Quotes & Sayings About Denial Of Death

Whatever the "Christian conservatives" in America say, there is no one set of rightful opinions that follow on automatically from your belief. If you have signed up for the redeeming love of God, you don't - you really don't - have to sign up too for low taxes, creationism, gun ownership, the death penalty, closing abortion clinics, climate change denial and grotesque economic inequality. You are entirely at liberty to believe that the kingdom would be better served by social justice, redistributive taxation, feminism, gay rights and excellent public transportation. You won't have the authoritative sanction of the gospel for believing in those things either, of course. But you can. — Francis Spufford

We increasingly live in societies based on the vocabulary of 'choice' and a denial of reality - a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, and a growing machinery of social and civil death. — Henry Giroux

Our manic accumulation of wealth,' Kuru Qan went on. 'Our headlong progress, as if motion was purpose and purpose inherently virtuous. Our lack of compassion, which we called being realistic. The extremity of our judgements, our self-righteousness - all a flight from death, Brys. All a vast denial smothered in semantics and euphemisms. Bravery and sacrifice, pathos and failure, as if life is a contest to be won or lost. As if death is the arbiter of meaning, the moment of final judgement, and above all else judgement is a thing to be delivered, not delivered unto. — Steven Erikson

Great dreams may not necessarily come to pass greatly at a twinkle of an eye. The best dream which survive greatly in reality takes great roots first before it grows in reality to bear great fruits. Delay is not death! Carefully and patiently nurture your dreams and make them happen distinctively in reality — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Radical self-denial gives the feel of adventure. If we forsake all, we even have the chance of glorious martyrdom. But in service, we must experience the many little death of going beyond ourselves. Service banishes us to the mundane, the ordinary, the trivial — Richard J. Foster

With actors, all our ages are out there for all to see - you can't hide anything, really. And it's kind of a relief. This is my age, this is what I look like without makeup on - who cares? That youth culture - that lying about your age - it's all denial of death anyway. — Julianne Moore

The woe of mortality makes humans God-like. It is because we know that we must die that we are so busy making life. It is because we are aware of mortality that we preserve the past and create the future. Mortality is ours without asking
but immortality is something we must build ourselves. Immortality is not a mere absence of death; it is defiance and denial of death. It is 'meaningful' only because there is death, that implacable reality which is to be defied. — Zygmunt Bauman

There is no doubt that the United States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad ... To produce this horrible confection at home, start with our genocidal treatment of the Native Americans, add a couple hundred years of slavery, along with our denial of entry to Jewish refugees fleeing the death camps of the Third Reich, stir in our collusion with a long list of modern despots and our subsequent disregard for their appalling human rights records, add our bombing of Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers to taste, and then top with our recent refusals to sign the Kyoto protocol for greenhouse emissions, to support any ban on land mines, and to submit ourselves to the rulings of the International Criminal Court. The result should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone. — Sam Harris

Those in the System, would like us to share their belief that all the changes [we are witnessing] are not connected: they are simply anomalies, isolated symptoms to be treated or preferably ignored, before the all-powerful Western capitalist patriarchal model goes on to ever greater heights and grander ejaculations. Most are numb to it, caught in fear, denial or resistance.

But we, Burning Woman, know this process intimately. Amongst Burning Women and Men, there is a fierce, quiet knowing that these are both the death pangs of the old, and the birthing pangs of the new. — Lucy H. Pearce

An artistic image is one that ensures its own development, its historical viability. An image is a grain, a self-evolving retroactive organism. It is a symbol of actual life, as opposed to life itself. Life contains death. An image of life, by contrast, excludes it, or else sees in it a unique potential for the affirmation of life.
Whatever it expresses - even destruction and ruin - the artistic image is by definition an embodiment of hope, it is inspired by faith.
Artistic creation is by definition a denial of death. Therefore it is
optimistic, even if in an ultimate sense the artist is tragic.
And so there can never be optimistic artists and pessimistic artists. There can only be talent and mediocrity. — Andrei Tarkovsky

Is war perhaps nothing else but a need to face death, to conquer and master it, to come out of it alive
a peculiar form of denial of our mortality? — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Lots of people there seemed to be in denial, in absolute denial, of death - everybody's pretending that death doesn't happen in L.A.; if you do enough exercise and take enough wheatgrass and have your pill every day, you might not die. — Emily Mortimer

