Dying People Quotes & Sayings

People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units. — Don DeLillo

Proud families spend fortunes on a one-day wedding ceremony for a marriage that may or may not last, while on the same day, in the same village, people are dying of starvation. A tourist makes a show of giving a ten-dollar tip to the doorman for pushing a revolving door, and the next minute he's bargaining for a five-dollar T-shirt from a vendor who is trying to support her baby and family. — Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse

I need the money, people are very coy about money, and the ladies arent just coy, they are sci fi about money ...
... people ask, well, dont sweet things happen? yes, indeed, many sweet things, but sweet doesnt keep you from dying, making love doesnt keep you from dying unless you get paid, writing doesnt keep you from dying unless you get paid, being wise doesnt keep you from dying unless you get paid, facts are facts, being poor makes you face facts which also does not keep you from dying. — Andrea Dworkin

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

It didn't have to be a newfound respect for the craft, I knew that it's notoriously difficult and frightens a lot of people off. I don't think anyone knows quite who to attribute it to, but the dying actor who says: "dying is easy, comedy is hard." I hear it. — Colin Firth

You wander through this city, and wonder if anything you do will make up for the horror that keeps the world turning. To live, you rip your own heart from your chest and hide it in a box somewhere, along with everything you ever learned about justice, compassion, mercy. You throw yourself into games to mark the time. And if you yearn for something different: what would you change? Would you bring back the blood, the dying cries, the sucking chest wounds? The constant war? So we're caught between two poles of hypocrisy. We sacrifice our right to think of ourselves as good people, our right to think our life is good, our city is just. And so we and our city both survive. — Max Gladstone

Because the biological mechanisms that affect our health and well-being are so dynamic, when people change their diet and lifestyle, they usually feel so much better, so quickly; it reframes the reason for changing from fear of dying to joy of living. Also, the support that patients give each other is a powerful motivator. — Dean Ornish

When the forms of an old culture are dying,
the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure. — Rudolf Bahro

Medicine and society have entered into a folie a deaux regarding medicine's importance in gigantic population ills. We believe that genetics and pills and enzymes bring us health. We wait for the dementia cure (the obesity cure, the diabetes cure) rather than changing our society to decrease incidence and severity. We slash social welfare programs and access to GPs and ignore the downstream effect this will have on future generations.
To reduce non-communicable disease, the actions we need to take are societal: make it easier for people to move and eat well, strengthen education, promote community participation and meaningful work. Our collective delusion is that we can have all the benefits such a society would bring without the structural supports necessary to bring it into being, that we can attain health by inventing and buying drugs.
It is hard to know which is the more utopian vision: magic pills or a society serious about prevention. — Karen Hitchcock

Throw your hands and pull up those in the valley to the hill. However, press your feet on the ground so hard that you don't fall into the same valley together. Some people's helping hands became their grave digging tools! — Israelmore Ayivor

"What for?" I said. "What for, Tante Lou? He treated me the same way he treated her. He wants me to feel guilty, just as he wants her to feel guilty. Well, I'm not feeling guilty, Tante Lou. I didn't put him there. I do everything I know how to do to keep people like him from going there. He's not going to make me feel guilty." — Ernest Gaines

They always think one
commits suicide for a reason. But it is quite possible to commit suicide for two reasons. No, that never occurs to them. So what is the good of dying
intentionally, of sacrificing yourself to the idea you want people to have of you? Once you are dead, they will take advantage of it to attribute idiotic or
vulgar motives to your action. Martyrs,cherami, must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood
never! Besides,
let us not beat about the bush; I love life
that is my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life. Such avidity has
something plebeian about it, don't you think? — Albert Camus

Frankly, out in America, you get the feeling that America is dying. And along its highways and byways, the country seems less ready to leap into the future than it is already clinging to a sepia-toned past when America stood as the unencumbered Big Boy in a Manichean world of good and evil, capitalists and Commies. Even the neon oasis-pods of the interstate - the perpetual clusters of Wendy's, McDonald's, Denny's, and Burger King - are crowded with people strangely reclaiming bygone days, connecting themselves to some prior eating experience, reveling in the familiar. We gas — Michael Paterniti

