Quotes & Sayings About Knowing You Are Dying

Outside, with Labor Day having come and gone, summer is fighting a dying battle against the fall air. The leaves are hanging perilously on the trees, knowing full well they're going to make the plunge, clinging on as if they stand a chance not to. The garbage smell that has wafted around us for the better part of August is dissipating, ushered out with the humidity, and in its place a briskness is filtering in, like something you'd smell from a bottle of Tide. — Allison Winn Scotch

BENDER: Dying sucks butt! How do you living beings cope with mortality? LEELA: Violent outbursts. AMY: General sluttiness. FRY: Thanks to denial, I'm immortal! BENDER: Damn it, I'm supposed to be perfect. Inspector 5 gave me his blessing! [He pulls out his scrap of paper and looks at it.] How could he bring me into this world knowing I'm gonna die? ZOIDBERG: So you wish you were never born, maybe? BENDER: Yes, anything less than immortality is a complete waste of time! ZOIDBERG: Then suicide it is. Step into my office. I'll give you a nice Kervorking. This — Courtland Lewis

That philosophy died yesterday, since Hegel or Marx, Nietzsche, or Heidegger - and philosophy should still wander toward the meaning of its death - or that it has always lived knowing itself to be dying ... that philosophy died one day, within history, or that it has always fed on its own agony, on the violent way it opens history by opposing itself to nonphilosophy, which is its past and its concern, its death and wellspring; that beyond the death, or dying nature, of philosophy, perhaps even because of it, thought still has a future, or even, as is said today, is still entirely to come because of what philosophy has held in store; or, more strangely still, that the future itself has a future - all these are unanswerable questions. By right of birth, and for one time at least, these are problems put to philosophy as problems philosophy cannot resolve. — Jacques Derrida

If we go to the depths of anything, we will begin to knock upon something substantial, "real," and with a timeless quality to it. We will move from the starter kit of "belief" to an actual inner knowing. This is most especially true if we have ever (1) loved deeply, (2) accompanied someone through the mystery of dying, (3) or stood in genuine life-changing awe before mystery, time, or beauty. — Richard Rohr

I hear you. Angry words get louder when people do not listen. When a person is ill and dying, it seems as if no one understands what is happening. People are busy doing what is required for physical caretaking, but very often the inner needs of the person are ignored. Even if the dying person makes no sense, which is often the case, knowing that someone hears the words, and the feelings behind the words, and is responding, makes all the difference. — Megory Anderson

From our birth we are all dying, but some of us finish sooner than others. — Raymond E. Feist

I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here. That's what I want to explore. We're all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we're going to die, each of us secretly believing we won't. — Charlie Kaufman

Kiernan told me-" Tears I hadn't even felt coming on suddenly began streaming down my cheeks. I had to swallow a sob before I could continue. "He told me he was sorry for-for loving me. He was s-sorry because," a deep breath helped me regain some of my waning control, "he didn't want to hut me. His biggest fear was the pain he'd cause those he cared about after he was gone. But I think we can all agree that knowing Kiernan for even a single day was worth a lifetime of grief — Jamie Canosa

Knowing about reincarnation helps us relax. It assists us with an understanding of death and dying. Death is not an end, quite the contrary. — Frederick Lenz

You think just knowing about death will keep you from dying? — Richard Bachman

Don't you believe it. I'll tell you what life is. It's gaol, it's not knowing where to get some money. Worms and cataract, cancer. You hear 'em shrieking from the upper windows- children being born. It's dying slowly. — Graham Greene

But when the wizard is onstage as the main character, you have to adopt what I call the Jack Vance Rule. I call it this because Jack Vance is the first author successfully and adroitly to have applied this rule in his The Dying Earth. The Jack Vance Rule is: (1) The wizard has to be able to do something unusual, or else he is not a wizard, (2) he cannot do everything, or else there is no drama; therefore (3) the story teller has to communicate to the reader whatever the dividing line is that separates what the wizard can do from what he cannot do, so that the reader can have a reasonable expectation of knowing what the wizard can and cannot do. — John C. Wright