We desire that God would give us the death-stroke; but we long to die without pain; we would die to our own will by the power of the will itself; we want to lose all and still hold all. Ah! what agony, what distress, when God has brought us to the end of our strength! We faint like a patient under a painful surgical operation. But the comparison is nought, for the object of the surgeon is to give us life
that of God to make us die. — Francois Fenelon

What you accomplish in life is limited only by your imagination and the fear of reprisal. Life is too fleeting and unrewarding to have to live with the added anus of indignity. The denial of one's inevitable demise is what causes most of the astringent blandness in the world. When your existence ends most certainly in death, there is no such thing as 'going too far'. There are no 'lines' you should fear to cross except the finish line. Playing it safe is the most dangerous thing you could do. — Jim Goad

Mappo frowned. 'I have not heard that phrase before. Lost Elementals?'
'Scholars tend to acknowledge but four, generally: water, fire, earth and air; yet others exist. ( ... ) Life, death, dark, light, shadow ... possibly, but even that seems a truncated selection. What of, for example, time? Past, present, future? What of desire, and deed? Sound, silence? Or are the latter two but minor aspects of air? Does time belong to light? Or is it but a point somewhere between light and dark, yet distinct from shadow? What of faith and denial? Can you now understand, Mappo, the potential complexity of relationships?'
'Assuming they exist at all, beyond the notion of concepts.'
'Granted. Yet, maybe concepts are all that's needed, if the purpose of the elements is to give shape and meaning to all that surrounds us on the outside, and all that guides us from within. — Steven Erikson

Suicide is an attack on society
an attack on its omnipotence, on its denial of death, and on its own despair. — Robert E. Neale

the evangelists have also explained how this "forgiveness of sins," this "return from exile," comes about. It comes about because the one will stand in for the many. It comes about because Jesus dies, innocently, bearing the punishment that he himself had marked out for his fellow Jews as a whole. It comes about because from the beginning Jesus was redefining the nature of the kingdom with regard to radical self-giving and self-denial, and it looks as though that was never simply an ethical demand but, at its heart, a personal vocation. It comes about because throughout his public career Jesus was redefining power itself, and his violent death was the ultimate demonstration-in-practice of that redefinition. These — N. T. Wright

If the denial of death is self-hatred, as it is to deny our freedom and live in fear of death (which is to say, to live in a form of bondage), then the acceptance and affirmation of death is indeed a form of self-love. But I'd want to make a distinction between a form of self-love which is essential to what it means to be human, and a narcissism of self-regard, like Rousseau's distinction between amour de soi and amour propre, self-love and pride. — Simon Critchley

What do you see to the south?" Tanis asked abruptly.
Raistilin glanced at him. "What do I ever see with these eyes of mine Half-Elf?" the mage whispered bitterly. "I see death, death and destruction. I see war." He gestured up above. "The constellations have not returned. The Queen of Darkness is not defeated."
"We may have not won the war," Tanis began, "but surely we have won a major battle
"
Raistlin coughed and shook his head sadly.
"Do you see no hope?"
"Hope is the denial of reality. It is the carrot dangled before the draft horse to keep him plodding along in the vain attempt to reach it."
"Are you saying we should just give up?" Tanis asked, irritably tossing the bark away.
"I'm saying we should remove the carrot and walk forward with our eyes open," Raistin answered. Coughing he drew his robes more closely around him. — Margaret Weis

If you are deemed insane, then all actions that would oherwise prove you are not do, in actuality, fall into the framework of an insane person's actions. Your sound protests constitute denial. Your valid fears are deemed paranoia. Your survival instincts are labeled defense mechanisms. It's a no-win situation. It's a death penalty really. — Dennis Lehane

There are two ways of attempting to deal with the appalling difficulties of choice on the higher ethical levels (Truth/beauty/goodness; family/country, war/peace, principles/persons.. ): (1) one can attempt to justify a one-sided choice, and this is what philosophies of value and religions attempt to do through reason and faith (feeling,) respectively. But this always founders or is never safe from foundering. (2) Or the dialectic can be squarely faced in the fact that no one-sided solution of it is ever justifiable by reason or by faith. And here enters the question not of acceptance or refusal, nor of affirmation or denial, but of letting-go. The letting-go, however, is limited, in life at least (and without taking death into account) by the boundary of ability to let go. — Nanamoli Thera

