Death Remembering Quotes & Sayings

Almost everything ... all external expectations ... all pride ... all fear of embarrassment or failure ... these things just fall away in the face of death ... leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking that you have something to lose. You are already naked ... there is no reason not to follow your heart. — Steve Jobs

I wiped my hands on my apron and went to the window. Outside, the prairie reached out and touched the places where the sky came down. Though the winter was nearly over, there were patches of snow and ice everywhere. I looked at the long dirt road that crawled across the plains, remembering the morning that Mama had died, cruel and sunny. They had come for her in a wagon and taken her away to be buried. And then the cousins and aunts and uncles had come and tried to fill up the house. But they couldn't. — Patricia MacLachlan

Awakened by a thousand dogs, a passing truck, the tailspin of a poisoned mosquito (or, perhaps, merely the silence of my dreams), I had, before remembering who and where I was, seen only that green sun suspended in the firmament of my room (her uterus bottled in preserving fluids) and, through seconds that became millennia, millennia aeons, felt the steadfastness of my orbit around that cold glow of love, a marvelous fatal steadfastness, before my pupils dilated and shadows and unease once more defined reality, the steel box naked but for a mattress and insomnious bugs where I had lived, in a coma of heartbreak and drunkenness, the six months since Primavera's death. — Richard Calder

The worst, most insidious effect of censorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination of the people. Where there is no debate, it is hard to go on remembering, every day, that there is a suppressed side to every argument. — Salman Rushdie

Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better. — Samuel Butler

What is longevity? It is the horror of existing in a human body whose faculties are in decline. It is insomnia measured by decades and not by metal hands. It is carrying the weight of seas and pyramids, of ancient libraries and dynasties, of the dawns that Adam saw. It is being well aware that I am bound to my flesh, to a voice I detest, to my name, to routinely remembering, to Castilian, over which I have no control, to feeling nostalgic for the Latin I do not know. It is trying to sink into death and being unable to sink into death. It is being and continuing to be. — Jorge Luis Borges

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint. — Edward Thomas

I wondered if there would ever be a day when I didn't think about Alaska, wondered whether I should hope for a time when she would be a distant memory - recalled only on the anniversary of her death, or maybe a couple of weeks after, remembering only after having forgotten. — John Green

The day that I left my home, I had prayed that my children would forget me. I wanted to spare them the pain of remembering. But that night, as I crouched in the white mist, waiting, I knew more than anything that I wanted them to remember, I wanted desperately to go on living in someone's memory. If we are not remembered, we are more than dead, for it is as if we had never lived. — Karen Maitland

Then come at once and pause for breath
In chasing wealth. Remembering death
And death's dark fires, mix, while you may,
Method and madness, work and play.
Folly is sweet, well-timed. — Horace

The easiest way to be immortal is to stop thinking and the easiest way to stop thinking is to work hard physically! Remember, when you don't think, you are immortal! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

And she wept as well for the others lost in the Dark War, and she wept for her mother and the loss she had endured, and she wept for Emma and the Blackthorns, remembering how they had fought back tears when she had told them that she had seen Mark in the tunnels of Faerie, and how he belonged to the Hunt now, and she wept for Simon and the hole in her heart where he had been, and the she would miss him every day until she died, and she wept for herself and the changes that had been wrought in her, because sometimes even change for the better felt like a little death. — Cassandra Clare

You know all my life I've hated funerals. The fuss and bother never brings anybody back. It just spoils remembering them as they really are. And when I see people actually facing it that way, I have to act like a sap. — Jules Furthman

Remembering the sound of metal clanging against wet tar sent chills up my spine. Car crashes always seemed like they couldn't happen to normal people, like me and Kona. But now I know that death can happen to anyone. — Jessica Mitchell

This is the last time I would ever visit the cemetery or my wife's grave, but I didn't want to expend too much effort in trying to remember it. As I said, this is the place where she's never been anything but dead. There's not much value in remembering that. — John Scalzi

