Quotes & Sayings About Unexpected Death

Because she is in God's hands.' But if so, she was in God's hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? If God's goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death as unendurably as before it. — C.S. Lewis

There is a whole generation of young people just like us wandering around Europe and the rest of the world, trying to find some meaning for why they are alive and what they should choose to do with their time. When Martha leaves and we sit in front of the fire in the living room, I look to Lily until she turns to me and I can see the grief that hides just under the surface of her expression. We are, or at least were, two of those lost souls: wanderers, backpackers, season workers, Wwoofers, Workawayers, travellers: searching the world for something or someplace to hold on to. And we have come home not because we have retired from trying to find answers and are ready to settle into adulthood, but because my death has come upon us fast and unexpected. I am not the first person of this generation of travellers- or any person who lives in this godless, superficial society- to die. But I think that it feels to Lily and to me, my mother too perhaps, that I may very well be. — Annie Fisher

I was 'led' to read The Shack by Wm Paul Young after the sudden & unexpected death of my fiance', Marina DeAngelo in July of 2012. It helped me as it has millions of people with the trauma and grief associated with the great personal loss of a loved one."

~R. Alan Woods [2013] — R. Alan Woods

Pure creativity is magnificent expressly because it is the opposite of everything else in life that's essential or inescapable (food, shelter, medicine, rule of law, social order, community and familial responsibility, sickness, loss, death, taxes, etc.). Pure creativity is something better than a necessity; it's a gift. It's the frosting. Our creativity is a wild and unexpected bonus from the universe. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Death is like that, it blinks, we blink; not always able to see the Stop signs, hiding behind trees in the corner of the roads. — Anthony Liccione

How long your closet held a whiff of you,
Long after hangers hung austere and bare.
I would walk in and suddenly the true
Sharp sweet sweat scent controlled the air
And life was in that small still living breath.
Where are you? since so much of you is here,
Your unique odour quite ignoring death.
My hands reach out to touch, to hold what's dear
And vital in my longing empty arms.
But other clothes fill up the space, your space,
And scent on scent send out strange false alarms.
Not of your odour there is not a trace.
But something unexpected still breaks through
The goneness to the presentness of you. — Madeleine L'Engle

Suffering is an oxymoron. There is unfathomable peace and satisfaction in suffering for Christ. It is as though you have searched endlessly for your purpose in life and now found it in the most unexpected place: In the death of your flesh. It is certainly a moment worth of laughter and dance. And in the end it is not suffering at all. The apostle Paul recommended that we find joy in it. Was he mad? — Ted Dekker

Whatever the reason we first mustered the _Apollo_ program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of _Apollo_. What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival.
Travel is broadening. It's time to hit the road again. — Carl Sagan

A life lived as variously as Roger's, and evoked in writing as powerful as his, means that even after death his influence continues to flow outwards. Green Man-like, he appears in unexpected places, speaking in leaves. — Robert Macfarlane

If we knew that we would meet the Lord tomorrow-through our premature death or through His unexpected coming-what would we do today? What confessions would we make? What practices would we discontinue? What accounts would we settle? What forgivenesses would we extend? What testimonies would we bear? If we would do those things then, why not now? — Dallin H. Oaks

There is nothing more painful than the untimely death of someone young and dear to the heart. The harrowing grief surges from a bottomless well of sorrow, drowning the mourner in a torrent of agonizing pain; an exquisite pain that continues to afflict the mourner with heartache and loneliness long after the deceased is buried and gone. — Jocelyn Murray

The external rest comes unexpected. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The start and unexpected miracle of a night fades out with the lingering death of the last starts and the premature birth of the first newsboys. The flame retreats to some remote and platonic fire; the white heat has gone from the iron and the glow from the coal. — F Scott Fitzgerald

My life was very tenuous last year. My daughter's death, in March in 2007, was unexpected. It was a shock. I didn't know if I'd survive it. — Phoebe Snow

At the moment of orgasm you are living fully and totally in the present. An orgasm is anticipated, like the sunrise on a new day, and unexpected, like winning a prize in a competition you can't recall having entered. Time freezes and there isn't a feeling of loss, a void, a little death, but a reminder that of all human activity, none is more perfect. — Chloe Thurlow

