Quotes & Sayings About Dying For A Friend

Surely there is a fitness in the institution of the Lord's Supper as a standing memorial by which the church at large may commemorate the grandest act, and by which the heart of each individual believer may be reminded of his dearest friend. You, who have learned to love the Saviour, will prize His ordinance for the Saviour's sake. You who rejoice in the salvation purchased by His dying, will not fail with gratitude and faith to show the Lord's death until He come. — William Morley Punshon

We die a day at a time — Bangambiki Habyarimana

Maybe happiness didn't have to be about the big, sweeping circumstances, about having everything in your life in place. Maybe it was about stringing together a bunch of small pleasures. Wearing slippers and watching the Miss Universe contest. Eating a brownie with vanilla ice cream. Getting to level seven in Dragon Master and knowing there were twenty more levels to go.
Maybe happiness was just a matter of the little upticks- the traffic signal that said "Walk" the second you go there- and downticks- the itch tag at the back of your collar- that happened to every person in the course of the day. Maybe everybody had the same allotted measure of happiness within each day.
maybe it didn't matter if you were a world-famous heartthrob or a painful geek. Maybe it didn't matter if your friend was possibly dying.
Maybe you just got through it. Maybe that was all you could ask for. — Ann Brashares

I remember hearing you scream, Cat, and seeing your face. But I don't remember dying. And how can I go on if I'm dead?"
Tat answered fiercely, "Dead is stuffed inside that box, not what you are now. You're my friend. Always will be. No matter what the fuck you eat. I didn't believe that pale prick when he said he could wake you up, but you're here. And don't you dare think about covering yourself back up with dirt. I need you, buddy. It's been hell without you."
"I missed you, amigo," Juan said in almost incoherently accented English. "You can't leave me again! Tat's boring, and Copper only wants to train. You stay!"
Dave stared at us. — Jeaniene Frost

- My friend is dying. Can you cure him or not?
Her voice caught on the word friend. Percy was a lot more than that. Even boyfriend really didn't cover it. They'd been through so much together, at this point Percy was part of her - sometimes a annoying part, sure, but definitely a part she could not live without. — Rick Riordan

It was from an old friend who thought he was dying. Anyway, he said, 'Life and death issues don't come along that often, thank God, so don't treat everything like it's life or death. Go easier.' — Thomas Arnold

Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you. What are you afraid of? Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret? — C.S. Lewis

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you. — Annie Dillard

Friends.
They aren't any such thing as good friend or bad friend.
Maybe there are just friend.
People who stand by you when you're hurt and who helped you feel not so lonely.
Maybe there are worth being scared for and hoping for and living for.
Maybe worth dying for too.
If that what has to be.
No bad friends.
Only people you want.
Need to be with.
People who build their houses in your heart. — Stephen King

The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death.
The rest are actors who want me to stay and further the plot. — Adrienne Rich

Before I took to the road, a friend tried to get me to go to a department store with him. He said it was to improve the place where I lived. He said," I want to know you are reading beneath this lamp. " This fellow was dying. He knew it and I did not. I think he was tucking me in. He was making sure all of his friends had the right lamps, the comfiest pillows, the softest sheets. He was tucking us all in for the night. — Amy Hempel

My mother went on and on about it. Actually she went off on a tangent, I told her about your mother at one point and she went all (H starts doing a lightly French accent) it is not fair for your friend, she is not going to get the important boredoms and mournings and melancholies that are her due and are owing to her just from being the age that she is, for now it will be interrupted by real mournings and real melancholies ... — Ali Smith

The world, Govinda my friend, is not imperfect, not to be seen as on a slow path toward perfection: No, it is perfect in every moment, all transgression already bears grace within itself, all little children already have the aged in themselves, all the sucklings death, all the dying eternal life. — Hermann Hesse

Think of, at the moment of dying, is there will be any enemy for you? None! Everyone will be the best friend. So win all your enemies with your divine love when you are living. — Debasish Mridha

I will tell you something that you don't want to hear: Autumn is ugly! Look at the dying leaves! There is no beauty in dying! Death is always ugly! The beauty of autumn is just an illusion, my friend! Wake up and see the real truth! See the crying leaves! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

