Quotes & Sayings About Dying For Someone Else

I don't think there are any rules for how you're supposed to act when someone you care about dies, sweetheart. I think you just have to figure it out as you go along. Sometimes you'll feel like crying, sometimes you won't, sometimes you'll be raging at him for dying on you. You just have to remember that all of those are OK. So is whatever else your head comes up with." "On — Tana French

I'm getting as bored with dying as with everything else, he thought.
'It's a bore,' he said out loud.
'What is, my dear?'
'Anything you do too bloody long. — Ernest Hemingway,

The Marquis De Sade said that the most important experiences a man can have are those that take him to the very limit; that is the only way we learn, because it requires all our courage. When a boss humiliates an employee, or a man humiliates his wife, he is merely being cowardly or taking his revenge on life, they are people who have never dared to look into the depths of their soul, never attempted to know the origin of that desire to unleash the wild beast, or to understand that sex, pain and love are all extreme experiences. Only those who know those frontiers know life; everything else is just passing the time, repeating the same tasks, growing old and dying without ever having discovered what we are doing here. — Paulo Coelho

No incident, however seemingly trivial, is unimportant in the scheme of things. One event leads to another, which triggers something else and before you know where you are, the ramifications spread far and wide throughout history, echoing down the ages; getting fainter and fainter but never completely dying away. They talk of the harmony of the spheres, but history is a symphony of echoes, every little action has huge consequences. They're not always apparent and sometimes, in our game, sometimes effect comes before cause, not after. It makes your head ache. — Jodi Taylor

We only came close to dying six or seven times, which I thought was pretty good. Once, I lost my grip and found myself dangling by one hand from a ledge fifty feet above the rocky surf. But I found another handhold and kept climbing. A minute later Annabeth hit a slippery patch of moss and her foot slipped. Fortunately, she found something else to put it against. Unfortunately, that something was my face.
"Sorry," she murrmured.
"S'okay," I grunted, though I'd never really wanted to know what Annabeth's sneaker tasted like. — Rick Riordan

Thou, Everlasting Strength, hast set Thyself forth to bear our burdens. May we bear Thy cross, and bearing that; find there is nothing else to bear; and touching that cross, find that instead of taking away our strength, it adds thereto. Give us faith for darkness, for trouble, for sorrow, for bereavement, for disappointment; give us a faith that will abide though the earth itself should pass away
a faith for living, a faith for dying. — Henry Ward Beecher

It's funny how books can change you. You open up a book and one minute you are who you've always been, then you read some random passage and you become someone else. — Brian Joyce

If you can take something as ultimately frivolous [as a comic book] in the cosmic scale of things in the universe and what's important - people being born and dying and everything else that's gonna happen today - if one gay kid in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, reads an X-Men comic and feels for a second like maybe they're not entirely alone in the world - that's amazing. I'll take it. Whatever size victory that is, I will take. — Matt Fraction

Life and death appear more certainly ours than whatsoever else; and yet hardly can that be called ours, which comes without our knowledge, and goes without it. — Walter Savage Landor

The audience has spoken, they want stories. They're dying for them. They're rooting for us to give them the right thing and they will talk about it, binge on it, carry it with them on the bus, and to the hairdresser, force it on their friends, tweet, blog, Facebook, make fan pages, silly gifs and god knows what else about it. — Kevin Spacey

To be honest, I keep wishing we could all talk. Chew the fat. And, yes, I know that wishing is another symptom of hope, but I can't help it. As we amble along, trudging over steaming brimstone beds of sulfur and coal, I want to ask if anyone else feels an intense sense of shame. By dying, do they feel as if they've disappointed everyone who ever bothered to love them? After all the effort that so many people made to raise them, to feed and teach them, do Archer or Leonard or Babette feel a crushing sense of having failed their loved ones? Do they worry that dying constitutes the biggest sin they could possibly commit? — Chuck Palahniuk

Killing was easy. Dying was something else. — Jean-Claude Izzo

Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to nothing. Despite precautions. If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. This old so dying woman. So dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else. Where no more precautions to be taken. No precautions possible. Cooped up there with the rest. Hovel and stones. The lot. And the eye. How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be. Gently gently. On. Careful. — Samuel Beckett

