Quotes & Sayings About Live Like You're Dying

We born dyin' ... But you ask a man an' he talk like he gonna live forevah. — Walter Mosley

To live a life that is wrong for you is a form of dying. There are people who have lives that look perfect. They try to be happy, they believe they should be happy, they are trying to like it, but if it's off course from their north star, they aren't satisfied. — Martha Beck

I am in my mother's room. It's I who live there now. I don't know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I'd never have got there alone. There's this man who comes every week. Perhaps I got there thanks to him. He says not. He gives me money and takes away the pages. So many pages,so much money. Yes, I work now, a little like I used to, except that I don't know how to work any more. That doesn't matter apparently. What I'd like now is to speak of the things that are left, say my good-byes, finish dying. They don't want that. Yes, there is more than one, apparently. But it's always the same one that comes. You'll do that later, he says. Good. The truth is I haven't much will left. When he comes for the fresh pages he brings back the previous week's. They are marked with signs I don't understand ... Here's my beginning. It must mean something, or they wouldn't keep it. Here it is. — Samuel Beckett

Please tell me you're not going to leave 'cause I'm dying to know what happens! I'm a romance reader and this is like a live action romance book! — Kelly Elliott

But death is extraordinarily like life when we know how to live. You cannot live without dying. You cannot live if you do not die psychologically every minute. This is not an intellectual paradox. To live completely, wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Oh the madness of battle! We fear it, we celebrate it, the poets sing of it, and when it fills the blood like fire it is a real madness. It is joy! All the terror is swept away, a man feels he could live for ever, he sees the enemy retreating, knows he himself is invincible, that even the gods would shrink from his blade and his bloodied shield. And I was still keening that mad song, the battle song of slaughter, the sound that blotted out the screams of dying men and the crying of the wounded. It is fear, of course, that feeds the battle madness, the release of fear into savagery. You win in the shield wall by being more savage than your enemy, by turning his savagery back into fear. — Bernard Cornwell

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

I hate America. I hate this country. It's just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, that's hard enough, I don't have to love it. You do that. Everybody's got to love something. — Tony Kushner

What the meat industry figured out is that you don't need healthy animals to make a profit. Sick animals are more profitable ...
Factory farms calculate how close to death they can keep animals without killing them. That's the business model. How quickly they can be made to grow, how tightly they can be packed, how much or how little can they eat, how sick they can get without dying ... We live in a world in which it's conventional to treat an animal like a block of wood. — Jonathan Safran Foer

The closer you get to death, the more alive you feel. Dylan Thomas wrote, Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. My dad always taught me to live like that. Dad wrote a poem too. It goes, Dune buggies. Woohoo! — Christopher Titus

Let my heiress have full rights,
Live in my house, sing songs that I composed.
Yet how slowly my strength ebbs,
How the tortured breast craves air.
The love of my friends, my enemies' rancor
And the yellow roses in my bushy garden,
And a lover's burning tenderness-all this
I bestow upon you, messenger of dawn.
Also the glory for which I was born,
For which my star, like some whirlwind, soared
And now falls. Look, its falling
Prophesies your power, love and inspiration.
Preserving my generous bequest,
You will live long and worthily.
Thus it will be. You see, I am content,
Be happy, but remember me. — Anna Akhmatova

Anne, I don't want to live ... Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can't Live It. I can't even explain. I know how silly it sounds ... but if you knew how it Felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay that's the rub. I am like a stone that lives ... locked outside of all that's real ... Anne, do you know of such things, can you hear???? I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet ... and yet to [be] behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can't, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong ... to do it all wrong ... believe me, (can you?) ... what's wrong. I want to belong. I'm like a jew who ends up in the wrong country. I'm not a part. I'm not a member. I'm frozen. — Anne Sexton

I can't function here anymore. I mean in life: I can't function in this life. I'm no better off than when I was in bed last night, with one difference: when I was in my own bed - or my mom's - I could do something about it; now that I'm here I can't do anything. I can't ride my bike to the Brooklyn Bridge; I can't take a whole bunch of pills and go for the good sleep; the only thing I can do is crush my head in the toilet seat, and I still don't even know if that would work. They take away your options and all you can do is live, and it's just like Humble said: I'm not afraid of dying; I'm afraid of living. I was afraid before, but I'm afraid even more now that I'm a public joke. The teachers are going to hear from the students. They'll think I'm trying to make an excuse for bad work. — Ned Vizzini

Gemma, you see how it is. They've planned our entire lives, from what we shall wear to whom we shall marry and where we shall live. It's one lump of sugar in your tea whether you like it or not and you'd best smile even if you're dying deep inside. We're like pretty horses, and just as on horses, they mean to put blinders on us so we can't look left or right but only straight ahead where they would lead. Please, please, please, Gemma, let's not die inside before we have to. — Libba Bray

