Quotes & Sayings About Someone's Death

The saddest thing about death, whether it's our own or someone we care for, is when the world doesn't stop when we do. — Darnell Lamont Walker

It's a rare day indeed when someone thanks you for bringing them to their death. — Sarah J. Maas

We're all in it together, Harry. We're all pieces of the fisherman. I know that sounds like a bullshit answer, but you'll see, when you start to work with the dead. Everyone's complicit: the most innocent little kiddies; babies who live a day, an hour - they still have a hand in things, even their own deaths. I know that's very hard for you to get your head around right now, but take it from someone that's spent a lot of time with death. — Clive Barker

I'm curious about why there's so much honor given to death, when there is no honor in losing someone you love. — Mackie Burt

Just think of Emily Bronte, for example: psychotically bookish - but was there ever a woman screaming out so loudly for a good f***ing? I even suspect that's why Wuthering Heights carries on decades too long rather than sensibly drawing the curtains a little after Cathy's death. It was Bronte saying, 'Look - I'm simply going to keep on writing this stuff until someone comes and shags me raw. — Mil Millington

That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it's reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you, and it just hits you all over again, that shocking. — Sarah Dessen

Even when your body does nothing, sin can be active in your mind. When your soul inwardly repulses the evil one's attack by means of prayer, attention, remembrance of death, godly sorrow and mourning the body, too, takes its share of holiness, having acquired freedom from evil actions. This is what the Lord meant by saying that someone who cleans the outside of the cup has not cleansed it inside, but clean the inside and the whole cup will be clean — Gregory Palamas

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

The clock had been Sylvie's, and her mother's before that. It had gone to Ursula on Sylvie's death and Ursula had left it to Teddy, and so it had zigzagged its way down the family tree ...
... The clock was a good one, made by Frodsham and worth quite a bit, but Teddy knew if he gave it to Viola she would sell it or misplace it or break it and it seemed important to him that it stayed in the family. An heirloom. ('Lovely word,' Bertie said.) He liked to think that the little golden key that wound it, a key that would almost certainly be lost by Viola, would continue to be turned by the hand of someone who was part of the family, part of his blood. The red thread. — Kate Atkinson

It's very hard to understand what's happening in someone's brain and what goes into their experience and their death, and the music has to say a lot. — Alexandre Desplat

Stop waiting for someone to give you what you want. The universe is too busy to care. It has worlds to create and galaxies to destroy. If you're worried about death and about your own end, don't. It's coming whether you like it or not. You will either arrive at the end of your life in style or you will arrive broken and beaten, but whichever way you choose, have no doubt that you WILL ARRIVE. There is only now. If you have power, it's now. If you can change anything, you have to do it now. If you want to be or to have that next great thing, be it. Have it. Take it. Own it. Do it. Become it. Be awesome. Do epic shit. Do it now. The clock is ticking. — Johnny B. Truant

If someone say he/she never lie in life, that is probably the worst lie anyone has ever told you.Everything -
Truth is that we all will die one day. That's the ultimate truth. So whatever big choices we make in life , chose death as an excuse . That will make our life as our well as death easier. — Rohit Kochar

It's necessary to start most work alone. But I'm tickled to death when I can pull somebody in or join someone, whether it's borrowing poetry or traveling with an associate. — Jenny Holzer

Dreaming's shit, but dying's worse; and watching someone die, that comes somewhere between the two, I guess. It ain't good, but it's got to be better than the other thing, better than doing it yourself. Hasn't it? — Chaz Brenchley

God and death kind of resemble each other, because the only time a lot of people will try and talk to God is when someone's died. — Rachel Hunter

The day before last, Jon had made the mistake of wishing he had hot water for a bath.
"Cold is better," she had said at once, "if you've got someone to warm you up after. The river's only part ice yet, go on."
Jon laughed. "You'd freeze me to death."
"Are all crows afraid of gooseprickles? A little ice won't kill you. I'll jump in with you to t'prove it so."
"And ride the rest of the day with wet clothes frozen to our skins?" he objected.
"Jon Snow, you know nothing. You don't go in with clothes."
"I don't go in at all," he said firmly, just before he heard Tormund Thunderfist bellowing for him (he hadn't, but nevermind). — George R R Martin

