my father is, not to solve anything but just simply even to see it again one last time, before what, before it ends, before it stops. But it doesn't stop; it simply ends. It is a final pattern scattered without so much as a pause at the end, at the end of what, at the end of this. — P. Harding

I dream dark dreams.
I dream of a figure moving through the forest, of children flying from his path, of young women crying at his coming. I dream of snow and ice, of bare branches and moon-cast shadows. I dream of dancers floating in the air, stepping lightly even in death, and my own pain is but a faint echo of their suffering as I run. My blood is black on the snow, and the edges of the world are silvered with moonlight. I run into the darkness, and he is waiting.
I dream in black and white, and I dream of him.
I dream of Caleb, who does not exist, and I am afraid. — John Connolly

If you're thinking of calling on that Mrs. Pentstemmon, you can save yourself the trouble. The old biddy's dead."
"Dead?" said Sophie. She had a silly impulse to add, But she was alive an hour ago! And she stopped herself, because death is like that: people are alive until they die. — Diana Wynne Jones

I frowned as my fingers throbbed. "Wait a sec. There's a chance I can't work with fire and you let me do that?""How else am I going to figure out your limitations?"
"What the hell!" I pulled my hand free, furious. "That's not cool, Blake. What's next? Trying to stop a moving vehicle by standing in front of it, but whoops, I can't do that and now I'm dead? — Jennifer L. Armentrout

This was the way we loved, until the night became a silent day. And as I lay there with her I could see how important physical love was, how necessary it was for us to be in each other's arms, giving and taking. The universe was exploding, each particle away from the next, hurtling us into dark and lonely space, eternally tearing us away from each other - child out of the womb, friend away from friend, moving from each other, each through his own pathway toward the goal-box of solitary death.
But this was the counterweight, the act of binding and holding. As when men to keep from being swept overboard in the storm clutch at each other's hands to resist being torn apart, so our bodies fused a link in the human chain that kept us from being swept into nothing. — Daniel Keyes

Rarely, I discovered, does a minister have the opportunity to get as close to his congregation as can a chaplain to men at war. Seemingly unimportant problems, which in normal life would never even come to the clergyman's attention, can seriously affect the soldiers' morale. For men whose every living moment is a preparation for battle, a preparation perhaps for death, the chaplain can become a link to family and home. But the chaplain cannot become that important link to family and home by moving among the men with folded hands and bowed head quoting Scriptures at the drop of a hat. He must share with the men their day-today experiences and enter into them fully. Before he can gain the soldiers' confidence in him as a chaplain, he must gain their confidence and respect in him as a man. Visiting the men in their quarters below deck became one of my regular duties. Down below in the hold of the ship was my 'pastorate,' and almost daily I spent as much time there as possible. — Chaplain William C. Taggart

For God is not gracious and merciful to sinners to the end that they might not keep his Law, nor that they should remain as they were before they received grace and mercy; but he condones and forgives both sin and death for the sake of Christ, who has fulfilled the whole Law in order thereby to make the heart sweet and through the Holy Spirit to kindle and move the heart to begin to love from day to day more and more. — Martin Luther

I think that's Miss Victorine now with your breakfast. Are you hungry?"
"Do you expect me to sit here like a bloody fool and eat a meal?"
"You'll always be a bloody fool, there's nothing to be done about that, and I don't care if you starve to death." Moving to the bottom of the stairway, she took the tray from Miss Victorine's hand. "But right now you have to maintain a modicum of health or we won't get our money. — Christina Dodd

It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,
My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water.
I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air. — Theodore Roethke

Let us begin with some of the earliest discoveries and correct hypotheses. Anaximander thought that the earth floats freely, and is not supported on anything. Aristotle,2 who often rejected the best hypotheses of his time, objected to the theory of Anaximander, that the earth, being at the centre, remained immovable because there was no reason for moving in one direction rather than another. If this were valid, he said, a man placed at the centre of a circle with food at various points of the circumference would starve to death for lack of reason to choose one portion of food rather than another. This argument reappears in scholastic philosophy, not in connection with astronomy, but with free will. It reappears in the form of 'Buridan's ass', which was unable to choose between two bundles of hay placed at equal distances to right and left, and therefore died of hunger. — Anonymous

To think to keep things as they are, is to let them move unpredictably, since nothing but death will still the beat of the heart or keep the universe from its perpetual motion. — Freya Stark