Take me beyond the shadows of my doubts and teach me how to rely on the power of Your promises. When doubt overshadows my thoughts, help me shift my focus back to You, remembering that the mind fixed on the flesh is death, but the mind fixed on the Spirit is life and peace. — Renee Swope

But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, on the ruin of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory. — Marcel Proust

That's what pictures are for, after all: to stand in place of the things that weren't left behind, to bear witness to people and places and things that might otherwise go unnoticed. — John Darnielle

The brief story of the supper at Emmaus carries within it a number of core principles of the Christian life as Luke understands it. First, the idea that one comes to know Christ through acts of generosity to other human beings. It is because of their kindness to a stranger that the disciples find the beloved teacher whom they had lost. Second, there is the idea that they can conjure his presence in prayer and in communal acts such as the breaking of bread - by remembering his life, death, and resurrection - even in an undistinguished house in an anonymous village. The simple acts of generosity and community in daily life are the acts that make real the living presence of Jesus. — Kate Cooper

Here's how you think about it: Together you constructed many things throughout your life. Then her body disappeared, but the constructions still remain. Human beings die: That's natural. But to accept her death is to lose all hope. — Michael Paterniti

My youth was the most stubborn, peremptory part of myself. In my most relaxed moments, it governed my being. It pricked up its ears at the banter of eighteen-year-olds on the street. It frankly examined their bodies. It did not know its place: that my youth governed me with such ease didn't mean I was young. It meant I was divided as if housing a stowaway soul, rife with itches and yens which demanded a stern vigilance. I didn't live thoughtlessly in my flesh anymore. My body had not, in its flesh, fundamentally changed quite so much as it now could intuit the change that would only be dodged by an untimely death, and to know both those bodies at once, the youthful, and the old, was to me the quintessence of being middle-aged. Now I saw all my selves, even those that did not yet exist, and the task was remembering which I presented to others. — Susan Choi

And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel's: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everyting, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will. — Annie Dillard

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

Remember God's Cause While Living - Let no one think that he will meet the mind of Christ in hoarding up property through life and then at death making a bequest of a portion of it to some benevolent cause. Some selfishly retain their means during their lifetime, trusting to make up for their neglect by remembering the cause in their wills. But not half the means thus bestowed in legacies ever benefits the object specified. Brethren and sisters, invest in the bank of heaven yourselves, and do not leave your stewardship upon another. — Ellen G. White

I could ask for no better parents.'
'You miss them.' After all this time?
'Every single day out of hundreds of thousands.'
What could I say to that? Anything I came up with sounded trite. Silence fell over us.
Aric drank, lost in thought. And I knew he was remembering the night he'd killed them ... — Kresley Cole

We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other ... except through faith. — Stephen King

I wanted to preserve the feeling of remembering her just months after her death - the raw immediacy of it, so the drafts were really about getting the language right, getting the pitch right, keeping the voice austere and plainspoken. — Paul Lisicky

Thinking remembering how his uncle had said that all man had was time, all that stood between him and the death he feared and abhorred was time yet he spent half of it inventing ways of getting the other half past: — William Faulkner

Why we acknowledge birthdays after death makes no sense, but I guess it's a way to stay committed to remembering somebody. Maybe it's because, after we die, we are so easily forgotten. I wondered who would remember me. — Renee Carlino

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare. — James Baldwin

That's a nice song,' said young Sam, and Vimes remembered that he was hearing it for the first time.
It's an old soldiers' song,' he said.
Really, sarge? But it's about angels.'
Yes, thought Vimes, and it's amazing what bits those angels cause to rise up as the song progresses. It's a real soldiers' song: sentimental, with dirty bits.
As I recall, they used to sing it after battles,' he said. 'I've seen old men cry when they sing it,' he added.
Why? It sounds cheerful.'
They were remembering who they were not singing it with, thought Vimes. You'll learn. I know you will. — Terry Pratchett