You never understood what death meant until it calimed someone you were so close to. When it did, then you truly shook death's hands. — Holly Hood

Someone's killed 100,000 people. We're almost going, "Well done! You killed 100,000 people? You must get up very early in the morning! I can't even get down the gym. Your diary must look odd: 'Get up in the morning, death, death, death, death, death, death, death - lunch - death, death, death - afternoon tea - death, death, death - quick shower ... ' " — Eddie Izzard

She spent a great deal of time staring into space, oppressed by the sense that she was waiting. But waiting for what? She did not know. Surely someone would call, someone must be needing her. Yet each day proceeded like the one before. Nothing intense, nothing desperate, ever happened. Time did not move. The home, the city, the nation, and life itself were eternal; still she had a foreboding that one day, without warning and without pity, all the dear, important things would be destroyed. — Evan S. Connell

I believe in the inherent good of people. I believe that someone can make a mistake and live to redeem themselves another day. Maybe that's why I don't believe in the death penalty. It forecloses all possibilities. — Carsen Taite

Unless you have suffered and wept, you really don't understand what compassion is, nor can you give comfort to someone who is suffering. If you haven't cried, you can't dry another's eyes. Unless you've walked in darkness, you can't help wanderers find the way. Unless you've looked into the eyes of menacing death and felt its hot breath, you can't help another rise from the dead and taste anew the joy of being alive. — Takashi Nagai

If there's a place for me in Hell I hope it's next to someone like you — Stanley Victor Paskavich

There's an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I've been thinking about a lot while writing this essay. In it, Buffy sacrifices her own life to save her sister, and right before she does, she tells her sister that the hardest thing to do in the world is to live - ironic words coming from someone about to kill herself for the greater good. As I'm writing this, I just keep thinking that Katniss never gets to sacrifice herself. She doesn't get the heroic death. She survives - and that leaves her doing the hardest thing in the world: living in it once so many of the ones she loves are gone. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Keep in mind that this appears in the same book of the Bible that approves the death sentence for a child who curses his parents, owners of oxen who injure someone through the owner's negligence, anybody who works or kindles a fire on Sunday, and anyone who has sex with an animal. — Jim Butcher

Ginny, listen ... I can't be involved with you anymore. We've got to stop seeing each other. We can't be together."
"It's for some stupid noble reason isn't it?"
"It's been like ... like something out of someone else's life these last few weeks with you. But I can't ... we can't ... I've got to do things alone now. Voldemort uses people his enemies are close to. He's already used you as bait once, and that was just because you were my best friend's sister. Think how much danger you'll be in if we keep this up. He'll know, he'll find out. He'll try and get me through you."
"What if I don't care?"
"I care. How do you think I'd feel if this was your funeral ... and it was my fault ... — J.K. Rowling

A hero is someone who rebels or seems to rebel against the facts of existence and seems to conquer them. Obviously that can only work at moments. It can't be a lasting thing. That's not saying that people shouldn't keep trying to rebel against the facts of existence. Someday, who knows, we might conquer death, disease and war. — Jim Morrison

[On suicide:] It's the only cause of death that can be used as a noun to describe the dead person. If you die of cancer you are not called 'a cancer.' If someone else shoots you, you are not referred to as 'a murder.' But if you shoot yourself, you are labeled as a suicide. Your death becomes your definition. — Joan Wickersham

Keisuke: "It's alright for you to kill someone?"
Akira: "As long as they have tags. According to the rules, if there's three people present, it's an official battle. I'm not sure how you're supposed to start it, though."
Keisuke: "So killing people is just a game, huh?"
Akira: "It's the only way to survive. — Suguro Chayamachi

Then without any warning the car stopped. They were there.
"The ride's over," someone said. "End of the ride."
For a moment nobody got out. They just sat there. The driver cut the ignition, and after that there was silence. Complete, uncanny silence, more frightening than the most threatening noise or violence could have been. Night silence. A silence that had death in it. ("The Number's Up") — Cornell Woolrich