Death pulls people from our spaces so often and we accept it as our final payment for having been here and having lived, however big or small. We don't always have time to notice how things have changed in the absence of some of them. But then death pulls away someone we love, and we find that time. In here, we notice everything; growing grass and fingernails, and songs that end in a minor key. We are too sad to do anything else but watch a clock, applying seconds, minutes, and hours to the trauma and the lacerations. Time, the forever healer, they say. We find the time to wonder how everyone else is moving on, around our paralyzed selves. Ourselves unsure of roads and trees and birds and things. It all blurs and words aren't words anymore. We find the time to attempt to figure a way to rethink everything we thought about this world and why we came to it. — Darnell Lamont Walker

The person who hurt you
who raped you or killed your family
is also here. If you are still angry at that person, if you haven't been able to forgive, you are chained to him. Everyone could feel the emotional truth of that: When someone offends you and you haven't let go, every time you see him, you grow breathless or your heart skips a beat. If the trauma was really severe, you dream of revenge. Above you, is the Mountain of Peace and Prosperity where we all want to go. But when you try to climb that hill, the person you haven't forgiven weighs you down. It's a personal choice whether or not to let go. No one can tell you how long to mourn a death or rage over a rape. But you can't move forward until you break that chain. — Leymah Gbowee

Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out,
swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing ...
And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes.
And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still
red, his eyes not yet extinguished.
Behind me, I heard the same man asking:
"For God's sake, where is God?"
And from within me, I heard a voice answer:
"Where He is? This is where
hanging here from this gallows ... "
That night, the soup tasted of corpses. — Elie Wiesel

To come to peace with the moving on. It is a gift, in a way. We spend so much of our time fighting death, as we should. But sometimes the greatest gift we can give ourselves, and in turn the ones we love, is to know when to let go. To know when it is time - and to be at peace with that. — Daisy Whitney

Together the magicks swirled and danced around us, invisible but tangible, like an breeze. This wasn't defensive or offensive magic. It wasn't used to gather information, for strategy or diplomacy, or to fight a war against supernatural enemy.
It simply was.
It was fundamental, inexorable. It was nothing and everything, infinity and oblivion, from the magnificent furnace of a star to the electrons that hummed in an atom. It was life and death and everything in between, the urge to fight and grow and swim and fly. It was a cascade of water across boulders, the slow-moving advance of mountain glaciers, the march of time. — Chloe Neill

It's not a pleasant place to be lying while the world is moving and doing and bettering... but it rather seems as though we ought to go back to the place we came from in the end. — Willa Cather

It feels like I'm stuck in one spot. It's been this way for a long time. I know you understand, but now you're moving on without me. And I - I'm not ready to be alone. — Brent Jones

Once you kill all of us, and you're alone, you'll die! The hate will die. That hate is what moves you, nothing else! That envy moves you. Nothing else! You'll die, inevitably. You're not immortal. You're not even alive, you're nothing but moving hate. — Ray Bradbury

I'd seen him fight before, but it never got old. He was captivating. He never stopped moving. Every action was graceful and lethal. He was a dancer of death. — Richelle Mead

I have much more power and protection than Salman Rushdie, because I'm an American citizen, but yes, I live in terrible fear for my life and for the lives of my children. My whole family has been threatened, my adoptive parents had to sell their house and move out of Washington, D.C. because of death threats caused by my work and activism. — Kola Boof

In my teens I saw the world in only black and white. Now I know that most things exist in a certain gray area. Though it took a while to get here, I now call this gray area home. I once believed that participating in a capitalist economy would be the death of me, but now realize that agonizing over the political implications of every move I make isn't exactly living. — Sophia Amoruso

Our life is a constant journey, from birth to death. The landscape changes, the people change, our needs change, but the train keeps moving. Life is the train, not the station. — Paulo Coelho

Listen in close, Wall Street Conquistadors, you're spreading like vapor up through people's floors, you're moving en masse under the cracks of our doors and grabbing our children to work in your stores, feeding the needy to make them your whores, but you need to remember the grave you're digging is yours. — Trevor D. Richardson

Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes already scattered; as a broken link, a biological dead end, an eternal withdrawal from reality, a once complex object that now dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a l like a fallen speck of soot on a blank sheet of paper. — John Fowles

The three men walked on and were met by ever more new saints. The saints were not exactly moving or even speaking, but the silence and immobility of the dead were not absolute. There was, under the ground, a motion that was not completely usual, and a particular sort of voices rang out without disturbing the sternness and repose. The saints spoke using words from psalms and lines from the lives of saints that Arseny remembered well from childhood. When they drew the candles closer, shadows shifted along dried faces and brown, half-bent hands. The saints seemed to raise their heads, smile, and beckon, barely perceptibly, with their hands. A city of saints, whispered Ambrogio, following the play of the shadow. They present us the illusion of life. No, objected Arseny, also in a whisper. They disprove the illusion of death. — Evgenij Vodolazkin