When you've tired of me," she said softly, precisely, "Apollo will still be my brother. Will still be there for me."
"I'll never tire of you," he said, knowing with every thread of his soul that he spoke the absolute truth.
"Then prove it."
He knew what she asked with such an open and vulnerable face. Something within him shriveled and died ... he'd been on the rack too long for a penance he wasn't sure he could ever entirely pay.
"You know ... " His voice was hoarse, the croaking of a dying man. He licked his lips. "You know why I cannot. — Elizabeth Hoyt

In being with dying, we arrive at a natural crucible of what it means to love and be loved. And we can ask ourselves this: Knowing that death is inevitable, what is most precious today? — Joan Halifax

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

The blizzard seemed to be dying down, and it was now possible to enjoy the sight of the buildings and embankments and bridges smothered in the diamond-dusted whiteness. There's always something soothing in the snow, thought Gabriel, a promise of happiness and absolution, of a new start on a clean sheet. Snow redesigned the streets with hints of another architecture, even more magnificent, more fanciful than it already was, all spires and pinnacles on pale palaces of pearl and opal. All that New Venice should have been reappeared through its partial disappearance. It was as if the city were dreaming about itself and crystallizing both that dream and the ethereal unreality of it. He wallowed in the impression, badly needing it right now, knowing it would not last as he hobbled nearer to his destination. — Jean-Christophe Valtat

In the fall, you don't grieve because the leaves are falling and dying. You say, "Isn't it beautiful!" Well, we're the same way. There are seasons. We all fall sooner or later. It's all so beautiful. And our concepts, without investigation, keep us from knowing this. It's beautiful to be a leaf, to be born, to fall, to give way to the next, to become food for the roots. It's life, always changing its form and always giving itself completely. We all do our part. No mistake. — Byron Katie

Well, we're all dying in increments. I don't mind people knowing what I look like, but I don't want them thinking I'm dying. — Roger Ebert

Their love was equal; on the hills they roamed together, and together they would go back to their cave; and this time too they went into the Lapith's palace side by side and side by side were fighting in the fray. A javelin (no knowing from whose hand) came from the left and wounded Cyllarus, landing below the place where the chest joins neck
slight wound, but when the point was pulled away, cold grew his damaged heart and cold his limbs. Hylonome embraced him as he died, caressed the wound and, putting lips to lips, she tried to stay his spirit as it fled. And when she saw him lifeless, she moaned words that in that uproar failed to reach my ears; and fell upon the spear that pierced her love, and, dying, held her husband in her arms. — Ovid

Consider the mind-set of the anarchist who plans to sacrifice himself for a cause.
For the weeks, months, possibly years leading up to the day he straps a thermal detonator to his chest and executes his task, he has lived in and strengthened by the secret he carries, knowing the toll his act will take. So it has been for the Sith, residing in a secret, sacred place of knowledge for one thousand years, and knowing the toll our acts will take. This is power, Sidious. Where the Jedi, by contrast, are like beings who, as they move among the healthy, keep secret the fact that they are dying of a terminal illness. The true power needn't bare claws or fangs, or announce itself with snarls and throaty barks, Sidious. It can subdue with manacles of shimmer silk, purposeful charisma and political astuteness"
-Darth Plagueis — James Luceno

Real life is so secret that not even I, who am dying of it, have been given the password, I am dying without knowing of what. — Clarice Lispector

Like many doctors, I was frankly traumatized by some of the experiences I had early on in my career. When you lean over a patient in an emergency room, trying to bring a dead body back to life, you are entirely focused on the job at hand. On the other side of a thin curtain, you can hear that person's husband or wife howling and wailing, knowing that the person they loved and lived with for fifty years is dying, begging the staff to do all they can, phoning their children, struggling to speak through tears to form the words and communicate the horror, telling them to come, quickly. I have memories from cubicles that I will never be able to deal with, and they upset me even now. — Ben Goldacre

As a result of 50 years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused not knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits ... the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied. — Ian Fleming