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. — Steve Jobs

Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. You follow it a far as you can go.
But finally,the grief goes away and you phase back into the world. Without him.
And you can accept that. What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don't ever completely come back from where you went with him
a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A cut that never heals.
And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can't feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You'll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you. — Philip K. Dick

Anyone in this world can have the power of life and death over someone else. It's horrible, but true. All you need to do is take it. And once you have
there is no going back. (The Killer's Cousin) — Nancy Werlin

I believe that everybody, whether you believe in the afterlife or the chance of a near-death experience and you come back and you see someone [on the other side] - whether that has happened or not, I don't know, but certainly everyone has thought about it at some point or another in time. It's a fantasy that if there is anything out there like that, it would be just terrific, but that remains to be seen. — Clint Eastwood

Mamaw often told a parable: A young man was sitting at home when a terrible rainstorm began. Within hours, the man's house began to flood, and someone came to his door offering a ride to higher ground. The man declined, saying, "God will take care of me." A few hours later, as the waters engulfed the first floor of the man's home, a boat passed by, and the captain offered to take the man to safety. The man declined, saying, "God will take care of me." A few hours after that, as the man waited on his roof - his entire home flooded - a helicopter flew by, and the pilot offered transportation to dry land. Again the man declined, telling the pilot that God would care for him. Soon thereafter, the waters overcame the man, and as he stood before God in heaven, he protested his fate: "You promised that you'd help me so long as I was faithful." God replied, "I sent you a car, a boat, and a helicopter. Your death is your own fault. — J.D. Vance

What made Olive the saddest about the Gardners was that everyone wanted to be enshrined in someone's memory. It was the only way of living on after death, really: in the minds of loved ones. Memories were the only things that made aging bearable, a way of reverting to better, simpler days. — Andrea Lochen

That is why humans resist life. To be alive is the biggest fear humans have. Death is not the biggest
fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive - the risk to be alive and express what we
really are. Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of humans. We have learned to live our lives trying
to satisfy other people's demands. We have learned to live by other people's points of view because of
the fear of not being accepted and of not being good enough for someone else. — Miguel Ruiz

There's a reason I said I'd be happy alone. It wasn't 'cause I thought I'd be happy alone. It was because I thought if I loved someone and then it fell apart, I might not make it. It's easier to be alone. Because what if you learn that you need love and then you don't have it? What if you like it and lean on it? What if you shape your life around it and then it falls apart? Can you even survive that kind of pain? Losing love is like organ damage. It's like dying. The only difference is death ends. This? It could go on forever. — Shonda Rhimes

Dying is overrated. Human sentimentality has twisted it into the ultimate act of love. Biggest load of bullshit in the world. Dying for someone isn't the hard thing. The man that dies escapes. Plain and simple. Game over. End of pain ... Try living for someone. Through it all-good, bad, thick, thin, joy, suffering. That's the hard thing. — Karen Marie Moning

Death come to all men.
It is only a matter of time.
But even if your flesh is gone,your immortal soul lives on.
Whether you live or die it's the same to me...
That's why i'm not worried.
I don't need to worry.
But...
For some reason,i don't know why,but...
I think she deserves more fun in her life.
I want her to make lots of friends,and have a lot of fun times,and fall in love...Just like everyone at home.
I am a Dullahan,one how guides souls to their resting place...i'm not allowed to change someone's fate
Even so...i still...
I still want to save her.
I...what should i do? — OKAYADO

Someone once said that death is God's way of telling you to slow down. I do enjoy what I do, and the secret of my success is the willingness to grind work out. — Guy Kawasaki

Phoebe asked me, "Tell me, what do you think of the afterlife?"
I was a bit nonplussed. I had no idea what she thought, but I knew that the question must be of greater interest to someone of her age than to me. But our conversation had been completely honest, and before I could speak, honesty and tact had joined hands in my answer. "I have no faith at all," I said, "but sometimes I have hope."
I rather think," she replied, "that total annihilation is the most comfortable position."
I was shaken. The horse clopped on. The children laughed behind us.
When I die," she said, "I don't expect to see any of my loved ones again. I'll just become a part of all this." She waved her hand at the surrounding countryside. "That's all right with me. — Sena Jeter Naslund