People hated and killed each other back then. Now even those who survived are dying, leaving this world one by one. Unless we find a way to forgive one another, none of us will ever be able to see each other again. (2007: 88) — Hwang Sok-yong

We are born haunted, he said, his voice weak, but still clear. Haunted by our fathers and mothers and daughters, and by people we don't remember. We are haunted by otherness, by the path not taken, by the life unlived. We are haunted by the changing winds and the ebbing tides of history. And even as our own flame burns brightest, we are haunted by the embers of the first dying fire. But mostly, said Lord Jim, we are haunted by ourselves. — Jonathan Evison

Life is so precious because it's short. Even the most resilient people are fragile. Life isn't about dying or not dying. It's about living well. Living so you can be proud and happy. — Ilona Andrews

Music is where I feel loved. Past, present. Music is where I give love. Why do I continue to enter rooms of strangers who are suffering, dying, cursing, diminished, unwashed? Because of love. I don't see hollow faces, blank stares, decaying bodies. I see the faces of God in these human beings. Precious people with stories, contributions, presence. Music pays tribute to their lives, often coaxes out their life stories, gives them worth, but most of all loves them when they are lost, weak, vulnerable. — Robin Russell Gaiser

Funny how gentle people get with you once you're dead. — William Holden

Millions of people walked through their lives numb, dying to feel something, to feel alive. To be chosen by Cordova for a film was an opportunity for just that, not simply for fame and fortune, but to leave their old selves behind like discarded clothes. — Marisha Pessl

The library door is already open when I dash in, but the room is empty. Books line shelves three floors high, and windows just as tall let in rays of dying sunlight. Three balconies wrap above me and a grand piano stands in the center of the bottom level, but there are no people, not even a servant dusting old books in a corner. — Sara Raasch

That's pretty amazing, the countries thing," I said.
"Yeah, everybody's got a talent. I can memorize things. And you can...?"
"Urn, I know a lot of people's last words." It was an indulgence, learning last words. Other people had chocolate;
I had dying declarations.
"Example?"
"I like Henrik Ibsen's. He was a playwright." I knew a lot about Ibsen, but I'd never read any of his plays. I didn't
like reading
plays. I liked reading biographies.
"Yeah, I know who he was," said Chip.
"Right, well, he'd been sick for a while and his nurse said to him,
'You seem to be feeling better this morning/ and Ibsen looked at her and said, 'On the contrary,' and then he
died."
Chip laughed. "That's morbid. But I like it. — John Green

THE FINE LINE BETWEEN FEAR AND COURAGE "I tell my kids, what is the difference between a hero and a coward? What is the difference between being yellow and being brave? No difference. Only what you do. They both feel the same. They both fear dying and getting hurt. The man who is yellow refuses to face up to what he's got to face. The hero is more disciplined and he fights those feelings off and he does what he has to do. But they both feel the same, the hero and the coward. People who watch you judge you on what you do, not how you feel." - CUS D'AMATO, LEGENDARY BOXING TRAINER — Ben Horowitz

I have charity work that I do. I started my own charity, the Friends of the Prostate, and I'm also working on awareness of the deviated septum. I do this because not many people are interested in it. There's also Save the Funnel-web - they're dying out. — Barry Humphries

Homicide through gun violence is the leading cause of death among young African American males in the United States. If people look a certain way, they have a higher tendency of dying, of having their lives taken away. — Ryan Coogler

I think that the dying pray at the last not please but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks. — Annie Dillard

I remember, on the medevac helicopter, I said to myself, "I am not f - - g dying in Afghanistan." People talk about having flashbacks; I began having flash-forwards. I began thinking of all the things I still wanted to do. — Giles Duley

Death is a long process," Archer says. "Your body is just the first part of you that croaks." Meaning: Beyond that, your dreams have to die. Then your expectations. And your anger about investing a lifetime in learning shit and loving people and earning money, only to have all that crap come to basically nothing. Really, your physical body dying is the easy part. Beyond that, your memories must die. And your ego. Your pride and shame and ambition and hope, all that Personal Identity Crap can take centuries to expire. — Chuck Palahniuk