We are your shadow uncles, your angel godfathers, your mother's or your grandmother's best friend from college, the author of that book you found in the gay section of the library. We are characters in a Tony Kushner play, or names on a quilt that rarely gets taken out anymore. We are the ghosts of the remaining older generation. You know some of our songs. We do not want to haunt you too somberly. We don't want our legacy to be gravitas. You wouldn't want to live your life like that, and you won't want to be remembered like that, either. Your mistake would be to find our commonality in our dying. The living part mattered more. We taught you how to dance. — David Levithan

The mind is a useful tool but not a very good friend. — Stephen Levine

In her room death would come as a friend, a friend with cool gentle hands ... — Mary Higgins Clark

Why don't all Christians and Muslims say something like the abbot when they hear that a friend is dying? When a devout woman is told by the doctor that she has only months to live, why doesn't she beam with excited anticipation, as if she has just won a holiday in the Seychelles? 'I can't wait!' Why don't faithful visitors at her bedside shower her with messages for those that have gone before? 'Do give my love to Uncle Robert when you see him . . . ' Why — Richard Dawkins

The Frenchman sat up with that strange energy which comes often as the harbinger of death. "( ... ) This I tell you - I, Raoul de la Roche Pierre de Bras, dying upon the field of honour. And now kiss me, sweet friend, and lay me back, for the mists closes round me and I am gone!"
With tender hands the squire [Nigel] lowered his comrade's head, but even as he did so there came a choking rush of blood, and the soul had passed. So died a gallant cavalier of France, and Nigel, as he knelt in the ditch beside him, prayed that his own end might be as noble and as debonair. — Arthur Conan Doyle

I will never be old, Rachel promised herself. I will never be sad. I'd scarf a cyanide capsule first, kill myself like that friend of Lotto's everyone is crying about. Life isn't worth living unless you are young and surrounded by other young people in a beautiful cold garden perfumed by dirt and flowers and fallen leaves, gleaming in the string of lights, listening to the quiet city on the last fine night of the year. Under the dying — Lauren Groff

The Sunlight on the Garden

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden. — Louis MacNeice

If your friend is sick and dying, the most important thing he wants is not an explanation; he wants you to sit with him. He's terrified of being alone more than anything else. So, God has not left us alone. — Lee Strobel

All the dying that summer began with the death of a child, a boy with golden hair and thick glasses, killed on the railroad tracks outside New Bremen, Minnesota, sliced into pieces by a thousand tons of steel speeding across the prairie toward South Dakota. His name was Bobby Cole. He was a sweet-looking kid and by that I mean he had eyes that seemed full of dreaming and he wore a half smile as if he was just about to understand something you'd spent an hour trying to explain. I should have known him better, been a better friend. He lived not far from my house and we were the same age. But he was two years behind me in school and might have been held back even more except for the kindness of certain teachers. He was a small kid, a simple child, no match at all for the diesel-fed drive of a Union Pacific locomotive. It — William Kent Krueger

I attended the bedside of a friend who was dying in a Dublin hospital. She lived her last hours in a public ward with a television blaring out a football match, all but drowning our final conversation. — Gabriel Byrne

Failure is my best friend. If I succeeded, it would be like dying. Maybe worse. — Alberto Giacometti

It's a little hard not to worry when my best friend keeps on dying. — Kristin Cast

How do you explain to your friend's mother why a night out with friends has left her daughter dying from an ecstasy overdose? — A.C. Flanagan

What language shall I borrow To thank Thee, dearest Friend, For this, Thy dying sorrow, Thy pity without end? O make me Thine forever, And should I fainting be, Lord, let me never, never Outlive my love for Thee. — Robert Morgan

Culloden, Scotland, April 1746
All around was the awful sound of moaning. It was not just mournful, but the sound of immense suffering, the cries of dying men. The battle had waged on, and the day was far spent. In dirt and blood, the soldiers waded on. Horizontal rain, snow, and wind made the normal battle conditions much worse.
Near the edge of the field I stood holding a gun, pointing it at the lad who had once been my best friend. He was dressed in the red coat of a government soldier; I was not. — David Holdsworth

Goodbye, my friend, goodbye
My love, you are in my heart.
It was preordained we should part
And be reunited by and by.
Goodbye: no handshake to endure.
Let's have no sadness - furrowed brow.
There's nothing new in dying now
Though living is no newer. — Sergei Yesenin

Dream Song 90: Op. posth. no. 13

In the night-reaches dreamed he of better graces,
of liberations, and beloved faces,
such as now ere dawn he sings.
It would not be easy, accustomed to these things,
to give up the old world, but he could try;
let it all rest, have a good cry.