And a strange, deadly war is raging around the world. Yet, each person who has lost a loved one surely knows secretly, deeply, that no war, no act of revenge, no daisy-cutters dropped on someone else's loved ones or someone else's children, will blunt the edges of their pain or bring their own loved ones back. War cannot avenge those who have died. War is only a brutal desecration of their memory. — Arundhati Roy

Well, people have been wondering what's going to happen to the novel for two hundred years; its death has been announced many times. You know, I think the novel keeps redefining the world we live in. What you should look for in a novel is a window nobody else is looking out of, that nobody else can look through. What you look for is a voice. You pick up a novel by someone such as Faulkner or Hemingway and you just read three pages and you know who wrote it. And that's what one should demand of a novelist. — Mordecai Richler

But why?" Gabriel asks. "Why do they wish to cause such pain to another human?"
"Why does the Spanish Inquisition do what it does?" I ask. "Why does our own Church burn witches at the stake? Why did our own crusaders punish the Moors so exquisitely?"
Gabriel thinks about this. He knows I don't beg answers for these questions.
"Of course it's easy to say that we mete out punishment to those who are an abomination in God's eyes," I say. "But it's more than that, isn't it? I think we don't just allow torturers but condone them as a way to excise the fear we all have of death. To torture someone is to take control of death, to be the master of it, even for a short time. — Joseph Boyden

There are many of us here. A whole street. That's what it's called--Chernobylskaya. These people worked at the station their whole lives. A lot of them still go there to work on a provisional basis, that's how they work there now, no one lives there anymore. They have bad diseases, they're invalids, but they don't leave their jobs, they're scared to even think of the reactor closing down. Who needs them now anywhere else? Often they die. In an instant. They just drop--someone will be walking, he falls down, goes to sleep, never wakes up. He was carrying flowers for his nurse and his heart stopped. They die, but no one's really asked us. No one's asked what we've been through. What we saw. No one wants to hear about death. About what scares them.

But I was telling you about love. About my love...

-- Lyudmila, Ignatenko,
wife of deceased fireman, Vasily Ignatenko — Svetlana Alexievich

Maybe it's not logical. I don't know. I don't care. I've been asked didnt I think it odd that I should be present to witness the death of everything and I do think it's odd but that doesnt mean it's not so. Someone has to be here. — Cormac McCarthy

Congratulations, you have been chosen to act as Death, it's a dirty job, but someone has to do it. — Christopher Moore

Neighbours complaining about someone's dog making an awful racket. You could hardly blame the poor beast, its owner had died in her bed at least a fortnight before and there hadn't been much left of the old girl worth eating. — James Oswald

To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away. — Christopher Hitchens

I love you because ... wait ... I take a drag from my pipe ... I really don't know. I think that's the beauty of love, wanting to be with someone, taste their sweetness and their fears, live their lives and be there in their death, share their ups and their downs, and most importantly, love them and grow old with them, even if they were some kind of monsters.
Have you ever been unable to shake your soul free, wrapped with your lover's velvet rope around your heart? Have you ever been enchanted with a nameless spell that made pain and pleasure synonymous? — Cameron Jace

I know what it meant. I worked it out myself. I've been reading about it. It was a metaphorical death. Sometimes the cards speak in metaphors. It's me. I'm dead on the inside, I've felt it for a long time. As if I died and everything that's happening is someone else's strange and awful dream. — Kate Morton

Follow your heart, Ithilnin," Albirich repeated. "Time is precious. Don't waste it living someone else's life. — Jess C. Scott

He put his hand over my mouth. His hand felt warm, full of blood, the hand of a living man. "Death is a gift, so long as it is nature's hand. But this," he drew his hand away, and nodded toward the dead man in the grass. "When we are called back unnaturally, Death demands a price, for there is always a balance. If I am alive, then someone else must die before his time. This is what you have done. But he is the lucky one. He is at peace. I know what awaits him, and I envy him. — Douglas Clegg