Death was not the scariest thing out there; no, the denial of it could be far worse. — Nenia Campbell

Remember, deniers claim 90 to 100% of all Holocaust deaths are some fantasy concocted years after the war. Rest assured the only books anywhere that talk about the tiny death toll numbers deniers believe in (i.e. tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands instead of millions) are Holocaust-denying books written by anti-Semitic "historians," religious zealots or neo-Nazis. No mainstream history books ever published since 1945 mention a death toll that isn't in the millions for the Holocaust. Period. — James Morcan

After slipping on a negligee and making herself comfortable on the lounge, she became conscious that she was miserable and that the tears were rolling down her cheeks. She wondered if they were the tears of self-pity, and tried resolutely not to cry, but this existence without hope, without happiness, oppressed her, and she kept shaking her head from side to side, her mouth drawn down tremulously in the corners, as though she were denying the assertion made by some one, somewhere. She did not know that this gesture of hers was years older than history, that, for a hundred generations of men, intolerable and persistent grief has offered that gesture, of denial, of protest, of bewilderment, to something more profound, more powerful than the God made in the image of man, and before which that God, did he exist, would be equally impotent. It is a truth set at the heart of tragedy that this force never explains, never answers - this force intangible as air, more definite than death. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Celibacy,fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude and the whole train of monkish virtues ... Stupify the understanding and harden the heart, obscure the fancy and sour the temper ... A gloomy hair-brained enthusiast, after his death, may have a place in the calendar, but will scarcely ever be admitted, when alive, into intimacy and society, except by those who are as delerious and dismal as himself. — David Hume

According to Elizabeth Kubler Ross, there are fivestages of grief a person passes through after the death of aloved one: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. — Colleen Hoover

My father learned his disinterest under the guise of masculinity. Boys don't cry. There are whole disciplines, institutions, rubrics in our culture which serve as categories of denial.
Science is such a category. The torture and death that Heinrich Himmler found disturbing to witness became acceptable to him when it fell under this rubric. He liked to watch the scientific experiments in the concentration camps — Susan Griffin

There came to him an image of man's whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all man's life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man's grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance on his lips, and that the shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing of his heart into the maw of all-engulfing night. — Thomas Wolfe

He may take long walks
in the raining dark
almost aimlessly
to a spot of soaked grass
in a neighbor's open field.
He's decided this is the place
for you and him to meet again. — Kristen Henderson

The crux of the worldview conflict ... is the denial of God's right to be God, and the usurpation of that right by man. In a word, it is a life or death struggle over _sovereignty_. Who will be sovereign- man or God?
If God has lost the authority to be sovereign over reality, if He has lost the authority to provide objective law, and if He has lost the authority to reveal absolute truth, then in the eyes of men, He has lost the right to be God. He has been stripped of His "God-ness," or the very attributes which make Him God.
At the same time, man is never content to be godless. He must have a god. Somebody or something must provide that authority. Thus, modern man gladly assumes that position, and humanist man becomes his own ultimate authority ... This is the Gettysburg of the worldview war of the 21st century. — Kevin Swanson

Our culture's quest to hide death behind a facade of denial has made fools and pretended immortals of us all. Perhaps it would be more helpful and liberating to begin each day by repeating the words of Crazy Horse, Today is a good day to die. — Richard Paul Evans

I have never had any difficulty falling asleep. No matter what problems I have. However terrible things are, I can sleep. It's like killing yourself and taking the easy way out. It's waking up that I dread. Every morning, I go through the five stages of death. I wake up in denial that I have to go to work. Then I get angry. Then I bargain with God, or myself, and try to call in sick. Then I feel guilty and go into remission, until finally I accept that the day will suck and I get up. — Ernesto Quinonez

I don't necessarily view death as something negative. Death gives meaning to life. Living in fear of death is living in denial. Actually, it's not really living at all, because there is no life without death. It's two sides of the one. You can't pick up one side and say, I'm just going to use the 'heads' side. No. It doesn't work like that. You have to pick up both sides because nothing is promised to anyone in this world besides death. — Curtis Jackson