Let Randall rest, whom your self-torturing
cannot restore one instant's good to, rest:
he's left us now.
The panic died and in the panic's dying
so did my old friend. I am headed west
also, also, somehow.

In the chambers of the end we'll meet again
I will say Randall, he'll say Pussycat
and all will be as before
whenas we sought, among the beloved faces,
eminence and were dissatisfied with that
and needed more. — John Berryman

Why do they lie?" she asked herself aloud. "They say time makes losing someone you loved easier to deal with, but it only makes it worse. — Rebecca McNutt

His friend Chuck, stabbed in the chest, bleeding, dying as Thomas held him. — James Dashner

And if the worst, or best, happens, and Death comes for you in the snow, he comes disguised as Sleep, and you greet him rather as a welcome friend than a gruesome foe. — Apsley Cherry-Garrard

The man peered through the doorway - a blond bearded man with steel blue eyes, who first considered her holding Niall's sword, and then Niall in her bed. She couldn't believe he would grin at them. The heathen. His friend was sick and could be dying and Gunnolf was grinning?
What kind of a friend did that?
"I should have known you would be in a lass' bed while I have been searching for you everywhere. Not to mention trying to locate our horses, and the lass we should be finding. Is the woman protecting you with your own sword, mon?" Gunnolf laughed.
"He was wounded and is now feverish. There is naught to jest about," Anora said harshly.
Gunnolf laughed again. "I hope you plan to wed the lass, Niall. She appears to be just the one for you. Every mon needs a woman who will fight to protect him. — Terry Spear

He's my friend, my brother," he whispered into her shoulder. "He's dying."
"Daemon." Jaenelle gently stroked his hair. "Daemon, we have to help him. I could - "
"No!" Don't tempt me with hope. Don't tempt me to take that kind of risk. "You can't help him. Nothing can help him now."
Jaenelle tried to push back to look at him, but he wouldn't let her. "I know I promised him I wouldn't wander around Terreille, but - " Daemon licked a tear.
"You met him? He saw you once?"
"Once." She paused. "Daemon, I might be able to - "
"No," Daemon moaned into her neck. "He wouldn't want you there, and if something happened to you, he'd never forgive me. Never. — Anne Bishop

Sometimes you find that one person, and you just know. And even if you don't love them right away, you know you will. It's just a matter of time. Because no one you've ever known has come close to making you feel the way they do. It keeps you up at night and drives you fucking crazy, but you pray to God the feeling never goes away no matter how much it's killing you." Sloane stared at him. "Wow." "Shut up," Ash mumbled, looking embarrassed. Like he hadn't realized what he'd said until then. "I've never heard you talk like this." He thought he knew everything there was to know about his best friend. Apparently he was wrong. Ash shrugged. "Yeah, well, almost dying makes you think." "About Cael?" Sloane asked quietly. Ash let out a weary sigh, his gaze falling to his hands. "Like I don't think about him every other day." "What are you going to do about him?" "I don't know. I really thought he'd give me some time, but he's going out for drinks with Seb this Friday." "And? — Charlie Cochet

When my friend Matilda lay dying of Lou Gehrig's disease, she said that she had been prepared all of her life to choose between good and evil. What no one had prepared her for, she lamented, was to choose between the good, the better, and the best - and yet this capacity turned out to be the one she most needed as she watched the sands of her life run out. — Barbara Brown Taylor

After all these years, his best friend is malaria.
Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old battles. — Louis Bayard

All the things people carry in their hearts, love, hatred, fears, and they had to be shared with a friend or a loved one, because when we do not share them, sometime, all the things love, anger, hatred, fears ends up coming out of us mixed-up. We just become a shell with nothing inwards us, an empty soul with nothing in it, that is as bad as dying. — Shaikh Ashraf

What good is having a friend who's a cop if he won't give me inside information?"
"So you can ask him to look at a piece of shit pistol after you've already bought it, and pronounce it a piece of shit. — Linda Howard

I was with a friend of mine recently who was dying and while he was lying there with his family around his bed, I just knew that was it, that was the best you can hope for in life - to have your family and the people who love you around you at the end. — Ewan McGregor