Why are you afraid of death? Is it perhaps because you do not know how to live? If you knew how to live fully, would you be afraid of death? If you loved the trees, the sunset, the birds, the falling leaf; if you were aware of men and women in tears, of poor people, and really felt love in your heart, would you be afraid of death? Would you? Don't be persuaded by me. Let us think about it together. You do not live with joy, you are not happy, you are not vitally sensitive to things; and is that why you ask what is going to happen when you die? Life for you is sorrow, and so you are much more interested in death. You feel that perhaps there will be happiness after death. But that is a tremendous problem, and I do not know if you want to go into it. After all, fear is at the bottom of all this - fear of dying, fear of living, fear of suffering. If you cannot understand what it is that causes fear and be free of it, then it does not matter very much whether yo u are living or dead. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

So many things that are so dramatic or exciting when you read about them actually happen so simply and quietly. We humans like to consider ourselves important to creation and to the world, and we expect that whenever death comes it should be with a crash of thunder and wild shouts or something, or with soft music around and people looking grave and serious. We always have it that way in the theatre because it makes us believe in our importance. Most of our life is a matter of dressing ourselves up to believe in just that, dressing ourselves in attractive clothes, in titles, in reputations. Actually, at base we all realize that we're just a frightened bundle of animals, still afraid of the unknown, and still afraid of thousands of things that can separate us from life, and trying to shield ourselves from our own smallness. — Louis L'Amour

He killed himself because he couldn't bear ... Ah, cher ami, how poor in invention men are! They always think one commits suicide for a reason. But it's quite possible to commit suicide for two reasons. No, that never occurs to them. So what's the good of dying intentionally, of sacrificing yourself to the idea you want people to have of you? — Albert Camus

Up on the stage people appeared to be dying left right and centre, and for most of the performance I had quite felt like leaping up there and joining them. — Ali McNamara

There are still thousands of people dying every year in Laos, mostly children and farmers, from unexploded anti-personnel ordnance that the U.S. simply saturated much of the land with, especially in the Plain of Jars. There actually is a British engineering team trying to remove some of these things, which are much worse than land mines. — Noam Chomsky

People are dying and my generation just does not care. Including me. But I want to care. I really want to. I want to care so bad. — Charles Yu

Sometimes, the Lord just takes blessed people because they've filled their purpose early. Everyone plays their own song. They sing their story to the world and leave behind a melody of memories. Sometimes ... their song is cut short and ends too early. But that doesn't mean their music was any less sweet or that they left any less of an impression. — Linda Kage

People are dying to tell you their secrets; it's just a matter of getting the conversation going in the right direction. If you just let people fill the silence, they will let you the most extraordinary things. I sometimes wonder if afterward they remember what they've said. — Charles McCarry

I'll not forget that day nor the message of the Christian church that we celebrate each death as an Easter, each dying as a living, each soul, no matter how poor or sinful, as the child of royalty. At its best, the church treats people as beings of eternal worth, no less at their dying than at their birth, no less in their sins than in their virtue, no less for one than for another. — Carl Scovel

Following this logic, the millions of people who perished during epidemics of influenza in the early twentieth century should have really pulled themselves together, instead of making all this fuss and dying in the most inconsiderate manner. — Claire D. Simone

People who think dying is the is the worst thing don't know a thing about life. — Sue Monk Kidd

People are always dying. Its a terrible habit they have and nothing you can do will change that. — Sally Green

Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, dear reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary. And cultivate distrust of the colour pink. Pink is taken as the colour of innocence, the colour of childhood, but as it spills across the water in the light of the dying sun, do not fall into its pretty path. There, right underneath, lies a bottomless graveyard of children, mothers and men. I shudder to imagine all the Africans rocking in the deep. Every time I have sailed the seas, I have had the sense of gliding over the unburied.
Some people call the sunset a creation of extraordinary beauty, and proof of God's existence. But what benevolent force would bewitch the human spirit by choosing pink to light the path of a slave vessel? Do not be fooled by the pretty colour, and do not submit to its beckoning. — Lawrence Hill

Dying is all about letting go and letting be, as is the awareness of God. People who have traveled far along the contemplative path are often aware that the sense of separation from God is itself pasted up out of a mass of thoughts and feelings. When the mind comes into its own stillness and enters the silent land, the sense of separation goes. Union is seen to be the fundamental reality and separateness a highly filtered mental perception. — Martin Laird