Sleep would be so welcome. A warm blanket of black to erase everything else. Sleep without dreams. I've heard people talk about the sleep of the dead. Is that what death would feel like? The nicest, warmest, heaviest never-ending nap? If that's what it's like, I wouldn't mind. If that's what dying is like, I wouldn't mind that at all. — Gayle Forman

I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing. — Neil Gaiman

But as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certain fatal cliffside fall - falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else's degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves. — Philip K. Dick

It's not easy-living in a void, living and dying inside your head ... wanting what you want so much that you'd give everything else to get it- but the time still passes, the days go on ... and as long as there's still a tomorrow, there's always a chance. — Kevin Brooks

Darwin's great gift to science was simplifying all life to pure mathematics: your one and only goal on earth is multiplication. Everything you do, every instinct you have, is an evolutionary urge to make babies and leave behind as many copies of yourself as possible. From that perspective, heroism makes no sense. Why risk the grave for someone else if there's no guarantee of a biological payoff? Dying for your own kids: smart. Dying for a rival's? Genetic suicide. — Christopher McDougall

In life, more than in anything else, it isn't easy to end up alive. — Roman Payne

I was finally beginning to perceive that no matter how many dead people I might see, or people at the instant of their death, I would never manage to grasp death, that very moment, precisely in itself. It was one thing or the other: either you are dead, and then in any case there's nothing else to understand, or else you are not yet dead, and in that case, even with the rifle at the back of your head or the rope around your neck, death remains incomprehensible, a pure abstraction, this absurd idea that I, the only living person in the world, could disappear. Dying, we may already be dead, but we never die, that moment never comes, or rather it never stops coming, there it is, it's coming, and then it's still coming, and then it's already over, without ever having come. — Jonathan Littell

Hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are. Being one place and wanting to be somewhere else ... Wanting life to be different from what it is. That's also called leaving without leaving. Dying before you die. It's as if there is a part of you that so rails against being shattered by love that you shatter yourself first. (p. 44) — Geneen Roth

What is it with young women and exclamation points and smiley faces! So afraid of appearing somber, always wanting to appear light and happy and sparkling, even when they are dying inside. Not ever being able to escape the mask that smiles. She wants to write, really write someday. But she is not fully formed. So she does not write. Not really. Unless attempting to live is a form of attempting to write. The agony of becoming. This is what she experiences. The young girl. She would like to be someone, anyone else. She wants, vaguely, to be something more than she is. But she does not know what that is, or how one goes about doing such a thing. — Kate Zambreno

What's it gonna be like, dying? To go to sleep and never, never, never wake up.

Well, a lot of things it's not gonna be like. It's not going to be like being buried alive. It's not going to be like being in the darkness forever.

I tell you what - it's going to be as if you never had existed at all. Not only you, but everything else as well. That just there was never anything, there's no one to regret it - and there's no problem.

Well, think about that for a while - it's kind of a weird feeling when you really think about it, when you really imagine.

[The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are ] — Alan W. Watts

The longer I live and the more experience I have of the world, the more I am convinced that, after all, the one thing that is most worth living for-and dying for, if need be-is the opportunity of making someone else more happy. — Booker T. Washington

This is your war now.' I despised myself for the cheesy sentiment, but what else did I have?
'Some war,' he said dismissively. 'What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Graze, with a predetermined winner. — John Green

Life is more than not dying. Every living creature is born; it grows and dies. The pattern is the same, regardless of the span allotted. You build between the beginning and the end. What you build is yours. Nothing else is. — Tom Deaderick

I told you. There's nothing heroic here, nothing for the writer's pen. I had thoughts like, It's not wartime, why should I have to risk myself while someone else is sleeping with my wife? Why me again, and not him? To be honest, I didn't see any heroes there. I saw nutcases, who didn't care about their own lives, and I had enough craziness myself, but it wasn't necessary. I also have medals and awards - but that's because I wasn't afraid of dying. I didn't care! It was even something of an out. They'd have buried me with honors. And the government would have paid for it. — Svetlana Alexievich

They had pulled me from the hemorrhaging, dying body of my mother and turned me over to the care of the man who was not my father. He had taken me home to their tiny apartment above the old hardware store and done what little he knew to take care of me.
It took less than six weeks for him to realize his mistake. Maybe even less than six hours, but he never abandoned me. He clung to me as though I was the last remnant of some great and powerful love.
And that gave me hope that maybe my mother was really something else and not just some girl who got knocked up by a guy whose name she didn't even know. She was something special, someone worthy of a man's loyalty and devotion.
Rocky Evans — Gwenn Wright