I used to be terrified of death. My grandfather was terminal in the hospital across from my high school, yet I never visited him. That fact still haunts me to this day. Years later, my arms were around my grandmother as she struggled with her last breaths. I told her we were with her and everything was going to be okay. She died as I held her tightly and I felt her body lose life. It was the most peaceful moment I ever experienced, and I felt joy for her. It was an emotional, intellectual, and spiritual moment for me. I wasn't afraid anymore ... One day years later I received the phone call every parent dreads. My daughter was in a serious automobile accident. As I raced to her I prepared myself for the news she had died. Once again, I felt an unexpected and profound emotion. She lived, but in the face of that horrifying time there was a strange overall calm. I realized, no matter what, everything was going to be okay. I remembered I wasn't afraid anymore. — John K. Brown

Death is as casual and often as unexpected as birth. It is as difficult to define grief as joy. Each is finite. Each will fade. — Jim Bishop

Unlike in our society, where we hide it, death surrounded medieval people. They had few hospitals, and so churches, poorhouses, and homes handled the dying and dead. Death was not a distant prospect at the end of a long, healthy life. It was integrated into ordinary experience. Medieval life was transitory, a journey through this world that often ended too soon and too abruptly. Death was often violent and unexpected. Extended death, through illness and in one's own bed, was actually a blessing. Death was part of everyday life; medieval people considered their deaths regularly. Indeed, as one medieval historian puts it, "One of the chief obsessions of medieval Christians was the need to make a 'good death.'"38 — Diana Butler Bass

I notice I am taking risks with my own security and losing my sensitivity to danger. I don't know it at the time, but the effects of war are reaching into me in unexpected ways, and I am being changed by them. I am surrounded by destruction and the randomness of death, which I cannot fathom. I have felt the closeness of death as tangibly as the whisper of a murderous seducer, and felt the richness, twinged by guilt, of having escaped its grasp. I have seen too often the numb lost look of men consumed by undiluted grief, and heard the howl of children as their mothers are pulled from the rubble of a rocket-blasted home, and I am coming to understand the long dark pain of those who silently endure what first seems unendurable. — Jason Elliot

I think on death as the apparent end of the illusions that encompass us. They all have a sudden and unexpected end, that challenges any faith we have pinned to their worth. — Vachel Lindsay

Unexpected discorporation was always rare on Mars; Martian taste in such matters called for life to be a rounded whole, with physical death taking place at the appropriate and selected instant. This artist, however, had become so preoccupied with his work that he had forgotten to come in out of the cold; by the time his absence was noticed his body was hardly fit to eat. He himself had not noticed his own discorporation and had gone right on composing his sequence. — Robert A. Heinlein

No decision is so fine as to not bind us to its consequences. No consequence is so unexpected as to absolve us of our decisions. Not even death. — R. Scott Bakker

[Australia] is the home of the largest living thing on earth, the Great Barrier Reef, and of the largest monolith, Ayers Rock (or Uluru to use its now-official, more respectful Aboriginal name). It has more things that will kill you than anywhere else. Of the world's ten most poisonous snakes, all are Australian. Five of its creatures - the funnel web spider, box jellyfish, blue-ringed octopus, paralysis tick, and stonefish - are the most lethal of their type in the world. This is a country where even the fluffiest of caterpillars can lay you out with a toxic nip, where seashells will not just sting you but actually sometimes go for you ... If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback. It's a tough place. — Bill Bryson

...[M]ortals are strange when people die. The more we hated or loved someone, the more we want to remember them. .... When people die, especially in a shocking, violent, or unexpected way, they tend to forgive, or at least forget, what angered them. It's a blessing of Persephone. She doesn't like it when people talk ill of the dead, being Queen of the Underworld and everything. It is also why we bring flowers for the dead. — Mandy Oviatt

Unattached and aimless, these old men are always infatuated with little certainties and regularities such as those that ordered the life of Mr. Krupper as seen from outside. Habit is living. Anything unexpected reminds them of death.
("Hard Candy") — Tennessee Williams

After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it. — Gustave Flaubert

This is how Raimbaut saw him, as with quick assured movements he arranged the pine cones in a triangle, then in squares on the sides of the triangle, and obstinately compared the pine cones on the shorter sides of the triangle with those of the square of the hypotenuse. Raimbaut realised that all this moved by ritual, convention, formulas, and beneath it there was ... what? He felt a vague sense of discomfort come over him at knowing himself to be outside all these rules of a game. But then his wanting to avenge his father's death, his ardor to fight, to enroll himself among Charlemagne's warriors - wasn't that also a ritual to prevent plunging into the void, like this raising and setting of pine cones by Sir Agilulf? Oppressed by the turmoil of such unexpected questions, young Raimbaut flung himself to the ground and burst into tears. — Italo Calvino