One saw a bird dying, shot by a man. It was flying with rhythmic beat and beautifully, with such freedom and lack of fear. And the gun shattered it; it fell to the earth and all the life had gone out of it. A dog fetched it, and the man collected other dead birds. He was chattering with his friend and seemed so utterly indifferent. All that he was concerned with was bringing down so many birds, and it was over as far as he was concerned. They are killing all over the world. Those marvellous, great animals of the sea, the whales, are killed by the million, and the tiger and so many other animals are now becoming endangered species. Man is the only animal that is to be dreaded. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Oakley won't," the duke said.
She turned and blinked. "I beg your pardon."
"Lord Oakley. He won't forget to find us rooms. I've known him for years. The only thing that is making this bearable is that he must be dying inside over all this."
"You don't like him?"
"On the contrary. I've long considered him a friend. It's why I enjoy his misery so much. — Julia Quinn

Even if Shaheed had been able to hear me, I could not then have told him what I later became convinced was the truth: that the purpose of that entire war had been to reunite me with an old life, to bring me back together with my old friends. Sam Manekshaw was marching on Dacca, to meet his old friend the Tiger; and the modes of connection lingered on, because on the field of leaking bone-marrow I heard about the exploits of knees, and was greeted by a dying pyramid of heads; and in Dacca I was to meet Parvati-the-witch. — Salman Rushdie

I have met people that said when their friend was dying, they made them promise that their funeral would be a party without people sitting in silence and in sadness. They want to celebrate their life and the life they lived and I try to adhere to that more. — Andrew W.K.

People get old, get sick and die. Or they die suddenly. Or their deaths drag on forever. My friend Tory is dying a slow, excruciatingly painful death of bone cancer. Eight friends have died of breast cancer. Polar bears are dying. Honeybees are vanishing. The oceans are drying up. There is a part of me that wants my money back. That wants to say, 'I didn't sign up for this. I don't like the way this whole thing is set up and I won't participate in it. — Geneen Roth

When the world tells us that it is impossible and when the world is falling from underneath us, and we have no where to turn, I feel the safest. For I know that you are there, and you won't let anything happen to me. When that same world tells us that this isn't meant to be,
and that we aren't ready for a life of commitment and adulthood, I still feel the safest. Because I know that you will always be there with me, for you are committed to me, and I am committed to you. I swear to you, in this moment when all of the world is watching and filled with doubts, when the entire world is slowly dying, that I will never leave your side. I want to live my life with you, and I want to die with you. I vow to you to always be true, be faithful, and be not only a wife, but a friend and comforter. My heart is all I can give you; it is all that I own. Therefore I give you my all. I give you everything that I have."
-Lily Potter — Mordred

The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for. — Mark Twain

Do not ask the definition of a friend. He/She is that one without whose company death and dying set in earlier and living is made more pleasurable. — Rod McKuen

When I did 'Bumble-ardy,' I was so intensely aware of death. Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did 'Bumble-ardy'. I did 'Bumble-ardy' to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live, as any human being does. — Maurice Sendak

Sometimes people just can't take how real the world can be. Even if they're your friend they'll drop away from you like petals from a dying flower to keep their own sanity. — Jason E. Hodges

I kept reading.
I miss you already, bro.
I love you, Augustus. God bless and keep you.
You'll live forever in our hearts, big man.
(That particularly galled me, because it implied the immortality of those left behind:
You will live forever in my memory, becauuse I will live forever! I AM YOUR GOD NOW, DEAD BOY! I OWN YOU! Thinking you won't die is yet another side effect of dying.)
You were always such a great friend I'm sorry I didn't see more of you after you left school, bro. I bet you're already playing ball in heaven. — John Green

The dying need but little, dear, - A glass of water's all, A flower's unobtrusive face To punctuate the wall, A fan, perhaps, a friend's regret, And certainly that one No color in the rainbow Perceives when you are gone. — Emily Dickinson

But underneath it all I tell myself the tiny glow-worm of the Leave event will be blinking. Up to me to surmount the trial, everything is dependent upon my will, impotent, tenacious, helpless, dogged, with a swollen sense of honor, I tell myself. I know me. Not that I'm the strongest as my friend used to claim, but I've always had the strength - weakness maybe - to believe that if "in the end we die, too fast," as he puts it, later on, as sequel, there's a chance that someone-I-don't-know-who - or I-don't-know-what - may come back. No keeping oneself from dying. Afterwards nothing stops one returning. — Helene Cixous

Nobody really wants to be your friend when they discover that you work with dead people. — Rebecca McNutt

Anoshe was a word for strangers in the street, and lovers between meetings, for parents and children, friends and family. It softened the blow of leaving. Eased the strain of parting. A careful nod to the certainty of today, the mystery of tomorrow. When a friend left, with little chance of seeing home, they said anoshe. When a loved one was dying, they said anoshe. When corpses were burned, bodies given back to the earth and souls to the stream, those left grieving said anoshe.