The Buddhist concept is that it takes 48 days to get near this state [of death]. So it's a slow process, moving into, not a permanent death, but the world of the dead. — Hiroshi Sugimoto

I am beginning to understand that the stream the scientists are studying is not just a little creek. It's a river of energy that moves across regions in great geographic cycles. Here, life and death are only different points on a continuum. The stream flows in a circle through time and space, turning death into life across coastal ecosystems, as it has for more than a million years. But such streams no longer flow in the places where most of us live. — Kathleen Moore

It didn't help that Oscar showed up in my dreams constantly ... I kept telling him to get actual, that he'd died, and he'd say, No no, honey, you got it all wrong. Oh, man, look at my hand. And I'd look at his hand that he held out, and I'd grab it, reaching out in dreamtime, doubting him, and it was there all right, but the touch of it, the tight tough skin exactly like Oscar's, would startle me with terror and love, and I'd wake up by myself in my apartment in the dark like a flashlight you've just switched on, with the traffic moving on the street outside the window and the headlights lighting the ceiling, and this big broken hole in me that Oscar had left behind, by dying. — Charles Baxter

The Cat
The cat licks its paw and lies down in the bookshelf nook. She can lie in a sphinx position without moving for so many hours and then turn her head to me and rise and stretch and turn her back to me and lick her paw again as if no time had passed. It hasn't and she is the sphinx with all the time in the world in the desert of her time the cat knows where flies die wees ghosts in the motes of air and shadows in sunbeams. She hears the music of the spheres and the hum in the wires of houses and the hum of the universe in interstellar spaces but prefers domestic places and the hum of the heater. — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Surely if living creatures saw the results of all their evil deeds, they would turn away from them in disgust. But selfhood blinds them, and they cling to their obnoxious desires. They crave pleasure for themselves and they cause pain to others; when death destroys their individuality, they find no peace; their thirst for existence abides and their selfhood reappears in new births. Thus they continue to move in the coil and can find no escape from the hell of their own making. — Gautama Buddha

I am fundamentally an optimist. Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say. Part of being optimistic is keeping one's head pointed toward the sun, one's feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death. — Nelson Mandela

Don't expect me to be sane anymore. Don't let's be sensible. It was a marriage at Louveciennes - you can't dispute it. I came away with pieces of you sticking to me; I am walking about, swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous ... I can't see how I can go on living away from you - these intermissions are death. How did it seem to you when Hugo came back? Was I still there? I can't picture you moving about with him as you did with me. Legs closed. Frailty. Sweet, treacherous acquiescence. Bird docility. You became a woman with me. I was almost terrified by it. You are not just thirty years old - you are a thousand years old.
Here I am back and still smouldering with passion, like wine smoking. Not a passion any longer for flesh, but a complete hunger for you, a devouring hunger. — Henry Miller

Ageing's a difficult thing, moving closer to death, but it's okay. I've had a good time living, so I'm gonna have a good time dying. — Nick Nolte

I look down past the stars to a terrifying darkness. I seem to recognize the place, but it's impossible. "Accident," I whisper. I will fall. I seem to desire the fall, and though I fight it with all my will I know in advance I can't win. Standing baffled, quaking with fear, three feet from the edge of a nightmare cliff, I find myself, incredibly, moving towards it. I look down, down, into bottomless blackness, feeling the dark power moving in me like an ocean current, some monster inside me, deep sea wonder, dread night monarch astir in his cave, moving me slowly to my voluntary tumble into death. — John Gardner

Things repeat themselves: people, life, death. But here God is the cameraman's boss, Thomas Alva Edison, he who has done the old biblical Lord one better: made sound that outlasts the life of the voice, light that knows no darkness, and now has made people who do not die, whose images shall remain forever on the earth in celluloid. And, from that which he has created, the light and the phonograph and the moving pictures and so much else, he has made what any true God must make here in America. Money. Piles of the stuff" (343-44). — Jonathan Lowy

The greatest mystery in life is not life itself, but death. Death is the culmination of life, the ultimate blossoming of life. In death the whole life is summed up, in death you arrive. Life is a pilgrimage towards death. From the very beginning, death is coming. From the moment of birth, death has started coming towards you, you have started moving towards death. — Rajneesh

We lost not only through death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on. And our losses include not only our separations and departures from those we love, but our conscious and unconscious losses of romantic dreams, impossible expectations, illusions of freedom and power, illusions of safety
and the loss of our own younger self, the self that thought it would always be unwrinkled and invulnerable and immortal. — Judith Viorst

For we lose not only by death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on. — Judith Viorst