Those who really can receive bread from a stranger and smile in gratitude, can feed many without even realizing it. Those who can sit in silence with their fellow man not knowing what to say but knowing that they should be there, can bring new life in a dying heart. Those who are not afraid to hold a hand in gratitude, to shed tears in grief, and to let a sigh of distress arise straight from the heart, can break through paralyzing boundaries and witness the birth of a new fellowship, the fellowship of the broken. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

The houses have been condemned on Memory Lane
I'm tired of this struggle that leaves everything the same
I've tried so hard to make it work
that I'm dying inside
Well, you can take my past
But you can't have my tomorrow

Promises that remain promises are useless and they're cheap
I wish I could put a price on words so I could make them keep
I put so much faith in you
I lost all my faith in me
Well, you can take my past
But you can't have my tomorrow

I'm giving up on giving up
I can't leave it all to prayer
'Cause the first step in getting better
is knowing what's not there
You said you'd make it better
and that just makes it worse
Well, you can take my past
But you can't have my tomorrow

Yes, I want my life to last
So you can't have my tomorrow
No, you can't have my tomorrow — David Levithan

The light. The light is so bright that all that remains is you and the darkness. You can feel the audience breathing. It's like holding a gun or standing on a precipice and knowing you must jump. It feels slow and fast. It's like dying and being born and fucking and crying. It's like falling in love and being utterly alone with God; you taste your own mouth and feel your own skin and I knew I was alive and I knew who I was and that that wasn't who I'd been up till then. I'd never been so far away but I knew I was home. "I know everything," I thought. — Anonymous

Where have i=I read that at the end, when life, surface upon surface, has become completely encrusted with experience, you know everything, the secret, the power, and the glory, why you were born, why you are dying, and how it all could have been different? You are wise. But the greatest wisdom, at that moment, is knowing that your wisdom is too late. You understand everything when there is no longer anything to understand. — Umberto Eco

Either I'm alive or I'm dying, she said to Daniel. Please don't feel you can't tell me. Which is it?
Which does it feel like? said Daniel. He patted her hand. You're not dead yet. You're a lot more alive than many people.
This isn't good enough for Rennie. She wants something definite, the real truth, one way or the other. Then she will know what she should do next. It's this suspension, hanging in a void, this half-life she can't bear. She can't bear not knowing. She doesn't want to know. — Margaret Atwood

I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I'm dying, until I actually die, I am still living. — Paul Kalanithi

Girl in the wind
blowing wide open
the closed doors of my life -
which way are we going?

Standing against the lurid sky
on the stark brink of ocean
arms outstretched
as if your love and hunger
would embrace the world
and I in my inner room
playing my poetic premutations
can only look and ask the unanswerable.

Brave and cunning I speak to my typewriter
knowing it will not answer back
knowing it will not reply
what I ask and do not want to hear
as you with the vast sunset merge
a multitude of dreams away
uniquely alone and outside of me
in the purity and rarity of this moment
immeasurably beyond my love and my rage

and with the dying call of gulls
the echo resounds:

Girl in the wind
throwing aside
the tight shutters of my life -
which way are we going? — Christy Brown

Dying without really living. Leaving this world knowing that the girl who makes me want to live the most-will have to do it without me — Rachel Van Dyken

Men will not fight and die without knowing what they are fighting and dying for. — Douglas MacArthur

How sad, ye Gods, how sad the world is at evening, how mysterious the mists over the swamps! You will know it when you have wandered astray in those mists, when you have suffered greatly before dying, when you have walked through the world carrying an unbearable burden. You know it too when you are weary and ready to leave this earth without regret; its mists; its swamps and its rivers; ready to give yourself into the arms of death with a light heart, knowing that death alone can comfort you. — Mikhail Bulgakov