I recall my life every day. I recall my sins and my acts of purity. I remind myself I was never a religious man. I remind myself that I have been dead for half of forever. I remind myself of nothing. I move along to the next minute. Next day. Next year. The earth doesn't change so much anymore. It doesn't change so quickly. With humans, the earth had to keep changing. But you can only replace a dying thing so many times before someone notices. There haven't been humans for years. Maybe a decade. Maybe more. I find myself loving their absence. The absence of humanity is the absence of violence. I love this peace. But then I remember my bones. My mind and my memories. I remember I'm human. I am the thing I detest. The creature that haunts my steps. It's my shadow I see watching me. It's my reflection in the water. I keep remembering. I live in fear. But still, I walk on. — F.K. Preston

It was one of those rare times when remembering the dead was more inmportant than tending to the needs of the living. — Dean Koontz

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.
Almost everything
all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure
these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. — Steve Jobs

Hazel shuddered, remembering her close call with Don that afternoon. If she hadn't moved quickly and snatched that diamond off the road ... She didn't want to think about it. She didn't need another death on her conscience. — Rick Riordan

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something ... almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. — Steve Jobs

I know, then, that after I die other bodies, other eyeings, will be born. But this is really the same thing as saying that after I die I will again awake as a baby - any baby, but only one - just as I did before but without remembering the previous trip. For anyone who argues that after death there will be nothingness forever is really saying that when he dies the universe will cease to be. But we know that it goes on after people die, and that because it does the eyeing it is really more my self than this particular body. — Alan W. Watts

I'm thinking of that Florida lady again, the one who wanted a book about the lighter side of a child's death, and I know: all she wanted was permission to remember her child with pleasure instead of grief. To remember that he was dead, but to remember him without pain: he's dead but of course she still loves him, and that love isn't morbid or bloodstained or unsightly, it doesn't need to be shoved away. — Elizabeth McCracken

Remembering may be a celebration or it may be a dagger in the heart, but it is better, far better, than forgetting. — Donald M. Murray

Death is somewhat easier to meet when you believe, as we do, that to end is to begin. You will learn to walk and speak again, lose your teeth (but hopefully only once), bite into apples, count stars lying on your back in the dewy grass--and you will know, again, what it is to lust and to love. It will be a different face you turn toward the sun, and that someone dear will call you by another name, but there are many other things you go on remembering even when you can no longer recall their meaning. — Camille DeAngelis

How easy it is to create ghosts, he thinks as he begins to die a minute later, feeling his mind closing chamber by chamber, the memory of Naheed contained in each one. And despite it all it means much to have been loved. Just before the world vanishes, a hope surfaces in him that this wasn't necessarily everything, that he will return somehow.
His arm rises, remembering when it used to be a wing. — Nadeem Aslam

The road is long and the end is death, he thought, remembering all the times his mother had said that. If we're lucky. — Pamela Freeman

My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap-mail-order paintbox, and our favourite hues. Thus, I remembered Grandma a few pages ago as "petite and unopinionated". My brother, when consulted, takes out his paintbrush and counterproposes "short and bossy. — Julian Barnes

There are so few people left alive from back then, you may as well be talking to them about the Black Death. Nobody recalls the shite in the 30s and that were fucking horrible. For Christ's sake, nobody wants to remember the shite in the 80s. It's all forgotten and swept under the rug by the newspapers and the BBC. They get nostalgic about the music, but they never want to mention the misery. It's all shite. As for the bloody Second World War, the politicians only talk about it when they need an excuse to go pissing about in one of those fucking Muslim countries. — Harry Leslie Smith

What I mean to say is, we had been considerable. Had been loved. Not lonely, not lost, not freakish, but wise, each in his or her own way. Our departures caused pain. Those who had loved us sat upon their beds, heads in hand; lowered their faces to tabletops, making animal noises. We had been loved, I say, and remembering us, even many years later, people would smile, briefly gladdened at the memory. — George Saunders