You're fucked. You thought you were going to be someone, but now it's obvious you're nobody. You haven't got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no Plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you're looking at forty or fifty years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. That's pretty heavy. That's worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You've got the choice of a slow, painful death, or a quick, merciful one. — Nick Hornby

Eyes Fastened With Pins"

How much death works,
No one knows what a long
Day he puts in. The little
Wife always alone
Ironing death's laundry.
The beautiful daughters
Setting death's supper table.
The neighbors playing
Pinochle in the backyard
Or just sitting on the steps
Drinking beer. Death,
Meanwhile, in a strange
Part of town looking for
Someone with a bad cough,
But the address somehow wrong,
Even death can't figure it out
Among all the locked doors...
And the rain beginning to fall.
Long windy night ahead.
Death with not even a newspaper
To cover his head, not even
A dime to call the one pining away,
Undressing slowly, sleepily,
And stretching naked
On death's side of the bed. — Charles Simic

Human life is fragile: we live in the space between one breath and the next. We often try to maintain an illusion of permanence, through what we do, say, wear, buy, and how we enjoy ourselves and who and how we love. Yet it is an illusion that is constantly being undermined by change and death. We can use diamonds in whatever way we like. They are empty things, pretty as water, yet within them - if we want to see it - there is blood, dust, love, curses, and suffering. There is desire to make someone happy, there is admiration, there is ostentation ... and there is a company's profit curve. — Victoria Finlay

That is the inescapable math of tragedy and the multiplication of grief. Too many good people die a little when they lose someone they love. One death begets two or twenty or one hundred. It's the same all over the world. — Ben Sherwood

Someone told me at the beginning of that summer that I would come face-to-face with death because of a Romeo and Juliet romance, I would never have believed it. But it wasn't like that summer went at all like I had planned in the first place. The Columbia recruiter sat across from me, her dark bushy eyebrows rising as high as they could go while she stared down at my application. "So, Alex, I see that you don't have any extracurricular activities." I shrugged. I was sitting in one of those uncomfortable orange plastic chairs in the guidance counselor's office, wishing I could just disappear. I was the first student in all of Winnebago High School's history to have a recruiter from an Ivy League school visit. By the way she looked at our tiny school with its ancient, chipped walls and rusted lockers, I could see why nobody had wanted to visit in the past. — Magan Vernon

You can't learn anything from losing someone you love. Any lesson you learn from that isn't a lesson. It's a compromise with life. A lie you tell yourself. — Sonali Dev

Home is where I take up such a tiny portion of the memory foam; home is a splintered word. His pillow is a sweat-stained map of an escape plot, also a map of love's dear abandon. (When did he give way, at which breath?) Forgiveness may mean retrospectively abandoning the pillow and abandoning the photograph of someone with curious eyes, kissing my toes, poolside. I paint my toes Big Apple Red. I don't know what to do about the shock of red nails on clean, white tiles except get used to it. (And when he gave way, was there room for feelings or the words for feeling?) While I brush my teeth, I can see him in my periphery at the other sink. The outline of him lulls and stings. (And when he gave way, was it the end of the beginning of suffering?) I draw his profile near, I make him brush his teeth with me, he spits and makes a mess. I could love another face, but why? — Karen Green

I hadn't understood funeral pyres before, but now I do. It's ghastly to burn someone you love but watching the smoke going into the sky, I think that's rather beautiful now. And I wish Tess could be up in the sky. Somewhere with color and light and air. — Rosamund Lupton

My fate is a prison. It's the only one of us who didn't need to inhabit one. I took your responsibility for those souls for you, even though their deaths are your fault. You should be forced to feel what it's like for someone to be imprisoned. — Martha Brockenbrough