And now the thought came to me that I lived much of my life through the pages of books as well. That perhaps I, too, was only a paper figure. A cut-out, or silhouette. Flat.
I always thought I knew the shape of my life. Of course I thought I knew about life, thought I knew all I needed - or wanted - to know. And yet, like the opening left when a burning star falls from its perch, now an unexpected hole was left in what was once a solid curtain of understanding... ( )... Sitting under the cold stars, I understood that it was death that made me recognize life, and the existence, or pherhaps the non-existence of my own beeing. — Linda Holeman

I revise my suicide plan to slow death by morphling. I will become a yellow-skinned bag of bones, with enormous eyes. I'm a couple of days into the plan, making good progress, when something unexpected happens. I begin to sing. At the window, in the shower, in my sleep. Hour after hour of ballads, love songs, mountain airs. All the songs my father taught me before he died, for certainly there has been very little music in my life since. What's amazing is how clearly I remember them. The tunes, the lyrics. My voice, at first rough and breaking on the high notes, warms up into something splendid. A voice that would make the mockingjays fall silent and then tumble over themselves to join in. Days pass, weeks. I watch the snows fall on the ledge outside my window. And in all that time, mine is the only voice I hear. What — Suzanne Collins

...if we somehow find the courage to go directly into the discomfort - even the discomfort of illness, pain, old age, and death - we might discover something unexpected there. — Roland Merullo

Which death is preferably to every other? 'The unexpected'. — Julius Caesar

Nine months ago, my mother died. This was the saddest, most painful time of my life, but somehow unexpected laughter managed to eke its way into the days and moments following her death...after determining she was, in fact, dead, my father, a very practical man, took the opportunity to finish up some laundry he has been working on — Meredith Spidel

The suffering and calamity are, moreover, exceptional. They befall a conspicuous person. They are themselves of some striking kind. They are also, as a rule, unexpected, and contrasted with previous happiness or glory. A tale, for example, of a man slowly worn to death by disease, poverty, little cares, sordid vices, petty persecutions, however piteous or dreadful it might be, would not be tragic in the Shakespearean sense. — A. C. Bradley

That was a strange thing, the death of Coco. Not that he should die, for owing to the unexpected folly of the concierge it was inevitable that he should, but his manner of doing it. Even at this distance of time, the remembrance agonises me. There — Elizabeth Von Arnim

Death occurs in unexpected times. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I still have those childish moments when I wish with all my heart that I could wake up and find it's all been a dream. I really have thought that. I have felt-stronger than grief, stronger than anger, stronger than despair-the profound desire to return to the netherworld of the safer past. There are still flashes of unexpected sadness, the pauses that last longer than they used to. The desire for retribution, the fear of retribution. Like a death in the family, like a personal tragedy, an event like this lays bare the complexity of our worlds, internal and external. — David Levithan

Loss is the uninvited door that extends us an unexpected invitation to unimaginable possibilities. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

I detach myself from preconceived outcomes and trust that all is well. Being myself allows the wholeness of my unique magnificience to draw me in those directions most beneficial to me and to all others. This is really the only thing I have to do. And within that framework, everything that is truly mine comes into my life effortlessly, in the most magical and unexpected ways imaginable, demonstrating every day the power and love of who I truly am. — Anita Moorjani

When Mother had told me that animals found quiet, unexposed places to die, I had always imagined they knew they were dying, and accepted it, almost gracefully. Now I saw that this wasn't so at all: they crept into corners in the hope of surviving, they only knew they were weakened and exposed, easy prey, and their instinct was to find a hidden place and try to outlive whatever it was they were suffering. It had been a mistake to imagine they wanted to be alone, to die in peace. Animals have no knowledge of death; for them, death is the unexpected end of life, something they resist by instinct, for no good reason. In that sense, their existence has an almost mechanical quality. — John Burnside

I am made to think, not for the first time, that in my writing I have plunged ahead-head-on, heedlessly one might say-or 'fearlessly'- into my own future: this time of utter raw anguished loss. Though I may have had, since adolescence, a kind of intellectual/literary precocity, I had not experienced much;nor would I experience much until I was well into middle age-the illnesses and deaths of my parents, this unexpected death of my husband. We play at paste till qualified for pearl says Emily Dickinson. Playing at paste is much of our early lives. And then, with the violence of a door slammed shut by wind rushing through a house, life catches up with us. — Joyce Carol Oates

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 fantastic postulates that there are forces in the outside world, and in our own natures, which we can neither know nor control, and these forces may even constitute the essence of our existence, beneath the comforting rational surface. The fantastic is, moreover, a product of human imagination, perhaps even an excess of imagination. It arises when laws thought to be absolute are transcended, in the borderland between life and death, the animate and the inanimate, the self and the world; it arises when the real turns into the unreal, and the solid presence into vision, dream or hallucination. The fantastic is the unexpected occurrence, the startling novelty which goes contrary to all our expectations of what is possible. The ego multiplies and splits, time and space are distorted. — Franz Rottensteiner

When Anaxagoras was told of the death of his son, he only said, "I knew he was mortal." So we in all casualties of life should say "I knew my riches were uncertain, that my friend was but a man." Such considerations would soon pacify us, because all our troubles proceed from their being unexpected. — Plutarch

Speak here," Ronan said. "As Ash's guard, I ought to be privy to any plans."