In twenty years you could say and do a lot you wish you hadn't. In twenty years you could store up a lot of regrets. And then, when it was too late, when there was no one left to say "I'm sorry" to, "I didn't mean it" to, you could stop sleeping for regret, stop eating, talking, working, for regret. You could stop wanting to live. You could want to die for regret.
It was only remembering the good times that kept you from taking the knife from the kitchen drawer and, holding it so, tightly in your fist, on the bed, naked to no purpose except that that was how you came into the world and how your best moments in the world had been spent
holding it so, roll onto the blade, slowly so that it slid like love between your ribs and into that stupidly pumping muscle in your chest that kept you regretting. — Joseph Hansen

When my husband died, people kept telling me not to cry. People kept trying to help me to forget. But I didn't want to forget ... So I realize, that if it's hard for me, how much harder it must be for you. — Katherine Paterson

We gonna be a family again in Heaven. It takes some strong patience, but the Lord will come through. And as long as we here, we can get on living by never forgetting. Never forgetting and always remembering. — Andrew Galasetti

What folly made young people, even those in middle age, think they were immortal? How much better, their lives, if they could remember the end. Carrying your death with you every day would make it hard to waste time on unkindness and anger and bitterness, on anything petty. That was the secret: remembering your dying time, in order to keep the stupid and the ugly out of your living time. — Rohinton Mistry

Not knowing trauma or experiencing or remembering it in a dissociative way is not a passive shutdown of perception or of memory. Not knowing is rather an active, persistent, violent refusal; an erasure, a destruction of form and of representation. The fundamental essence of the death instinct, the instinct that destroys all psychic structure is apparent in this phenomenon. . . . The death drive is against knowing and against the developing of knowledge and elaborating [it]. — Dori Laub

even in death, his last breath was poetry
existing in the wind
and on the breeze of
"it used to be likes"
forever remembering,
yet never reliving
his life
will never be what it used to be like. — N'Zuri Za Austin

The truth of living is proved not by the inevitability of death but by the wonder that we lived at all. Remembering lives from the past ratifies that truth, more and more so the older we get. When I was growing up, my father told me once, "Do by look for happiness; life itself is happiness." It took me years to understand what he meant. The value of a life lived; the sheer value of living. — Nina Sankovitch

It felt like the times were good, like we were remembering a time before Rachel died, even though things were never this good then, because they were just normal, and ordinary is never the kind if good you remember. — Zoe Whittall

Just say it, she thought. Say what everyone in this bunker is thinking. Say what we all know to be true. The truth that we are all going to die down here, and death is the end. Nobody wakes up to a heaven or paradise. Your life will be gone. You will be gone. Forever. Uncover the truth. Tear off the bandages of delusion. Open your hearts and minds to the real world. We were doomed the day we were born. We lived and we will die and the only immortals are the people who did something worth remembering while they lived. My genetics are prime. I am pleasing to the eyes of man and machine. A dripping fountain of pleasure. Their organic sanctuary. And in time? Aging. Fading. Graying. What am I? Who am I? What makes me human? Emotions? My conscience? The soul is an old testament myth. No one shall ascend anywhere except into annihilation. The dust of earth and stars are the only eternals, she said. — C.J. Anderson

This is me being sad.
Maybe you think I'm being happy in this picture. Really I'm being sad but pretending I'm being happy. I'm doing that because I think people won't like me if I look sad. — Michael Rosen

The only way anyone can hope to live after death is if he leaves something that posterity can remember him for. — Bangambiki Habyarimana

And I'll look back at him because I shan't be able to help it, remembering about being young, and about being made love to and making love, about pain and dancing and not being afraid of death, about all music I've ever loved, and every time I've been happy. — Jean Rhys

I'm tired of everyone looking at me with pity in their eyes. I'm tired of feeling like my heart is being ripped out of my chest every damned day. I'm tired of waking up in the morning, and then remembering ... — A.B. Shepherd