I thought about Stockhausen. What had prompted him to call the attacks a work of art? For him, I thought, it was not a matter of finding death beautiful, but rather seeing that someone had taken liberties in reality that an artist could only dream of. That was both the virtue and the vice of art. In art, you can kill with impunity - destroy the world, perpetrate a holocaust, whip up the apocalypse. But it's only art. You can blow up five million people in an opera and not have anywhere near the impact of blowing up five thousand in reality. Stockhausen seemed to realize this, since the terrorism caused him to feel that being a composer was nothing. In that sense, his words were a moral statement about the limits of art, not an immoral statement about aestheticizing destruction. — Supervert

The expression on her face was one the trooper would never forget: it was the look of someone still alive who realizes she's already dead — Alan Dean Foster

Wolfe was drinking beer and looking at pictures of snowflakes in a book someone had sent him from Czechoslovakia ...
... Wolfe seemed absorbed in the pictures. Looking at him, I said to myself, "He's in a battle with the elements. He's fighting his way through a raging blizzard, just sitting there comfortably looking at pictures of snowflakes. That's the advantage of being an artist, of having imagination." I said aloud, "You mustn't go to sleep, sir, it's fatal. You freeze to death. — Rex Stout

The brick is neither here nor there,' interrupted the stranger in an imposing fashion, 'it never merely falls on someone's head from out of nowhere. In your case, I can assure you that a brick poses no threat whatsoever. You will die another kind of death.
'And you know just what that will be?' queried Berlioz with perfectly understandable irony, letting himself be drawn into a truly absurd conversation. 'And can you tell me what that is?'
'Gladly,' replied the stranger. He took Berlioz's measure as if intending to make him a suit and muttered something through his teeth that sounded like 'One, two.. Mercury in the Second House ... the moon has set ... six-misfortune ... evening-seven ... ' Then he announced loudly and joyously, 'Your head will be cut off! — Mikhail Bulgakov

Why would you cry for someone who's already gone? You should cry for someone who is still here but is about to go away. That way, they'd have a chance to know that they are important and would be missed. — Jessamine Verzosa

It's very rare that someone gets the death penalty for charges of conspiracy, for his influence, for his Svengali-Rasputin act. — Raymond Pettibon

General Studies
Question: Redundancy is often an unpleasant and unexpected event in someone's life. Give two examples of unexpected life events.

Answer: 1) death 2) Reincarnation — Richard Benson

The person who hurt you
who raped you or killed your family
is also here. If you are still angry at that person, if you haven't been able to forgive, you are chained to him. Everyone could feel the emotional truth of that: When someone offends you and you haven't let go, every time you see him, you grow breathless or your heart skips a beat. If the trauma was really severe, you dream of revenge. Above you, is the Mountain of Peace and Prosperity where we all want to go. But when you try to climb that hill, the person you haven't forgiven weighs you down. It's a personal choice whether or not to let go. No one can tell you how long to mourn a death or rage over a rape. But you can't move forward until you break that chain. — Leymah Gbowee

It's equinox, with the world balanced between winter and summer, life and death, like a spinning ball balanced on the tip of someone's finger. — M.R. Carey

Father's Day was great, but all the family gatherings brought up my mother's death. Maybe it's me, because I am a wimp. We would get together, but there was someone missing! — Doug Davidson

A star's light still shines even if there's no one to see it, but without someone to remember Jesse, his light will disappear. — Shaun David Hutchinson

Only fanatics - in religion as well as in politics - can find a meaning in someone else's death. — Elie Wiesel

It's lovely. If only you could frost someone to death."
"Don't be so superior. You can never tell what you will find in the arena. Say it's a gigantic cake- — Suzanne Collins

It doesn't seem right that someone like that would get sick and die.'
[He] countered, 'Why shouldn't it be right? It's what happens. — Jan Elizabeth Watson

If someone believes it is our faith that heals us and forgets that it is God who does it, we should ask that person how much faith Lazarus had. Remember, he was decomposing in a tomb when Jesus raised him from death. His faith obviously didn't matter. It was all God. It is God and God's grace that heals, not our prayers and not our "faith." Though we are exhorted by God to pray to him, we cannot compel him to do what we wish. DO — Eric Metaxas