Anoshe brought solace. And hope. And the strength to let go. — V.E Schwab

The Lord's supper is memorative, and so it has the nature and use of a pledge or token of love, left by a dying to a dear surviving friend. — John Flavel

The difficulty is not that great to die for a friend, the hard part is finding a friend worth dying for. — Henry Home

I'm a good girl. I'm a nice girl. I'm a straight-A, strait-laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody's boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my parents' shit and brother's shit and I'm not a girl anyhow, I'm over forty fucking years old, and I'm good at my job and I'm great with kids and I held my mother's hand when she died,after four years of holding her hand while she was dying, and I speak to my father ever day on the telephone
every day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because here it's pretty gray and a big muggy too? It was supposed to say "Great Artist" on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say "Such a good teacher/daughter/friend" instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL. — Claire Messud

I sat down in a chair by the bed. The house got altogether still again, and I thought he was asleep. Just ever so quietly I reached over and laid my hand on his shoulder.

He said, 'I love you too, Hannah."

He didn't last long after that. Death had become his friend. They say that people, if they want to, can let themselves slip away when the time comes. I think that is what Nathan did. He was not false or greedy. When the time came to go, he went. — Wendell Berry

And it came to me that these trees had been hardly smaller when I was yet unborn, and had stood as they stood now when I was a child playing among the cypresses and peaceful tombs of our necropolis, and that they would stand yet, drinking in the light of the dying sun, even as now, when I had been dead as long as those who rested there. I saw how little it weighed on the scale of things whether I lived or died, though my life was precious to me. And of those two thoughts I forged a mood by which I stood ready to grasp each smallest chance to live, yet in which I cared not too much whether I saved myself or not. By that mood, as I think, I did live; it has been so good a friend to me that I have endeavored to wear it ever since, succeeding not always, but often. — Gene Wolfe

This sludge oozes like a dying sea snake, though it tastes like it's already dead. Some evil force made up this concoction, intending to release it to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting world. But the creator made the mistake of tasting his creation and passed on. The world was saved for a moment. Still, like the black plague, this thing refused to fade out forever. I'm sad to report that our good friend Cliff behind the bar rediscovered it. Now it's spreading around the world as if carried by rats. — Ace Boggess

The difficulty is not so great to die for a friend as to find a friend worth dying for. — Homer

In the eyes of her oldest friends and colleagues and extended family, she wasn't a painfully thin seventy-five-year-old gray haired woman dying of cancer- she was a grade school class president, the young friend you gossiped with, a date or double date, someone to share a tent with in Darfur, a fellow election monitor in Bosnia, a mentor, a teacher you'd laughed within a classroom or a faculty lounge, or the board member you'd groaned with after a contentious meeting — Will Schwalbe

I remembered a friend of mine dying from AIDS, and while he was visiting his family on the coast for the last time, he was seated in the grass during a picnic to which dozens of family members were invited. He looked up from his fried chicken and said, "I just want to die with a big dick in my mouth. — David Wojnarowicz

She tried to push away that memory. Her brave winged friend, dying from poison, his muzzle in her lap, looking at her trustingly as she raised her dagger to end his misery ... Gods, — Rick Riordan

Oh, trust me Sydney Tar Ponds, you aren't the first Personification to be forgotten by somebody ordinary," Mearth sighed with a falsely-reassuring smile. Alecto stepped back from her, glaring hatefully. "Sydney Tar Ponds," Mearth added, "I've had so many ordinary people as friends in my life that by now I've forgotten all their names. At first it was difficult ... very sad ... to see them always leaving, dying, disappearing, ignoring, but after a while I realized that they weren't worth the trouble. I'd rather be in the company of other Personifications. At least they aren't always dropping dead like houseflies or sailing away to parts unknown. Nil sa saol seo ach ceo, i ni bheimid beo, ach seal beag gearr. Wouldn't you agree?"
"No," Alecto told her. "I think you're insane. — Rebecca McNutt