Noah crouched over Gansey's body. He said, for the last time, 'You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not, and so you will live when you should not.'
Gansey died.
'Goodbye,' Noah said. 'Don't throw it away.'
He quietly slid from time. — Maggie Stiefvater

This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don't like at all and would like to avoid. It's not as if the whole thing has not happened before, it's not as if people have not been dying all along and each person left behind is the first person ever left behind in the world. What to make of it? Why can't everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can't go on and on, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it's so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you could survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go. — Jamaica Kincaid

I chose to be a photographer twenty-two years ago, but I don't know that I'd make that choice again. Back in the early eighties, I still thought I was doing okay, trying to order and shape the world with my camera. Now that I know a bit more about living and dying, about our planet and its complex problems, I'm a lot less comfortable with my images of people. Still, I haven't a clue what else to do. — Eugene Richards

There's not a day that goes by, without me thinking of you, dying, in someone else's arms. — Anthony Liccione

Far more powerful than religion, far more powerful than money, or even land or violence, are symbols. Symbols are stories. Symbols are pictures, or items, or ideas that represent something else. Human beings attach such meaning and importance to symbols that they can inspire hope, stand in for gods, or convince someone that he or she is dying. These symbols are everywhere around you. — Lia Habel

I cannot give up on my values and beliefs for the sake of respecting someone else's values and morals. Because those values explain who am I. I prefer struggling and even dying for what I believe and what I don't believe.
Silence is not respect; it is not condemning brutality and cruelty, and neglecting your own existence as human being. I will be killed and so many others because of standing against the fallacy and misleading notion of religions. They will torture us and cut us in pieces alive and even won't stop disrespecting our death bodies; that is how these monsters have been governing for hundreds thousands of years. — M.F. Moonzajer

But there's a million of these
towns that are like factories,
breeding hate and fear that only
the fortunate will never meet
And these zoomed up
kids die like saints, for
someone else's
dollar — Phil Volatile

Well, Espen, you're no drug addict, so why do you beg?"
"Because it's my mission to be mirror for mankind so that they can see which actions are great and which are small."
"And which are great?"
Espen sighed in despair, as though weary of repeating the obvious. "Charity. Sharing and helping your neighbor. The Bible deals with nothing else. In fact, you have to search extremely hard to find anything about sex before marriage, abortion, homosexuality, or a woman's right to speak in public. But, of course, it is easier for Pharisees to talk aloud about subordinate clauses than to describe and perform the great actions the Bible leaves us in no doubt about: You have to give half of what you own to someone who has nothing. Thousands of people are dying every day without hearing the words of God because these Christians will not let go of their earthly goods. I'm giving them a chance to reflect. — Jo Nesbo

I never thought before how strange the notion of a transplant list is. The only list I've ever really given thought to were grocery lists and to-do lists, lists of homework assignments and list of clothes I wanted to buy before school started. I never thought there was such a thing as a list of names, people waiting for new faces. People waiting for someone else to die. — Alyssa B. Sheinmel

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

For the rest of the earth's organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death - and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying - and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering - slowly or quickly - as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we "enjoy" as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are - hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones. — Thomas Ligotti

Dying is only one thing to be sad over ... Living unhappily is something else. — Morrie Schwartz.

My greatest fear in life isn't dying. It's being the source of someone else's suffering. — V.E Schwab

Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciting received analyses of current events. All the Manor residents watched television day and night, informed to the eyeballs like everyone else and rushed for time, toward what end no one asked. Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else's, but their many experiences' having taught them so little irked Lou. One hated tourists, another southerners; another despised immigrants. Even dying, they still held themselves in highest regard. Lou would have to watch herself. For this way of thinking began to look like human nature
as if each person of two or three billion would spend his last vital drop to sustain his self-importance. — Annie Dillard

It happened as it always did, swallowing her swiftly and completely. Intense. Painful. Quick, vivid colors spun beneath her eyelids. Sounds were sharp inside her skull. Fire shot up through her bones. She may have been screaming and she wouldn't have known. There was smoke in her nose, thick and black, and she couldn't breathe. It stung her eyes and licked at her skin. Wood and metal crashed down as skin blistered and popped and she knew this wasn't her, knew it was someone else, someone with a bigger body, bigger boots and darker jeans, and big ol' hands with scars on the fingers. Men's hands. Nails blunt and dirty with oil and grease and burning and- The cars were on fire. Paper burned and curled and rags ignited, the cement floor pockmarked by flash fires. Meat withered in her nose and she realized it was her. Him. Dancing embers blackened and burned bone. He screamed and she hoped she was not. He writhed and she really hoped she was not. He was dying, dead, and- — Angele Gougeon