A great tragedy is occurring. Millions of people are dying prematurely. These people are killing themselves and they don't even know it. — Tim Loy

As a young cavalry officer out of St-Cyr, de Mun first became acquainted with the lives and problems of the poor through the charitable work of the Society of St-Vincent de Paul in his garrison town. During the Commune, as an aide to General Galliffet, who commanded the battalion that fired on the insurgent Communards, he saw a dying man brought in on a litter. The guard said he was an "insurgent," whereupon the man, raising himself up, cried with his last strength, "No, it is you who are the insurgents!" and died. In the force of that cry directed at himself, his uniform, his family, his Church, de Mun had recognized the reason for civil war and vowed himself to heal the cleavage. He blamed the Commune on "the apathy of the bourgeois class and the ferocious hatred for society of the working class." The responsible ones, he had been told by one of the St. Vincent brothers, were "you, the rich, the great, the happy ones of life who pass by the people without seeing them." To — Barbara W. Tuchman

The idea that a game is anything more than a game ... You know, there are people who are basically unbalanced who are going to misuse a game and have bad results. If a golfer who insists on playing during a lightning storm gets hit by a stroke of lightning and is killed nobody says, 'There's golfers dying by the droves being hit by lightning!' You can overdo what you really like, and if you're unbalanced you go overboard. — Gary Gygax

But you'll see, you can feel time on the wind it whips up as it passes. We don't worry about time or the wind. Nothing can touch us any more. As long as people remember us, we are here. Anyway, it's the wind that tells us, lets us know about the thigs we've left behind. — Tahar Ben Jelloun

She was not suicidal; that is what people never managed to grasp. Cutting relieved the pressure and stood as some enduring demonstration of her emotion, some way to be in control of a body that could toss her about with seizures. It was borderline artistic to mark her body, chiaroscuro designs in blood. Dying is the last thing she would want, like any healthy organism. A little pain, a small invoked sting trailing her arm, brought her much closer to grounded when she could not keep her head from racing, her thoughts from consuming her with obsession. An ounce of liquid weight loss and she could go back to being herself again. Usually. — Thomm Quackenbush

I'm oftentimes asked, What difference does it make to America if people are dying of malaria in a place like Ghana? It means a lot. It means a lot morally, it means a lot from a
it's in our national interest. — George W. Bush

I would far prefer to be told simply to go and die. It's straightforward. But people almost never say, "Die!" Paltry, prudent hypocrites! — Osamu Dazai

They loved scenes of righteous Godly vengeance on sinful mankind. They loved to show God's chosen people safe from harm, watching with happy faces as they were proved right to the world. But they never showed the aftermath. They never showed weeping humans, crushed and dying in pools of their own fluids. Young men smashed into piles of red flesh. A young woman cut in half because she was passing through a hatchway when catastrophe hit. This was Armageddon. This is what it looked like. Blood and torn flesh and cries for help. — James S.A. Corey

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time ... — Sylvia Plath

There's no greater feeling than people coming up to me and going, "Man, my father was dying, and we went to see Rush Hour, and it was the greatest night we had in years together. We sat in that theater and we laughed for two hours without stopping. That was just a great memory that I had before my father died." — Brett Ratner

It's peculiar to me,' she said, 'that everybody pays so much attention to living and so little to dying. Why are these high-powered scientists always screwing around trying to prolong life instead of finding pleasant ways to end it? There must be a hell of a lot of people in the world like me--who want to die but haven't got the guts. — Horace McCoy

On game days, I could be in the worst mood imagiable-a really bad mood. But sometimes, I'd get a call from the Make-A-Wish Foundation-there would be people, sometimes kids, who anted to meet me before they died. And the foundation would call on a game day and say, "There's kid dying here whose last wish is to see you. Can you just come and see him?" I'd get there and sometimes the kid would be comatose. One day, a kid woke up for a split second and smiled at me. I was told he'd been hanging on. The mom and dad called me later and said, "I don't know what yu did to him, but those few moments were wonderful." And I cried all the way to the game, just cried my eyes out.
It's very scary. It's uplifting, too, but so scary. And then ... I'm bitching because my breakfast is cold? — Charles Barkley