"You are hardly in any shape to function as her guard, my son. Rest, and when you've recovered, you can - "

"I've recovered enough to stay by her side," Ronan said. "Which I will, particularly now, after what happened to the guard you assigned."

"It was not Tarquin's fault," Ashyn said.

"I do not mean to minimize the tragedy of his death," Ronan said. "But he wasn't up to his task. You require better. You require me."

"You have a high opinion of yourself," Edwyn said dryly.

"No, I have a high opinion of the danger Ash faces, and I don't trust anyone else to understand it. Clearly your guard did not expect fiend dogs."

"No one expects fiend dogs," Ashyn said.

"True, but at least you and I expect the unexpected. — Kelley Armstrong

Cool. I'm quiet, too."
I arched a brow.
He laughed. "Okay. I'm not quiet. I'm sure if you Wikipedia'd my ass, I would show up as the opposite of quiet. But that's okay. You and I would get along like lime and tequila. You can make up for my nonstop talkin' and I can make up for your lack of talkin'." He nudged my arm with his. "We're a perfect team!"
The smile returned to my face. I didn't really know him but I liked him. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

It hurts when they're gone. And it doesn't matter if it's slow or fast, whether it's a long drawn-out disease or an unexpected accident. When they're gone the world turns upside down and you're left holding on, trying not to fall off. — Walter Mosley

I would rather have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick. If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback. — Bill Bryson

How could anything be the same? The red of blood lay over the market road in slick pools mingled with a yellow spread of dal someone must have brought in anticipation of a picnic after the parade, and there were flies on it, left behind odd slippers, and a sad pair of broken spectacles, even a tooth. It was rather like the government warning about safety that appeared in the cinema before the movie with the image of a man cycling to work, a poor man but with a wife who loved him, and she had sent his lunch with him in a tiffin container; then came a blowing of horns and small, desperate cycle tinkle, and a messy blur clearing into the silent still image of a spread of food mingled with blood. Those mismatched colors, domesticity shuffled with death, sureness running into the unexpected, kindness replaced by the image of violence, always made the cook feel like throwing up and weeping both together. — Kiran Desai

There's a part of grief that's unexpected. After the days when you think you'll never be able to get out of bed again and after walking about feeling like your insides are hollow and your skin is made of paper, you start remembering. You remember not the death and seeing the one you love in a hospital bed with tubes. You remember what he was like before all of that, when he was well and you were whole. It's that remembering that catches up with you and then you know the person you lost isn't lost after all, but has become part of you and you're the better for it. — Shelly King

I went into the living room and looked down at my mother's torn body and shook my head. It was surreal. I guess some people in that situation would have crumbled, some would have cried, but I'd emotionally disconnected from life a long time ago. For that, I had to thank the skeletal bitch on the floor, with her greedy rodent soul and her short-tempered ape-mate in the kitchen. If anything, her death was a belated answer to old prayers, with a bit of an unexpected mess. — Bobby Adair

Viewed from a different angle, my uncle's words offered up the rest of my life as an unexpected gift, an opportunity for the most radical improvisation. I could be whatever I wanted to be, as long as I didn't end up another corpse in the casket with a hole in his head. Anything went. Anything was permissible, as long as I lived. — Philip Connors

My mother was killed in a plane crash, so I hate travelling in planes. Death is so unexpected. I would actually rather stay at home and not go anywhere. — Linda McCartney

...[T]he king is lying down, severely wounded; one of his faithful companions, Lucan the Butler, approaches, in tears, to say a final farewell. Arthur stands up to embrace him, "holding him so tightly against his chest that he smothers him, crushes his heart and kills him." This is a strange and dramatic event, unexpected, serving no plot purpose, but an event that recalls that Arthur was in origin a bear-king endowed with superhuman strength: like the animal he could kill his enemy in hand to hand combat simply by pressing him against his chest. The king is not aware of his animal strength, but even as he is dying, he retains the power to cause death by a mere embrace, a power that no human being possesses. (p.53-54) — Michel Pastoureau