Quotes & Sayings About Denying Death

Marriage. It's a hard term to define. Especially for me
I've ducked it like root canal. Still there's no denying the fact that marriage ranks right up there with birth and death as one of the three biggies in the human safari. It's the only one though that we'll celebrate with a conscious awareness. Very few of you remember your arrival and even fewer of you will attend your own funeral. — Andrew Schneider

I wonder now about Demeter and Persephone. Maybe Persephone was glad to run off with the king of death to his underground realm, maybe it was the only way she could break away from her mother, maybe Demeter was a bad parent the way Lear was a bad parent, denying nature, including the nature of children to leave their parents. Maybe Persephone thought Hades was the infinitely cool older man who held the knowledge she sought, maybe she loved the darkness, the six months of winter, the sharp taste of pomegranates, the freedom from her mother, maybe she knew that to be truly alive death had to be part of the picture just as winter must. It was as the queen of hell that she became an adult and came into power. Hades's realm is called the underworld, and so are the urban realms of everything outside the law. And as in Hopi creation myths, where humans and other beings emerge from underground, so it's from the underground that culture emerges in this civilization. — Rebecca Solnit

I was her world, yes, and I was at that point we all reach where I was denying she was mine. I'd never quiet forgive myself for that. — Danny Wallace

Kira is evil ... There's no denying that ... But lately I've been starting to think of it more like this ... The real evil is the power to kill people. Someone who finds himself with that power is cursed. No matter how you use it, anything obtained by killing people can never bring true happiness. — Tsugumi Ohba

We wait. We are bored. (He throws up his hand.) No, don't protest, we are bored to death, there's no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let's get to work! (He advances towards the heap, stops in his stride.) In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone more, in the midst of nothingness! — Samuel Beckett

Human beings invent myth, ideology, and religion as means of denying reality and replacing death with palliative fantasies. Helplessness and death are blows to human narcissism. Human beings create illusions about themselves, lie to themselves as a means to feel secure and less vulnerable. — Jerry Piven

Nuclear energy is a waste of time. They should go about harnessing the power of the unconscious when it is in the act of denying Death. — Steve Toltz

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

By the time she'd finished with him, with a little encouraging pat and a request that he rest quiet like a good lad, there was no point in denying it: Holly Evernight would be the death of him. — Kristen Callihan

Yet each, in itself - this was the uncanny, the anti-organic, the life-denying character of them all - each of them was absolutely symmetrical, icily regular in form. They were too regular, as substance adapted to life never was to this degree - the living principle shuddered at this perfect precision, found it deathly, the very marrow of death - Hans Castorp felt he understood now the reason why the builders of antiquity purposely and secretly introduced minute variation from absolute symmetry in their columnar structures. — Thomas Mann

Think of a lifeless forest in which a small plant pushes its head upward, out of the ruin. In our grief process, we are moving into life from death, without denying the devastation that came before. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

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

If the Pope were to deny that the death penalty could be an exercise of retributive justice, he would be overthrowing the tradition of two millenia of Catholic thought, denying the teaching of several previous popes, and contradicting the teaching of Scripture. — Avery Dulles

I go in the body, not the soul. And by denying my soul, I give no power to any force but those I control. I do not seek favor from devil or god; I deny them. For if there is no soul, no death to contemplate, then neither god nor devil rules - their battle is of no consequence, to one who lives in the flesh alone. — Diana Gabaldon

Those who determine not to put self to death will never see the will of God fulfilled in their lives. Those who ought to become the light of the world must necessarily burn and become less and less. By denying self, we are able to win others. — Sadhu Sundar Singh

A civilization that denies death ends by denying life. — Octavio Paz

It was rumored, in 1946, that the hangman in Nuremberg adjusted the nooses of some of the condemned to magnify the pain of suffocation. Such sadism was not called for then and is not called for now. But if fornication is wrong, there is no denying that it can bring pleasure. The death of Saddam Hussein at rope's end brings a pleasure that is undeniable, and absolutely chaste in its provenance. — William F. Buckley Jr.

Most people live out ordinary lives by denying death. Others live more completely because they're aware of it. I choose the second group. — Alan Joshua

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

I'm not denying that depression can be spiritually induced. Guilt from having wronged and hurt others can bring it on. A sense of having failed to live out the will of God can give rise to depression. Certainly the fear of death and what might follow can sap the joy out of life. — Tony Campolo

I sometimes wonder whether our churches
living as we do in American death-denying culture, relentlessly smiling through our praise choruses
are inadvertently helping people live not as much in hope as in denial. — Mark Galli

They'd pretended - all of them faking, denying, lying - that they weren't counting the seconds until leave was over and it was back out there into that world of yellow dust, that alien planet where the only color was death. — Cole McCade

There was something twisting in his gut that he wanted to deny and couldn't. It was like a knife in him that he could not remove lest he bleed to death. — Hazel B. West

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

I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death
because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses. — Saul Bellow

The thing about denying someone their voice in this life is that it tends to come out in death. — J. Michael Straczynski

Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill or enslave other 'races' according to need, is not more unrealizable than the idea that a single state, let alone the globe itself, could be governed according to the dictates of an allegedly holy book. This mad scheme begins by denying itself the talents (and the rights) of half the population, views with superstitious horror the charging of interest, and invokes the right of Muslims to subject nonbelievers to special taxes and confiscations. Not even Afghanistan or Somalia, scenes of the furthest advances yet made by pro-caliphate forces, could be governed for long in this way without setting new standards for beggary and decline. — Christopher Hitchens

When death brings at last the desired forgetfulness, it abolishes life and being together, and sets the seal on the knowledge that "being" is merely a continual "has been," a thing that lives by denying and destroying and contradicting itself. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Every religion holds forth the promise of either defeating time, escaping time, overcoming time, reissuing time, or denying time altogether. We use our religions as vehicles to enter the state of nirvana, the heavenly kingdom, or the promised land. We come to believe in reincarnation, rebirth, and resurrection as ways of avoiding the inevitability of biological death. — Jeremy Rifkin