I am lying in the same bed where my mother died so long ago; on the same mattress,
beneath the same black wool coverlet she wrapped us in to sleep. I slept beside her, her
little girl, in the special place she made for me in her arms.
I think I can still feel the calm rhythm of her breathing; the palpitations and sighs that
soothed my sleep ... I think I feel the pain of her death ... But that isn't true.
Here I lie, flat on my back, hoping to forget my loneliness by remembering those times.
Because I am not here just for a while. And I am not in my mother's bed but in a black box
like the ones for burying the dead. Because I am dead.
I sense where I am, but I can think ... — Juan Rulfo

It seems that the people who come into our lives and stay for the briefest amount of time have the greatest impact upon us. Time may change some things, but not all things. Each day brings me closer to him, and the age in which he passed from this world into the next, but I still fight the urge, on rare occasions, to pick up the phone and dial his number, which I still remember. It's decades later, but that last meal we shared, laughing and smiling at each other from across the table, lost in harmony, seems but yesterday. Then there was the last lingering look and the final wave goodbye. — Donna Lynn Hope

Anyone who can be proved to be a seditious person is an outlaw before God and the emperor; and whoever is the first to put him to death does right and well. Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel. — Martin Luther

If we knew a person was going to die, we'd hold harder to the memories."
Fire corrected him, in a whisper. "The good memories. — Kristin Cashore

There's a part of grief that's unexpected. After the days when you think you'll never be able to get out of bed again and after walking about feeling like your insides are hollow and your skin is made of paper, you start remembering. You remember not the death and seeing the one you love in a hospital bed with tubes. You remember what he was like before all of that, when he was well and you were whole. It's that remembering that catches up with you and then you know the person you lost isn't lost after all, but has become part of you and you're the better for it. — Shelly King

While Celia was gone he walked up and down remembering what he had originally felt about Dorothea's engagement, and feeling a revival of his disgust at Mr. Brooke's indifference. If Cadwallader-- if every one else had regarded the affair as he, Sir James, had done, the marriage might have been hindered. It was wicked to let a young girl blindly decide her fate in that way, without any effort to save her. Sir James had long ceased to have any regrets on his own account: his heart was satisfied with his engagement to Celia. But he had a chivalrous nature (was not the disinterested service of woman among the ideal glories of old chivalry?): his disregarded love had not turned to bitterness; its death had made sweet odors-- floating memories that clung with a consecrating effect to Dorothea. He could remain her brotherly friend, interpreting her actions with generous trustfulness. — George Eliot

Letty allowed her to ramble on while she looked around the wood, remembering its autumn carpet of beech leaves and wondering if it could be the kind of place to lie down in and prepare for death when life became too much to be endured. — Barbara Pym

Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, because only extroverts cry twice; I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her. — John Fowles

Remembering is the only way to defeat the death. — David Albahari

The idea of enemies is awful it makes one stop remembering eternity and the fear of death. That is what enemies are. Possessions are the same as enemies only less so, they too make one
forget eternity and the fear of death. — Gertrude Stein

Not the slow Hearse, where nod the sable plumes,
The Parian Statue, bending o'er the Urn,
The dark robe floating, the dejection worn
On the dropt eye, and lip no smile illumes;
Not all this pomp of sorrow, that presumes
It pays Affection's debt, is due concern
To the FOR EVER ABSENT, tho' it mourn
Fashion's allotted time. If Time consumes,
While Life is ours, the precious vestal-flame
Memory shou'd hourly feed; - if, thro' each day,
She with whate'er we see, hear, think, or say,
Blend not the image of the vanish'd Frame,
O! can the alien Heart expect to prove,
In worlds of light and life, a reunited love! — Anna Seward

There were umpires everywhere, men who said who was winning or losing the theoretical battle, who was alive adn who was dead.
The umpire had comical news. The congregation had been theoretically spotted from the air by a theoretical enemy. They were all theoretically dead now. The theoretical corpses laughed and ate a hearty noontime meal.
Remembering this incident years later, Billy was struck by what a Tralfamadorian adventure with death that had been, to be dead and to eat at the same time. — Kurt Vonnegut