It's normally the kiss of death to be identified as a rising star, or someone to watch. — George Osborne

It's like I'd been walking a tightrope with a big safety net underneath me, but I never really thought about the net until someone took it away. And then every single step scared me to death. — Margaret Peterson Haddix

But to find a lingering unread missive from someone no longer living, and someone whose life had been so deeply entwined with one's own, raised the possibility that the past could never be a fully settled matter. It meant that your own past could be altered without your action or consent, that the story of your self that you continually told back to yourself could be revised by force, making you into another person who you would, perhaps, prefer not to become. — Dexter Palmer

Being a hangman requires you to take someone else's life based on someone else's judgment, and carry it out on someone else's schedule. The job does not provide the same satisfaction that an ordinary murderer gets from smashing a skull. It robs them of the fulfillment of plunging a knife into someone's throat. In the world of capital punishment, the prisoner's crimes have been sanitized by years of sitting on death row. By then, the execution is a cold and impersonal affair. There is prayer, a noose, and a few last words. The prisoner then experiences a sudden rush of blood to the head. At the end of it all, you have a broken neck and a dead body swinging from the end of a rope. That is it. You don't get to manhandle them with your own hands. That's why the brutes you mention will never be hired. So you see, Vaida, this is not a job for a murderer. It is a job for a humanitarian. — Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

Hate," says Roman. "It's such a small word. Four freaking letters. No big deal, right? Only, it is a big deal. People spend their entire lives holding on to it. Even if you no longer even remember the cause of the quarrel you hold on to that feeling because it becomes the only feeling you've ever known; because that feeling drives you towards achieving something and because it gives life meaning, gives you a sense of purpose. Without someone to hate you're just a burger-flipping failure who doesn't stand a chance. Without someone to hate you're just another millionaire, passing through life getting old and inching towards your death.
"Without hate, you're just nothing. — Sam Hunter

As an atheist, I see nothing "wrong" in believing in a God. I don't think there is a God, but belief in him does no harm. If it helps you in any way, then that's fine with me. It's when belief starts infringing on other people's rights when it worries me. I would never deny your right to believe in a God. I would just rather you didn't kill people who believe in a different God, say. Or stone someone to death because your rulebook says their sexuality is immoral. It's strange that anyone who believes that an all-powerful all-knowing, omniscient power responsible for everything that happens, would also want to judge and punish people for what they are. — Ricky Gervais

Saying goodbye to someone you love isn't really the hard part. It's living every day, not being able to say anything to them at all. — Laurel Ulen Curtis

[When asked what he wants for his tombstone epitaph]
Since I'm an atheist, and have no belief whatsoever in life after death, I couldn't care less
it's not like it'll have any impact on me, since by definition I will be completely extinguished. I guess if someone twisted my arm and forced me to provide an epitaph, it would be 'Don't forget.' Sound advice ... — Richard Bartle

Two years ago," she says, "I was afraid of spiders, suffocation, walls that inch slowly inward and trap you between them,getting thrown out of Dauntless, uncontrollable bleeding, getting run over by a train, my father's death,public humiliation, and kidnapping by men without faces."
Everyone stares blankly at her.
"Most of you will have anywhere from ten to fifteen years in your fear landscapes. That is the average number," she says.
"What's the lowest number someone has gotten?" asks Lynn.
"In recent years," says Lauren, "four."
I have not looked at Tobias since we were in the cafeteria,but I can't help but look at him now. He keeps his eyes trained on the floor. I knew that four was a low number, low enough to merit a nickname,but I didn't know it was less than half the average.
I glare at my feet.He's exceptional. And now he won't even look at me. — Veronica Roth

When I spoke to a colleague about Joe's report, her face registered surprise. She said, "Is it possible for a death in a nursing home to be premature?"
Joe told me, "If it were happening in any other kind of institution, to any other part of the population - workers, say, or children - there'd be an outcry, media, inquiries, swift intervention. The truth is we do not value the last months or years of a person's life. The remaining life of someone old. Particularly if they are in residential care."
If we are all just economic units who lift or lean, then very little is "lost" when a nursing home resident or anyone getting on in their years dies prematurely. In fact money might be saved - one less nursing-home bed to fund, and the kids can finally get their hands on the house. — Karen Hitchcock