When you're dying, the unicorn up in heaven gets a note from an angel telling her there's a person who's going to need a ride up soon. The unicorn finds out what the person likes. Favorite foods and books, colors and activities, pets and games. She gets a room ready for him, or her, near people who she knows they'll enjoy being with, maybe other friends and family who have died before.
When the unicorn is done, she jumps off of heaven's perch, flies through the blue sky, around the clouds, over any rainbows, and down to the person. She's invisible to everyone. She patiently waits. When the person dies, she gathers them up on her back, using her hooves and horn. All of a sudden, they sit up straight and smile, they laugh, because they're on top of a unicorn and alive again. They hold on tight to her golden reins and the unicorn takes them to their new home, where they're happy. — Cathy Lamb

People think I watch TV too much, but they are wrong. There is a huge difference between merely "watching" TV and learning to respond aggressively to it. The difference, for most people, is the difference between the living and dying of their own brains. — Hunter S. Thompson

the worry habit is reinforcing in the same sense that superstitions are. Since people worry about many things that have a very low probability of actually occurring - a loved one dying in a plane crash, going bankrupt, and the like - there is, to the primitive limbic brain at least, something magical about it. Like an amulet that wards off some anticipated evil, the worry psychologically gets the credit for preventing the danger it obsesses about. The — Daniel Goleman

When people are dying, they call their old enemies and try to forgive them and try to be forgiven by them. They call their old friends and affirm their love for them, as well as detach themselves from them, and they try to get into as free a space as they can so they're really ready to go. They give away all their possessions and are as generous as possible. They give up old hatreds and grudges, and that's a wise intuitive thing, because it's much freer to live like that. — Robert Thurman

O Tree of God - Tree of Life, In the gift of your shade, I stand, my heart raised to your Creator. Your branches call me to reach out in all directions to many people. Your branches remind me of the sheltering arms of God. Your roots call me to be rooted in all that is good and nourishing. Your roots ask me to spend time in the ground of my being. Teach me, like you, to praise God in the silence of my being. Help me to surrender unnecessary words. Draw me, like a magnet, into the abiding love of God. And when it is time for me to die, teach me to die gracefully and joyfully. Teach me to let go as you let go of your leaves each autumn. In living and in dying, teach me to praise God by living well and dying well. May it come to pass! — Macrina Wiederkehr

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

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

A sematary," I say. "A what?" Viola says, looking round at all the square stones marking out their graves. Must be a hundred, maybe two, in orderly rows and well-kept grass. Settler life is hard and it's short and lotsa New World people have lost the battle.
"It's a place for burying dead folk," I say.
Her eyes widen. "A place for doing what?"
"Don't people die in space?" I ask.
"Yeah," she says. "But we burn them. We don't put them in holes." She crosses her arms around herself, mouth and forehead frowning, peering around at the graves. "How can this be sanitary? — Patrick Ness

(Please excuse my lack of depth; I'm a generalist, not a specialist. Why bother learning all that biochemistry stuff - or how to design a building, or conn a boat, or balance accounts, or solve equations, or comfort the dying - when you can get other people to do all that for you in exchange for a blow job?) — Charles Stross

I was teaching in one of the universities while the country was suffering from a severe famine. People were dying of hunger, and I felt very helpless. As an economist, I had no tool in my tool box to fix that kind of situation. — Muhammad Yunus

Of course there are people who think of 'heaven' as a kind of pie-in-the-sky dream of an afterlife to make the thought of dying less awful. No doubt that's a problem as old as the human race. — N. T. Wright

So - people a thousand years from now ... This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying. — Thornton Wilder

The only thing I consider appalling would be to suddenly become a vegetable and a burden on other people. A soul slowly dying out, trapped in a body in which the insides gradually sabotage me - that, I think, would be terrifying. — Ingmar Bergman

I thought: "Perhaps Adelma is the city where you arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known. This means I, too, am dead." And I also thought: "This means the beyond is not happy. — Italo Calvino

Consumptive patients, with lungs incompetent to perform the duties of lungs, people with defective hearts that break down under excitement of the circulation, people with any constitutional flaw preventing the due fulfillment of the conditions of life are continually dying out and leaving behind those fit for the climate, food, and habits to which they are born ... And thus is the race kept free from vitiation. — Herbert Spencer