Fear is not shaking, knowing that you are going to be harmed. Fear is not sweating profusely because you can't do anything else. Fear is not hiding under your bed or under your sheets or in your closet because you know the monsters are trying to find you. Fear is not having nightmares about these monsters because you know you cannot escape them. Fear is not anything I have experienced in my sixteen years of life. Fear is the feeling that a block of ice has been dropped into your stomach and it's slowly melting sending poison coursing through your veins, rooting you to where you stand. Fear is knowing that there is nothing you can do about your current situation. You can't run or hide or escape even in your dreams. Fear is not the knowledge that you're going to be hurt, but the knowledge that you can do nothing to stop what is coming. Fear is learning that the person you love most has been dying for you over and over again because they value your life over their own. — Annie Ortiz

Faith is a great thing, and really religious people would like us to believe that faith and knowing are the same thing, but I don't believe that myself. Because there are too many different ideas on the subject. What we know is this: When we die, one of two things happens. Either our souls and thoughts somehow survive the experience of dying or they don't. If they do, that opens up every possibility you could think of. If they don't, it's just blotto. The end. — Stephen King

But what's all this about not being able to die, live, be born? That must have some bearing. All this about staying where you are, dying, living, being born, unable to go forwards or back, not knowing where you came from, or where you are, or where you're going, or that it's possible to be elsewhere, to be otherwise? Supposing nothing, asking yourself nothing? You can't, you're there. — Samuel Beckett

You said that the mind is like the wind, but perhaps it is we who are like the wind. Knowing nothing, simply blowing through. Never aging, never dying. — Haruki Murakami

Because there was only one thing worse than dying. And that was knowing you were going to die. And where. And how. ("Death Ship") — Richard Matheson

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

I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die. — Adrienne Rich

There's a certain language, a dying language, and I can't remember who speaks it or where in the world they are, but in that language the future is referred to as being behind us. It must be behind us, since we can see the past. We walk backwards, blind, into the future, only knowing where we've already been. — Andra Brynn

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

There are a million things in this world that can end you, that can in one second obliterate the life you work so hard to keep alive. Our lives are structured around not dying. Eating, sleeping, looking both ways before you cross the street. It's all, all of it, to keep us safe from the thing that we know is going to get us anyway. It doesn't even make sense, if you think about it. It's the world's biggest joke. Our entire lives are set up around not dying, knowing all the while that it's the one thing we can't avoid. — Rebecca Serle

Bond came to the conclusion that Tilly Masterton was one of those girls whose hormones had got mixed up. He knew the type well and thought they and their male counterparts were a direct consequence of giving votes to women and 'sex equality.' As a result of fifty years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused, not knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits
barren and full of frustrations, the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied. He was sorry for them, but he had no time for them. — Ian Fleming

Damned bad luck! "Stop that locomotive!" he yelled. His men drew carbines from their saddle packs and let loose a volley at the train. The engineer spun round in agony, two bullets having smashed into his chest, and he collapsed dying on the footplate, but the stoker kept his head down and ensured the train carried on past the station and away to get help. "Hell, bad luck," Stuart muttered. "Okay men, leave the ammunition and clothing in a huge pile and set it on fire! And the alcohol. No drink is to be taken, d'ya hear?" "Yes general," his aide saluted, and trotted away, barking orders. They burned the station and rode off south, knowing now that the Union pursuit would be closing in on them. Ahead was the Chickahominy — Tony Roberts

Consider the impasse of a one God universe.
He is all-knowing and all-powerful.
He can't go anywhere since He is already everywhere.
He can't do anything since the act of doing presupposes opposition.
His universe is irrevocably thermodynamic having no friction by definition. So, He has to create friction: War, Fear, Sickness, Death,
To keep his dying show on the road. — William S. Burroughs

Losing a family member, and her dying knowing she didn't have to die, that ... is a scar that will last forever for the people remaining, and even with good actions and good words, that scar will never disappear. Ever. — Kim Du-han

Sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices' accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old postcards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one. — Italo Calvino