We figure out what death means when we're born, practically, and we live our whole lives in some kind of weird denial about it. — Lauren DeStefano

He was in a room of the Gesshuuji, which he had thought it would be impossible to visit. The approach of death had made the visit easy, had unloosed the weight that held him in the depths of being. It was even a comfort to think, from the light repose the struggle up the hill had brought him, that Kiyoaki, struggling against illness up that same road, had been given wings to soar with by the denial that awaited him. — Yukio Mishima

Why is it that people talk about death, as if it is a part of life, when it is entirely separate? Someone passes on into the never ending void, where the living aren't allowed. We can't see, hear, touch or feel those who have succumbed to the eternal sleep, but we comfort ourselves with thoughts of a grander plan. We tell ourselves that they are in a better place, but what could be greater than breathing the same air, as those loved ones? Their pain may be gone, but pleasure can only be when it is stark against the hurt that life brings? — J.D. Stroube

I have refused to believe that Mother will die. And by denying her cancer, even her death, I deny her life. Denial stops us from listening. I cannot hear what Mother is saying. I can only hear what I want. But denial lies. It protects us from the potency of a truth we cannot yet bear to accept. It takes our hands and leads us to places of comfort. Denial flourishes in the familiar. It seduces us with our own desires and cleverly constructs walls around us to keep us safe. — Terry Tempest Williams

Eventually, however, the denial turned into emptiness and my childhood ended. — Floyd C. Forsberg

If the spirits of the dead are either in heaven or hell, then appearances in Mormon Temples, as in seances, can only be demons impersonating the dead to foster belief in Satan's denial of death." This is why attempted communication with the dead, which is called necromancy, is absolutely forbidden in the Bible." Here again, in open rejection of the Word of God, Mormonism not only encourages but boasts of alleged contact with the spirits of the dead. At the same 1982 General Conference mentioned above, Elder A.Theodore Tuttle, another General Authority, proudly declared:
On the third of April 1836, one week after the dedication of the Kirtland Temple, the monumental event occurred-the Savior appeared and accepted the Temple!
Moses and Elias also came. Then, Malachi's prophecy was fulfilled, for Elijah the prophet stood before them...? — Ed Decker

The death of Nighteyes gutted me. I walked wounded through my life in the days that followed, unaware of just how mutilated I was. I was like the man who complains of the itching of his severed leg. The itching distracts from the immense knowledge that one will forever after hobble through life. — Robin Hobb

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

So what did you do when death came to your house? We continued in the same way as before. What is that, a failure of the imagination? Are you in denial? This is not wholly true; we continue in the same way as before but in parenthesis. My thinking has switched its grammar. The present continuous is its single operational tense. Uncertainty is our present and our future. — Marion Coutts

I'd been an idiot to think that this was anything but a quest. Searches were nice and soft and cuddly and no one need be killed. A quest always demanded the death of a trusted colleague and one or more difficult dilemmas. I'd been in denial. I'd been a fool. — Jasper Fforde

It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you'll live forever, it becomes too easy to postpone the things you know that you must do. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Religion, in one sense, is a life of self-denial, just as husbandry, in one sense, is a work of death. — Henry Ward Beecher

Faith is the leading grace in all our spiritual warfare and conflict; but all along, while we live, it hath faithful company that adheres to it and helps it. Love works, and hope works, and all other graces - self-denial, readiness to the cross - they all work and help faith. Yet when we come to die, faith is left alone. Now, try what faith will do. Not to be surprised with any thing is the substance of human wisdom; not to be surprised with death is a great part of the substance of our spiritual wisdom. — John Owen

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. — James Baldwin

The denial of death is self-hatred. — Simon Critchley

If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can. — Donald Hall

The only death the spirit recognizes is the denial of birth to that which strives to be born: those realities in ourselves that we have not allowed to live. The real ghost is a strange, persistent beggar at a narrow door asking to be born; asking, again and again, for admission at the gateway of our lives. Such ghosts I had, and thus, beyond all reason, I continued to be haunted. — Laurens Van Der Post

The moonlight rained down on the beach as if to shine a spotlight on my solitude, and I wanted to cry out at it, 'Why did you take her? You, surrounded by all of your twinkling stars and infinite wonders and darkness. There's already enough beauty where you are. — Rachael Wade