Someone had painted FUK U on the dented trunk.
"What does it say about the literacy rate when you can even spell fuck. It's sad," Eve decided. — J.D. Robb

If you see really bright lights, or hear really loud noises, go towards them, don't run away from anything. It's like giving someone instructions on how to handle a bear, don't run away from it. Stand up and try to make yourself look as big as possible. Don't give it the signal that it should chase you. And that's the case with the after death visions. Don't go for dark seductive lights, go only for bright lights. — Robert Thurman

In all death penalty cases, spending time with clients is important. Developing the trust of clients is not only necessary to manage the complexities of the litigation & deal with the stress of a potential execution; it's also key to effective advocacy. A client's life often depends on his lawyer's ability to create a mitigation narrative that contextualizes his poor decisions or violent behavior. Uncovering things about someone's background that no one has previously discovered--things that might be hard to discuss but are critically important--requires trust. Getting someone to acknowledge he has been the victim of child sexual abuse, neglect, or abandonment won't happen without the kind of comfort that takes hours and multiple visits to develop. Talking about sports, TV, popular culture, or anything else the client wants to discuss is absolutely appropriate to building a relationship that makes effective work possible. — Bryan Stevenson

A mother is an individual who'd go to any length for someone else, beyond rationality, beyond her physical body, her social bindings of state, country, her kind. That's the most horrifying individual you'll ever meet. — E.J. Koh

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time - the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes - when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever - there comes another day, and another specifically missing part. — John Irving

Then you know. You know what it's like to love someone like you love yourself and lose them. — Monica Hesse

It's okay to talk about it. Death is so normal, I don't know why everyone gets so hung up about it. We all have to deal with it. Most people that you talk to have lost someone, but nobody talks about it. — Rachel Ward

When someone dies, it's good to mail a note. Don't send an e-mail. You have to send a card. Everyone should have cards and stamps kicking around. I have some very simple stationery, just nice card stock with my name at the top. When the news is happy, e-mail is fine. You can e-mail congratulations about babies, weddings, anything. But when it's not? If it's a death or other bad news, you have to be more formal. — Tim Gunn

When you haven't yet had your heart really broken, the gospel isn't about death and rebirth. It's about life and more life. It's about hope and possibility and a brighter future. And it is, certainly, about those things.
But when you've faced some kind of death - the loss of someone you loved dearly, the failure of a dream, the fracture of a relationship - that's when you start understanding the central metaphor. When your life is easy, a lot of the really crucial parts of Christian doctrine and life are nice theories, but you don't really need them. When, however, death of any kind is staring you in the face, all of a sudden rebirth and new life are very, very important to you. — Shauna Niequist

Usually when you are grieving and someone says something so senselessly optimistic to you, it's about them. Either they want to feel like they can say something helpful, or they simply cannot allow themselves to entertain the finality and pain of death, so instead they turn it into a Precious Moments greeting card. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

It's not just women in film, 18-year-old girls feel pressure to do preventative injecting. I see someone's face, someone's body who has had children and I think, they're the song lines of your experience, and why would you want to eradicate that? I look at people sort of entombing themselves and all you see is their little pin holes of terror ... and you think, just live your life, death is not going to be any easier just because your face can't move. — Cate Blanchett

The first time you fall in love, it's like you've created the first love in the universe, and the first time someone you love dies, you grieve the universe's first death. What does it help to be told that what you feel is nothing new? — Leah Stewart

It's tempting to think that decisions that are not life-and-death are therefore unimportant, and that the little compromises we make don't matter to our bottom line or our spiritual selves. How many of us are tempted, in business, to make a less-than-ethical decision? To appropriate someone else's idea or fudge some numbers? We have to remember that maintaining our ethical and spiritual selves is absolutely linked with achieving the degree of success we're working toward. — Marianne Williamson