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

But Amanda ... " Jadina said, looking past Maylin at the young Fate. "She doesn't ask for anything. She doesn't even try to read the future, it's just there. She ends up blurting things out. Starts talking about the car accident you're going to have in three years, or your baby boy dying in child birth in a few months, or your grandmother's funeral next year. Thing's you can't change even if you know about them. Things you're happier not knowing about. People go through life, happily oblivious. If you start telling them all the horrible things that are coming, they get upset. When those horrible things start coming true, they get scared and blame you. They say you caused it. Label you witch. Even burn you at the stake. She's safer in there. — Crissy Moss

2Pac wrote about life threatening situations after being shot so often, it made it seem like he was obsessed with it. He even wrote music and material that he left behind after he died that made reference to him dying already. I think the significance in that ties back to us knowing that that's our fate. — Curtis Jackson

If I Must Go
If I must go to heaven's end
Climbing the ages like a stair,
Be near me and forever bend
With the same eyes above me there;
Time will fly past us like leaves flying,
We shall not heed, for we shall be
Beyond living, beyond dying,
Knowing and known unchangeably. — Sara Teasdale

I had seen AIDS patients in India and Africa, and knowing that people were dying even though drugs existed that could help them was shattering for me. — Yusuf Hamied

Art replaces the light that is lost when the day fades, the moment passes, the evanescent extraordinary makes its quicksilver. Art tries to capture that which we know leaves us, as we move in and out of each other's lives, as we all must eventually leave this earth. Great artists know that shadow, work always against the dying light, but always knowing that the day brings new light and that the ocean which washes away all traces on the sand leaves us a new canvas with each wave. — Elizabeth Alexander

Most world-historic events - great military battles, political revolutions-are self-consciously historic to the participants living through them. They act knowing that their decisions will be chronicled and dissected for decades or centuries to come. But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for prosperity. And of course, if they do recognize that they are living through a historical crisis, it's often too late- because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of history is by dying. — Steven Johnson

The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent's greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with. The fear of one day being obliged for your child's own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, above all, the fear of knowing - as every parent fears - that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited. It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with which The Road extends the metaphor of a father's guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself in a ruined, friendless world that The Road finds its great power to move and horrify the reader. — Michael Chabon

In each of us lies sleeping beauty, wasted potential, dying dreams. We sleep and live in dormant twilight, never knowing what it means to live, to love the bits of heaven that we can unearth deep in our hearts; not recognizing that our salvation is ever-present in those parts that we have disowned, denied, forgotten. The thorns of fear thwart faint attempt. The prince is courage, the kiss believing and then with these our life begins. — Kay Thompson

I hope you fall in love with someone nice and have a good marriage. I might end up dying without knowing what it's like to be in love. — Koushun Takami

I walked to Scott, each step heavy, tears hot on my face, my hands hovering uselessly over his rapidly decaying body. I shut my eyes, forcing myself to recall his lopsided grin. Not his vacant eyes. In my mind, I played back his teasing laugh. Not the gurgling, gasping sounds he'd made right before dying. I remembered his warmth in accidental touches and playful jabs, knowing his body was rotting even as I clung to the memory.
"Thank you," I choked out, telling myself that somewhere nearby, he could still hear my voice. "You saved my life. Good-bye, Scott. I'll never forget you, that's my oath to you. Never." I vowed. — Becca Fitzpatrick

I have a fear of dying partway through a book - of never knowing the ending. It's silly, I know, but it makes me a quick reader. — Steve Robinson

Only by a frank discussion of the very details of dying can we best deal with those aspects that frighten us the most. It is by knowing the truth ... that we rid ourselves of that fear of the terra incognita of death. — Sherwin B. Nuland

We worship ... the powers that speak to our souls, if it seems they do. We do so knowing there is more to the world, and the half-world, and perhaps worlds beyond, than we can grasp. We always knew that. We can't even stop children from dying, how would we presume to understand the truth of things? Behind things? Does the presence of one power deny another? [p. 176] — Guy Gavriel Kay

Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had been right when he repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager so lucid or dangerous, than a poet. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

California is like a beautiful wild kid on heroin, high as a kite and thinking she's on top of the world, not knowing she's dying, not believing it even if you show her the marks. — S.E. Hinton