And suddenly it's very clear to her that every action is an interaction, and everything she has ever done has led to something else, and to another something else, and all of that is ending here, at the bottom of the hill by Highway 34, and she is dying. — Amy Zhang

I'm slightly pessimistic about human nature, about how close it's possible to bond with those around you. Dying alone is a deep fear for most people. I'm not scared of death but I'm scared of dying scared. Maybe everything else in life comes from those two points: the separation anxiety of childhood and the ultimate fear of dying alone. — Jonathan Trigell

Everyone has got their own ideas and they push them and say to hell with everyone else. That's the history of the human race. It got us on top, only now it is pushing us off. The thing is that people will put up with any kind of discomfort, and dying babies, and old age at thirty as long as it has always been that way. Try to get them to change and they fight you, even while they're dying, saying it was good enough for grandpa so it's good enough for me. Bango, dead. — Harry Harrison

Living a life somewhere else in your mind is nothing more than being a prisoner where you are. — Shannon L. Alder

The first purpose of a librarian is to preserve and defend our books. Sometimes, that means dying for them - or making someone else die for them. Tota est scientia. — Rachel Caine

Get a little practice. See what it feels like to drive a knife through my heart. Relish it. Watch the light fade from my eyes, stare into my dying, taste it, see how you like it. There's a moment in death that is unlike anything else in all existence. — Karen Marie Moning

They want to make me feel better about dying. To make me feel better about dying gives them a purpose." You pause. "But I'm fine about dying. And they just can't accept that. It takes away their purpose." You sip your tea and flinch. "And I'm buggered if I'm going to waste what's left of my time pretending to be terrified just to fit into someone else's picture of how things should be. I'd rather watch reruns of Dalziel and Pascoe on UK Gold. — Sarah Pinborough

If a society has no moral foundations then success is a threat. Every successful person thinks everyone else is a failure, and this is the proof of failure. Conquering the world and dying empty-handed on foreign shores is a paradox of such success. — Wasif Ali Wasif

More than anything else a dying person needs to have someone with them. This used to be recognised in hospitals, and when I trained, no one every died alone. However busy the wards, or however short the staff, a nurse was always assigned to sit with a dying person to hold their hand, stroke their forehead, or whisper a few words. Peace and quietness, even reverence for the dying, were expected and assured.
I disagree wholly with the notion that there is no point in staying with an unconscious patient because he or she does not know you are there. I am perfectly certain, though years of experience and observation, that unconsciousness, as we define it, is not a state of knowing. Rather, it is a state of knowing and understanding on a different level that is beyond our immediate experience. — Jennifer Worth

Am I better off living through death,
Or dying an invisible ghost?
Am I better off speaking in silence,
Or screaming so loud no one will hear?
I fake a smile,
But it's killed by you,
I fake a soul,
But that dies, too.
So I fake my life,
What else can I do?
Take me in, spit me out,
And I scream and scream and shout,
But you can't hear my pain,
My blood's nothing but a worthless stain.
I fake a smile,
But it's killed by you.
I fake a soul,
But that dies, too.
So I fake my life,
What else can I do?
And if one day I wake up gone,
Maybe people will see through,
But until then the lies will rule.
And sometimes I think
I'm better off dead,
But then I realize
I already am. — Olivia Rivers

First commandment: there ain't no such thing as "one true way" and the way you find is only good for you, not anybody else, because your interpretation of what you see and feel and understand as the truth is never going to be the same as anyone else's.
Second commandment: the only answers worth having are the ones you find for yourself.
Third commandment: leave the world better than you found it.
Fourth commandment: if it isn't true, going to do some good, or spread a little love around, don't say it, do it, or think it.
Fifth commandment: there are only three things worth living for; love in all it's manifestations, freedom, and the chance to keep humanity going a little while longer. They're the same things worth dying for. And if you aren't willing to die for the things worth living for, you might as well turn in your membership in the human race. — Mercedes Lackey