,dying seems like the greatest weakness, and in a world where people say you're lazy for not shaving your legs, then being dead seems like the ultimate character flaw.
Chapter I. — Chuck Palahniuk

Strangely, the subsequent AIDS works that have become iconic in our culture rarely mention the movement, or the engaged community of lovers, but both formations were inseparable from the crisis itself. Now, looking back, I fear that the story of the isolated helpless homosexual was one far more palatable to the corporations who control the reward system in the arts.The more truthful story of the American mass - abandoning families, criminal governments, indifferent neighbors - is too uncomfortable and inconvenient to recall. The story of how gay people who were despised, had no rights, and carried the burden of a terrible disease came together to force the country to change against its will, is apparently too implicating to tell. Fake tales of individual heterosexuals heroically overcoming their prejudices to rescue helpless dying men with AIDS was a lot more appealing to the powers that be, but not at all true. — Sarah Schulman

Some are bound to die young. By dying young a person stays young in people's memory. If he burns brightly before he dies, his brightness shines for all time. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is all about perspective. To healthy people, I seem very sick. But to dying people, I seem healthy. — Sean Waller

I'd write and read and let myself, a little at a time, step down into myself- like a stairway down into a dark, intimate kiva- where the work of vigil is taking place, the necessary attending. I imagine there's a little fire burning in there, a few steadily glowing embers, and a quiet chant going on, from me, from some singer in me, honoring and accompanying W's soul, which is with him as he is making his passage..there's a leavetaking in process, a movement towards increasing simplicity, away from complexity, activity, expectation. The bout of paranoia, with a childlike quality of being threatened, seems part of that-like a day or two when he couldn't just let go and float on the energies of other people, who are bearing him up-but had to doubt them, struggle. So much better when he can trust and float. There's enough love around him to carry him now ... — Mark Doty

I am not afraid of dying. I have lived longer than most people in the world. What scares me is to have a body that works but a brain that is waving goodbye. If that happens, I hope I die quickly. — Henning Mankell

More and more, I felt that I was meeting people like Lee who didn't at all seem part of this modern world and this moment in time - the world of petty aggravations and obligations and boundaries, a time of bored cynicism - because how they lived and what they lived for was so optimistic. They sincerely loved something, trusted in the perfectibility of some living thing, lived for a myth about themselves and the idea of adventure, were convinced that certain things were really worth dying for, believed that they could make their lives into whatever they dreamed. — Susan Orlean

When I worked as a prosecutor in Richmond, Virginia in the 1990s, that city, like so much of America, was experiencing horrific levels of violent crime. But to describe it that way obscures an important truth: for the most part, white people weren't dying; black people were dying. Most white people could drive around the problem. — James Comey

I could never feel like that about any public issue. Sometimes I wish I could. For me, if I'm honest, politics is background, news, almost entertainment. Something you switch on and off, like the TV. What I really worry about, what I can't switch off at will is, oh, sex, or dying or losing my hair. Private things. We're private people, aren't we, our generation? We make a clear distinction between private and public life; and the important things, the things that make us happy or unhappy are private. Live is private. Property is private. Parts are private. That's why the young radicals call for fucking in the streets. It's not just a cheap shock-tactic. It's a serious revolutionary proposition. — David Lodge

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death. — Socrates

It was such a dismal time in Japan. It almost seemed as if they were dying as a people, their economy in tatters, the population dwindling, the remaining citizens isolated and adrift. Had they been wrong about everything? Kenzo wondered. The power of consensus and obligation, the imperatives of racial purity and harmony? — Don Lee

I read in some book that if you try to hold people back too much when they're dying it keeps them from being reborn as a Buddha, — Banana Yoshimoto

Eating, drinking, dying - three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference. — Aldous Huxley

They don't actually see the real world, where 95% of the people with HIV are not treated and are dying. And even though we have some blue sky now in our country, the sky could become cloudy again very soon. — Luc Montagnier

I was born in the middle of the Second World War when the United States dropped their atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when millions of people were dying in concentration camps, when half the planet were colonies that belonged to empires. The word feminism didn't exist. And in my lifetime I have seen all these things improved, changed. We are more connected, more informed. We can fight against stuff together in ways we couldn't before. — Isabel Allende