I don't believe we return to haunt or comfort the living or anything, but I think something becomes of us." "But you fear oblivion." "Sure, I fear earthly oblivion. But, I mean, not to sound like my parents, but I believe humans have souls, and I believe in the conservation of souls. The oblivion fear is something else, fear that I won't be able to give anything in exchange for my life. If you don't live a life in service of a greater good, you've gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won't get either a life or a death that means anything." I just shook my head. "What?" he asked. "Your obsession with, like, dying for something or leaving behind some great sign of your heroism or whatever. It's just weird." "Everyone wants to lead an extraordinary life. — John Green

They take away your options and all you can do is live, and it's just like Humble said: I'm not afraid of dying; I'm afraid of living. I was afraid before, but I'm afraid even more now that I'm a public joke. — Ned Vizzini

You'll be going back to Tokyo before much longer," Midorikawa quietly stated. "And you'll return to real life. You need to live life to the fullest. No matter how shallow and dull things might get, this life is worth living. I guarantee it. And I'm not being either ironic or paradoxical. It's just that, for me, what's worthwhile in life has become a burden, something I can't shoulder anymore. Maybe I'm just not cut out for it. So, like a dying cat, I've crawled into a quiet, dark place, silently waiting for my time to come. It's not so bad. But you're different. You should be able to handle what life sends your way. You need to use the thread of logic, as best as you can, to skillfully sew onto yourself everything that's worth living for. — Haruki Murakami

Imagine the terrestrial timespan as an outstretched arm: a single swipe of an emery-board, across the nail of the third finger, erases human history. We haven't been around for very long. And we've turned the earth's hair white. Sh e seemed to have eternal youth but now she's ageing awful fast, like an addict, like a waxless candle. Jesus, have you seen her recently? we used to live and die without any sense of the planet getting older, of mother earth getting older, living and dying. We used to live outside history. But now we're all coterminous. We're inside history now all right, on its leading edge, with the wind ripping past our ears. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. And maybe love can't bear it either, and flees all planets when they reach this condition, when they get to the end of their twentieth centuries. — Martin Amis

I'd known since I was a child that I was going to live in New York eventually, and that everything in between would be just an intermission. I'd spent all those years imagining what New York was going to be like. I thought it was going to be the most exciting, magical, fraught-with-possibility place that you could ever live; a place where if you really wanted something you might be able to get it; a place where I'd be surrounded by people I was dying to know; a place where I might be able to become the only thing worth being, a journalist. And I'd turned out to be right. — Nora Ephron

Poems are bullshit unless they are

teeth or trees or lemons piled

on a step. Or black ladies dying

of men leaving nickel hearts

beating them down. Fuck poems

and they are useful, wd they shoot

come at you, love what you are,

breathe like wrestlers, or shudder

strangely after pissing. We want live

words of the hip world live flesh &

coursing blood. Hearts Brains

Souls splintering fire. We want poems

like fists beating niggers out of Jocks

or dagger poems in the slimy bellies

of the owner-jews. Black poems to

smear on girdlemamma mulatto bitches

whose brains are red jelly stuck

between 'lizabeth taylor's toes. Stinking

Whores! we want "poems that kill. — Amiri Baraka

With every plus there must be a minus; with every tear there must be a smile; and for every skunk there must be a fragrant flower. We live our lives in fear of dying and we overlook the simple truth that living is all we can control. Never too high, never too low will get you stuck in the middle of the road. A sense of equilibrium is needed to see life as it is, not what you would like it to be. — Phil Wohl

I did not think you would be angry, Jem burst out, and it was like ice cracking across a frozen waterfall, freeing a torrent. We were engaged, Tessa. A proposal-an offer of marriage-is a promise. A promise to love and care for someone always. I did not mean to break mine to you. But it was that or die. I wanted to wait, to be married to you and live wit you for years, but that wasn't possible. I was dying too fast. I would have given it up-all of it up-to be married to you for a day. A day that would never have come. You are a reminder-a reminder of everything I am losing. The life I will not have. — Cassandra Clare

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

You were right to come to see a dying man. It is right that these moments should have witnesses. Everyone has his dream; I would like to live till dawn, but I know I have less than three hours left. It will be night, but no matter. Dying is simple. It does not take daylight. So be it: I will die by starlight — Victor Hugo

That's how lonely and sad I was. Dying is not that hard. Lime the air being sucked slowly out of a room, the will to live was slowly seeping out of me. When you feel like rhat, dying doesn't seem like such a big deal. — Haruki Murakami

Live like you were dying, Love because you are. — Mark Green

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

I hate you for all the years I 'll have to live without you. How can a heart hurt this much and still go on beating? How can I feel this bad without dying from it?
I 've bruised my knees with praying to have you back. None of my prayers have been answered. I tried to send them up to heaven but they 're trapped here on earth, like bobwhites beneath the snow. I try to sleep and it's like I 'm suffocating.
Where have you gone?
Once you said that if I wasn't with you, it wouldn't be heaven.
I can't let go of you. Come back and haunt me. Come back. — Lisa Kleypas