Rory: Amy. I'm gonna need a little help here.
Amy: Just stop it!
Rory: Just think it through, this will work. This will kill the Angels.
Amy: it will kill you too.
Rory: Will it? River said that this place would be erased from time, never existed. If this place never existed what did I fall off?
Amy: You think you'll just come back to life.
Rory: When don't I?
Amy: Rory -
Rory: Anyway, what else is there? Dying of old age downstairs, never seeing you again? Amy, please. If you love me, then trust me and push.
Amy: I can't.
Rory: You have to!
Amy: Could you? Could you if it was me? Could you do it?
Rory: To save you, I could do anything.
Amy: Prove it.
Rory: But I can't take you too.
Amy: You said we'd come back to life. Money-where-your-mouth-is time.
Rory: Amy, but -
Amy: Shut. Up. Together. Or not at all

-Doctor Who — Steven Moffat

If you have only one passion in life - football - and you pursue it to the exclusion of everything else, it becomes very dangerous. When you stop doing this activity it is as though you are dying. The death of that activity is a death in itself. — Eric Cantona

He was a dying king of the universe and she was the witch inside whose mouth was the last drop of elixir available in the universe. Yes, either that or nothing else could explain the fierce manner in which he attacked her lips — Ray Anyasi

The thing I don't say is: I want to stay alive. the reason I don't say it is because, given that fat folder in front of him, he'd never believe it. And here's something else he'd never believe
I'm fighting to be here in this [crappy], messed-up world. Standing on the ledge of the bell tower isn't about dying. It's about having control. It's about never going to sleep again. — Jennifer Niven

Family is worth dying for, killing for. Fighting for them is all that keeps us going when everything else is gone. — Sabaa Tahir

Art belongs to all times and to all countries; its special benefit is precisely to be still living when everything else seems dying; that is why Providence shields it from too personal or too general passions, and grants it a patient and persevering organization, durable sensibility, and the contemplative sense in which lies invincible faith. — George Sand

That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch. — Donna Tartt

I feel like all this stuff that we make: books and art and music, all of it. There's this energy that circles the world that wants to be made manifest, and it is just looking for someone to come through. And it's dying for you to make it. And if you don't do it, it will go find somebody else. — Elizabeth Gilbert

And if you are waiting for a new book in a long ongoing series, whether from George or from Pat Rothfuss or from someone else ...
Wait. Read the original book again. Read something else. Get on with your life. Hope that the author is writing the book you want to read, and not dying, or something equally as dramatic. And if he paints the house, that's fine.
And ( ... ) in the future, when you see other people complaining that George R.R. Martin has been spotted doing something other than writing the book they are waiting for, explain to them, more politely than I did the first time, the simple and unanswerable truth: George R. R. Martin is not working for you. — Neil Gaiman

They want you to be afraid. They want to believe, and they want to suffer, suffer, only suffer, and they choke the dying man to make them suffer even more, so they'll suffer till their last breath, so that no good moment can ever exist. If the rocks and water rip away your face, it's for the sake of everyone. If you live with the belief that the river will carry away the village, you won't think about anything else. Let the suffering be removed, but not desire, because desire keeps you alive. That's why they're afraid. They are consumed by the fear of desire. They want you to suffer so they won't think about desire. You're maimed when you're little, the fear is hammered into the back of your head. Because desire keeps you alive, they kill it off while you're growing up. — Merce Rodoreda

There are those individuals who die for a cause, and we say they have made the ultimate sacrifice. We call them martyrs, and we never doubt their sincerity.
Yet many others search their entire lives for something - or someone - worth dying for and this is very different. These are the lonely and the desperate, fearful that their lives have no meaning. They yearn for the bullet, if only someone else will pull the trigger. — Ilsa J. Bick

Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story. Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else's. As a kid growing up with books and films and stories instead of friends, that was always the narrative injustice that upset me more than anything else. I felt it sometimes like a sharp pain under the ribcage, the kind of chest pain that lasts for minutes and hours and might be nothing at all or might mean you're slowly dying of something mundane and awful. It's a feeling that hit when I understood how few girls got to go on adventures. I started reading science fiction and fantasy long before Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, before mainstream female leads very occasionally got more at the end of the story than together with the protagonist. Sure, there were tomboys and bad girls, but they were freaks and were usually killed off or married off quickly. Lady hobbits didn't bring the ring to Mordor. They stayed at home in the shire. — Laurie Penny