Let's be honest, the world's always been a scary place with very little charm. I try to brush it off as I've brushed off the flu, as I brushed off the death of my father when I was young, as I've brushed off so much since Benton has known me. — Patricia Cornwell

Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you, dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well
by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God. — Sam Harris

It is soon to be spring
The Christmas toys barely played with
I have a glass soldier whose head can turn
The epaulettes interchangeable
Soon flowers will bloom
Lawrence from the garden shed will give us
each a cup of seeds

I am to wait
I said — George Saunders

A man begins dying at the moment of his birth. Most People live in denial of Death's patient courtship until, late in life and deep in sickness, they become aware of him sitting bedside. — Dean Koontz

We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask ... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however 'lifelike' we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead. — Roland Barthes

Samuel may have thought and played and philosophized about death, hut he did not really believe in it. His world did not have death as a member. He, and all around him, was immortal. When real death came it was an outrage, a denial of the immortality he deeply felt, and the one crack in his wall caused the whole structure to crash. I think he had always thought he could argue himself out of death. It was a personal opponent and one he could lick. — John Steinbeck

The denial of death is openly acknowledged as a significant trait of our culture. The tears of the bereaved have become comparable to the excretions of the diseased — Philippe Aries

True spiritual love is not a feeble imitation and anticipation of death, but a triumph over death, not a separation of the immortal form from the mortal, of the eternal from the temporal, but a transfiguration of the mortal into the immortal, the acceptance of the temporal into the eternal. False spirituality is a denial of the flesh; true spirituality is the regeneration of the flesh, its salvation, its resurrection from the dead. — Vladimir S. Soloviev

Death makes me realize how deeply I have internalized the agnosticism I preach in all my books. I consider dogmatic belief and dogmatic denial very childish forms of conceit in a world of infinitely whirling complexity. None of us can see enough from one corner of space-time to know "all" about the rest of space-time. — Robert Anton Wilson

I claim that the fact that we are strongly encouraged to identify with characters for whom death is not a significant creative possibly has real costs. We the audience, and individual you over there and me right here, lose any sense of eschatology, thus of teleology, and live in a moment that is, paradoxically, both emptied of intrinsic meaning or end and quite literally ETERNAL. If we're the only animals who know in advance we're going to die, we're also probably the only animals who would submit so cheerfully to the sustained denial of this undeniable and very important truth. The danger is that, as entertainment's denials of the truth get even more effective and pervasive and seductive, we will eventually forget what they're denials OF. This is scary. Because it seems transparent to me that, if we forget how to die, we're going to forget how to live. — David Foster Wallace

Yet the denial of feelings is one way of blocking the chronic depression that can descend like a dense fog on those who deal day after day with sickness and death. It is better than not caring at all, better than burning out. Only a few are tough enough to maintain both equanimity and caring for a lifetime; these renowned nurses and legendary physicians are saints of the medical profession. Copper knew a few of them, and he wished he could be more like them. It took a lot of growing up. — Richard S. Weeder

If you are working with a therapist counselor social worker grief expert minister priest or anyone else who is trying to help you navigate the wilderness of grief and they start talking about the groundbreaking observations of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross suggesting there is an orderly predictable unfolding of grief please please please. Do yourself a favor. Leave. People who are dying often experience five stages of grief: denial anger bargaining depression and acceptance. They are grieving their impending death. This is what Elizabeth Kubler Ross observed. People who are learning to live with the death of a beloved have a different process. It isn't the same. It isn't orderly. It isn't predictable. Grief is wild and messy and unpredictable — Tom Zuba

So when you're dealing with an existential threat like death or like climate change, if you see it as 'we are all toast anyway,' then denial is a pretty good way of coping. — Bob Inglis

All my life as an artist I have asked myself: What pushes me continually to make sculpture? I have found the answer. art is an action against death. It is a denial of death. — Jacques Lipchitz

I think ancient cultures incorporated death into the experience of life in a more natural way than we have done. In our obsessive focus on youth, on celebrity, our denial of death makes it harder for people who are grieving to find a place for that grief. — Edward Hirsch

Ours is a society of denial that conditions us to protect ourselves from any direct difficulty and discomfort. We expend enormous energy denying our insecurity, fighting pain, death and loss and hiding from the basic truths of the natural world and of our own nature. — Jack Kornfield