Lord, help us to see in your crucifixion and resurrection an example of how to endure and seemingly to die in the agony and conflict of daily life, so that we may live more fully and creatively. You accepted patiently and humbly the rebuffs of human life, as well as the torture of the cross. Help us to accept the pains and conflicts that come to us each day as opportunity to grow as people and become more like you-make us realize that it is only by frequent deaths of ourselves, and our self-centered desires that we can come to live more fully, only by dying with you that we can rise with you. — Mother Teresa

I tried. I tried to burn that memory of my regret. But I wasn't dead yet, I was just on my way to dying, and it's harder to burn memories when you've still got life left. When you're alive you have to learn how to live with things like regret. — Christopher Barzak

The theme of the book is simple: a man is dying: you feel him sinking throughout the book; his thought and his memories pervade the whole with greater or lesser distinction (like the swell and fall of uneven breathing), now rolling up this image, now that, letting it ride in the wind, or even tossing it out on the shore, where it seems to move and live for a minute on its own and presently is drawn back again by grey seas where it sinks or is strangely transfigured. — Vladimir Nabokov

And you're stuck like a hook through the roof of your mouth
Tired of living for your sick days
Every day makes you sick
Tired of living just get paid
When you're dying to live
but you can't — Dominic Owen Mallary

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

Listen, he said vehemently. Somebody's going to have to say what they really mean and then do what they say they will. All this lying. All this bullshit and pretending. It's just wasting lives, wasting time, everything's just a waste.
She was looking at him curiously. That's just the way people are. The way the world is. What are you trying to do, fix the world?
I don't want to fix the world. Fuck the world. Just the little part of it that I have to live on. You and that old man. Folks starting babies andd walking off like that's got nothing to do with them. People walking off while you're asleep and never coming back. Leaving a note. A Goddamned note. Old people living a half mile apart and wanting to see each other and dying without doing it. Now that's crazy for you. That's what's crazy. — William Gay

It's amazing how you can live without somebody your entire life and then you meet them, let them in, let them take over your every thought, and then the moment they're gone, you feel like you're fucking dying. — Claire Contreras

Someday I hope you get the chance to live like you were dying. — Tim McGraw

-"Do you know what it's like to be condemned to love?"
-"But isn't it always like that?" Svetlana asked, trembling with indignation. "When people love each other, when they find each other out of thousands and millions of people. It's always destiny!"
Once again I sensed that infinitely naive girl in her, the girl who couldn't hate anything except herself. The girl who was already beginning to disappear.
-"No, Sveta, haven't you ever heard love compared to a flower?"
-"Yes."
-"A flower can be grown, Sveta. But it can be bought too, or given as a gift."
-"Did Anton buy it?"
-"No," I said, a bit too sharply. "It was a gift. From destiny."
-"What difference does that make? If it is love?"
-"Sveta, cut flowers are beautiful, but they don't live for long. They're already dying, even the ones that are carefully placed in a crystal vase and given fresh water. — Sergei Lukyanenko

No, no, it's not me, it's them - that old time that I've tried to have live in me. These were just men, unimportant evidently or they wouldn't have been 'unknown'; but they died for the most beautiful thing in the world - the dead South. You see," she continued, her voice still husky, her eyes glistening with tears, "people have these dreams they fasten onto things, and I've always grown up with that dream. It was so easy because it was all dead and there weren't any disillusions comin' to me. I've tried in a way to live up to those past standards of noblesse oblige - there's just the last remnants of it, you know, like the roses of an old garden dying all round us - streaks of strange courtliness and chivalry in some of these boys an' stories I used to hear from a Confederate soldier who lived next door, and a few old darkies. Oh, Harry, there was something, there was something! I couldn't ever make you understand but it was there. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I know I'm not supposed to argue with you when you talk about dying. And yes, you could die, Neil. But I could get hit by a bus and die tomorrow. Either we need to live every single day together like it's our last, or we need to be comfortable with the fact that some times are just sucky times. — Abigail Barnette

Wanna know what a bullet feels like, Warren? A real one? It's not like in the comics ... I think you need to. Feel it ... It's not going to make a neat little hole. First - it'll obliterate your internal organs. Your lung will collapse, feels like drowning ... When it finally hits your spine, it'll blow your central nervous system- ... I'm talking. The pain will be unbearable, but you won't be able to move ... A bullet usually travels faster than this, of course. But the dying? It seems like it takes forever. Something, isn't it? One tiny piece of metal destroys everything. It ripped her insides out ... It took her light away. From me. From the world ... And now the one person who should be here is gone - and a waste like you gets to live. A tiny piece of metal. Can you feel it now? — Joss Whedon

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

Cause whatever you love
could be taken away,
So live like it's your dying day. — Machine Gun Kelly

The greatest tragedy in your life will not be the death of a loved one or a natural disaster; those things hurt like hell and devastate to the core. But loss like that is part of life. What's not necessary and is therefore most tragic is the demise of your truest identity, your dying before you're dead, the moments when you let the words and judgments of others define who you are instead of rising above that pain to be the person you were meant to be. No matter what has happened in your past, you are still capable of becoming a better version of who you are at this moment. Think right. Believe the voice inside of you that speaks the truth. You are a divine marvel. Act like it. Live like it. — Toni Sorenson