Comtemporary pulpits feel that to bring up dying is just not as relevant as telling people how to live, marry, succeed, relate, or become a winner. — Calvin Miller

I like sort of esoteric and weird Twitter jokes. But I actually unfollow people if they make jokes about a celebrity's death within the first two minutes of that celebrity dying. — Timothy Simons

Fate is but a dying wish ... Of a world that is beyond control. Like a single lotus flower, the future blossoms; Upon its petals, two people shall be free. — Youka Nitta

All those religions
they contradict each other on every point but every one of them is filled with ways to help people to be brave enough to laugh even though they know they are dying. — Robert A. Heinlein

It happened, you see, after the war, when I saw people making money while the others were dying in the trenches. You saw it and you couldn't do anything about it. Then later I was at the League of Nations, and there I saw the light. I really saw the world was ruled by the Golden Calf, by Mammon! Oh, no kidding! Implacably. Social consciousness certainly came to me late. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

You're wise to be cautious. People taking the last rites have a way of dying on cue. — Kurt Vonnegut

It is well nigh impossible to talk to anyone about death, I find. Most people seem deeply embarrassed. It is like when I was a girl and nobody could talk about sex. We all did it, but nobody talked about it! We have now grown out of that silly taboo, and we must grow out of our inhibitions surrounding death. They have arisen largely because so few people see death any more, even though it is quite obviously in our midst. A cultural change must come, a new atmosphere of freedom, which will only happen if we open our closed minds. — Jennifer Worth

My biggest nightmare is I'm driving home and get sick and go to hospital. I say: 'Please help me.' And the people say: 'Hey, you look like ... ' And I'm dying while they're wondering whether I'm Barbra Streisand. — Barbra Streisand

He knew all the stories. His grandfather had given them to him when he sat between the old man's knees as a child. It was a comfort, though, to hear them again. To call them to mind. All these stories that made him more than just a vintner and more than just a man who carried a spear whom other men were willing to follow. More than just a man who lay dying. The stories made him one of the People, who would never die. — Stant Litore

He wished he understood where they come from: all the terrorists, religious revolutionists
and hate-criminals. Did terrorizing entire communities of people help them sleep sound at
night? Did it make them happy? Or are they just in for the attention? Have they nothing to
lose? Or are they simply bored and spit balling issues that have always been there? Can all
global acts of violence and terror be summed up, as just a whole other level of a mixture of
bad parenting, psychological disorders and unattended anger management issues? Can they
be treated, medically or spiritually? Are we waiting for the birth of another great visionary
like Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ or Prophet Muhammad, who will 'make the world a better
place'? Or are we just too soaked in the idea that religion is a dying concept and spirituality
is overrated? Is it too late? Are we too far behind? He wanted to know. — Thisuri Wanniarachchi

Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying. — Theodor W. Adorno

You have a morbid aversion to dying. You probably resent the fact that you're at war and might get your head blown off any second."
"I more than resent it, sir. I'm absolutely incensed."
"You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don't like bigots, bullies, snobs, or hypocrites. Subconsciously there are many people you hate."
"Consciously, sir, consciously," Yossarian corrected in an effort to help. "I hate them consciously."
"You're antagonistic to the idea of being robbed, exploited, degraded, humiliated, or deceived. Misery depresses you. Ignorance depresses you. Persecution depresses you. Violence depresses you. Corruption depresses you. You know, it wouldn't surprise me if you're a manic-depressive!"
"Yes, sir. Perhaps I am."
"Don't try to deny it."
"I'm not denying it, sir," said Yossarian, pleased with the miraculous rapport that finally existed between them. "I agree with all you've said. — Joseph Heller

Don't risk your life for those that doesn't love your life, lest you end up in regrets if not death. — Michael Bassey Johnson

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

Those people who believe in previous lives always think they were dukes or queens or something, ignoring the fact that most people back then spent their whole lives up to their knees in shit before dying of toothless old age at thirty. — Tad Williams

I was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don't postpone your dreams. — Abraham Verghese

I think the institute of marriage is a noble thing. The idea of a partner for life is incredibly romantic. But now we're living to 100. A hundred years ago people were dying at age 37. Til death do us part was a much different deal. — Debra Messing