Dying in one's fourth decade is unusual now, but dying is not. "The thing about lung cancer is that it's not exotic," Paul wrote in an email to his best friend, Robin. "The reader can get into these shoes, walk a bit, and say, 'So that's what it looks like from here. Sooner or later, I'll be back here in my own shoes.' That's what I'm aiming for, I think. Not the sensationalism of dying and not the exhortations to gather rosebuds but: Here's what lies up ahead on the road." Of course, he did more than just describe the terrain. He traversed it bravely. — Paul Kalanithi

I am Outcast."
"The kids behind me laugh so loud I know they're laughing about me. I can't help myself. I turn around. It's Rachel, surrounded by a bunch of kids wearing clothes that most definitely did not come from the EastSide Mall. Rachel Bruin, my ex-best friend. She stares at something above my left ear. Words climb up my throat. This was the girl who suffered through Brownies with me, who taught me how to swim, who understood about my parents, who didn't make fun of my bedroom. If there is anyone in the entire galaxy I am dying to tell what really happened, it's Rachel. My throat burns."
"Her eyes meet mine for a second. "I hate you," she mouths silently. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I must be able to say, 'Percival, a ridiculous name'. At the same time let me tell you, men and women, hurrying to the tube station, you would have had to respect him. You would have had to form up and follow behind him. How strange to oar one's way through crowds seeing life through hollow eyes, burning eyes. — Virginia Woolf

In death a hero, as in life a friend! — Alexander Pope

A dear friend best expressed, in a few words, the aim of this book. When she reflected on my recovery from Alzheimer symptoms she stated: "You came back to life." She was right. For me, losing the ability to think, talk, and feed and clothe myself would be the same as dying. If you (or someone you know) suffer these symptoms, I want to bring you back to life." "Avoiding certain foods can reverse the many conditions caused by nerve damage - including damage to the nerves of the brain. The nerves of the brain can recover from years of abuse. — William E. Walsh

Destiny gets compressed, you know, into just that small fraction of a second you have right in front of you at any one time. And there's nothing romantic about keeping your head down to avoid getting shot, or trying to save a friend who's been injured, or coming face to face with a creature who is as smart and mean and as terrified of dying as you are, and who wants to make sure that if someone is left on the ground there, it's you and not it. — John Scalzi

I have a friend who actually told me that she'd rather be dead than be fat. This is a woman who, if I order a sandwich at lunch, she'll order a salad. If I order a salad, she'll order half a cantaloupe. If I order half a cantaloupe, she'll order a cup of coffee. This bizarre contest continues until she's down to sucking on a mint-flavored toothpick. At this rate, her preference for dying over being fat could be a reality sooner than she thinks. — Joy Behar

Death was a friend, and sleep was Death's brother. — John Steinbeck

They died crying in their minds like little babies. They forgot the thing they were fighting for the thing they were dying for. They thought about things a man can understand. They died yearning for the face of a friend. They died whimpering for the voice of a mother a father a wife a child. They died with their hearts sick for one more look at the place where they were born please god just one more look. They died moaning and sighing for life. They knew what was important. They knew that life was everything and they died with screams and sobs. They died with only one thought in their minds and that was I want to live I want to live I want to live. — Dalton Trumbo

Write about "leaving." Approach it any way you want. Write about your divorce, leaving the house this morning, or a friend dying. — Natalie Goldberg

And miss the final journey? Never! I wish to take notes on dying, my friend. To my knowledge I have never done it before. — Mary Victoria

I've never written a book, except my first, without at some point considering that I might die before it was completed. This is all part of the superstition, the folklore, the mania of the business, the fetishistic fuss ... Dying in the middle of a wo(rd), or three-fifths of the way through a nov(el). My friend the nov(el)ist Brian Moore used to fear this as well, though for an extra reason: "Because some bastard will come along and finish it for you." Here is a novelist's would-you-rather. Would you rather die in the middle of a book, and have some bastard finish it for you, or leave behind a work in progress that not a single bastard in the whole world was remotely interested in finishing? — Julian Barnes

The doctor nodded. "Nemesis is bonded to you now. She'll live and breathe for you all the days of your life."
"I like her, too," Donia declared, smiling at me. "I think we'll become friends."
The doctor laughed softly. "Friends, yes. I promise you, Nemesis will be the best friend you'll ever have. She'll love you until your dying day."
And at last, I had a name for this feeling, this strange but wonderful new sensation within me - this was what the Impyrean Matriarch had promised me.
This was love. — S.J. Kincaid