|
ef82619
|
Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.
|
|
creativity
death
history
human-spirit
life
time
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
bbbfe8c
|
Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.
|
|
beauty
death
die
grow
mean
old
shabby
time
tragedy
wrinkled
young
youth
|
Raymond Chandler |
|
1cd3001
|
And here face down beneath the sun And here upon earth's noonward height To feel the always coming on The always rising of the night
|
|
death
night
poem
poet
poetry
|
Archibald MacLeish |
|
892cbda
|
She was my friend. Briefly, she was my lover. She was braver than I ever would have been in the moment of death. And I bet she was a hell of a shooting star.
|
|
death
friend
hell
lover
moment
shooting
star
|
John Scalzi |
|
550f496
|
If death is no longer a fear, we're really free. Free to take any risk under the sun for Christ and for love.
|
|
death
faith
immortality
|
John Piper |
|
795c792
|
She fed him scraps from her ragbag because words were all that were left now. Perhaps he could use them to pay the ferryman. The air rippled and shimmered. Time narrowed to a pinpoint. It was about to happen.
|
|
beautiful
death
dying
edward-thomas
gerard-manley-hopkins
john-keats
kate-atkinson
literary-allusions
literary-quotes
quotes
william-blake
william-shakespeare
william-wordsworth
|
Kate Atkinson |
|
be395ba
|
What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull.
|
|
anachronisms
death
permanence
revolution
sociology
technology
time
work
|
Alain de Botton |
|
f546165
|
I thought, My name is Matt and I'm an alcoholic. A woman I know got killed last night. She hired me to keep her from getting killed and I wound up assuring her that she was safe and she believed me. And her killer conned me and I believed him, and she's dead now, and there's nothing I can do about it. And it eats at me and I don't know what to do about that, and there's a bar on every corner and a liquor store on every block, and drinking won't bring her back to life but neither will staying sober, and why the hell do I have to go through this? Why?
|
|
death
|
Lawrence Block |
|
01bedc9
|
"Of course what I'm about to share isn't true for me but... Friends, somebody said, are "god's apology for relations." (p. 129)"
|
|
death
family
friends
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
fd9877c
|
Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death.
|
|
death
life
|
Julian Barnes |
|
35d810e
|
Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?
|
|
business
death
marketing
meaning
products
promotions
work
|
Alain de Botton |
|
e79ac39
|
Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these things are justification enough for our hopes and dreams, although I wouldn't say that to a dying man.
|
|
arts
dance
death
dream
dreams
dying
hope
hopes
life-after-death
music
poetry
posterity
ritual
|
Don DeLillo |
|
87f8653
|
It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that--the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness, persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop?
|
|
death
humor
|
Mary Roach |
|
62dc212
|
She was still clutching the book. She was holding desperately on to the words who had saved her life.
|
|
death
reading
words
|
Markus Zusak |
|
2609989
|
And then the queen wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into that man, the boy whose gentle hand had comforted her childhood hurts, the boy whose frightened voice had cried out to her at the end of his life, as if he wondered why he had gotten lost inside himself, as if he realized that it was too, too late to get out again.
|
|
death
greed
grief
growing-up
lost
lost-innocence
regret
saddest-thing
the-end
the-princess-and-the-bear
too-late
|
Orson Scott Card |
|
2c777b0
|
He knows that there will be days ahead, long, tedious days which have no real beginning or ending, but which run together into night and out of it without changing color, or sound, or meaning. He will lie in his bed feeling the minutes and the hours pass through his body like an endless ribbon of pain because time becomes pain then. Light and darkness become pain; all his senses exist only to receive it, to transmit to his mind again and again, with ceaseless repetition, the simple fact that now he is dying.
|
|
death
malaria
|
Beryl Markham |
|
6e9cbf3
|
"She leaves my side and heads deeper into
|
|
amnesia
androids
apocalypse
carrack
cityisle
cityspire
count
damnation
death
desolate
dreams
emily-dickinson
empty
fedora
ghosts
gothic
greek-mythology
haunting
haunts
horace-walpole
jazz
life
magic
magick
mannequins
masquerade
music
phillip-k-dick
piano
poems
puddles
rain
reflections
romance
sacrifice
science-fiction
sex
shakespeare
ships
songs
specters
spectre
storms
tempest
waking
water
|
Nathan Reese Maher |
|
8982bb4
|
"Then Deborah stood at the wicket gate, the boundary, and there was a woman with outstretched hand, demanding tickets. "Pass through," she said when Deborah reached her. "We saw you coming." The wicket gate became a turnstile. Deborah pushed against it and there was no resistance, she was through. "What is it?" she asked. "Am I really here at last? Is this the bottom of the pool?" "It could be," smiled the woman. "There are so many ways. You just happened to choose this one." Other people were pressing to come through. They had no faces, they were only shadows. Deborah stood aside to let them by, and in a moment they had gone, all phantoms. "Why only now, tonight?" asked Deborah. "Why not in the afternoon, when I came to the pool?" "It's a trick," said the woman. "You seize on the moment in time. We were here this afternoon. We're always here. Our life goes on around you, but nobody knows it. The trick's easier by night, that's all." "Am I dreaming, then?" asked Deborah. "No," said the woman, "this isn't a dream. And it isn't death, either. It's the secret world." The secret world... It was something Deborah had always known, and now the pattern was complete. The memory of it, and the relief, were so tremendous that something seemed to burst inside her heart. "Of course..." she said, "of course..." and everything that had ever been fell into place. There was no disharmony. The joy was indescribable, and the surge of feeling, like wings about her in the air, lifted her away from the turnstile and the woman, and she had all knowledge. That was it - the invasion of knowledge. ("The Pool")"
|
|
creativity
death
dream
fantasy
imagination
innocence
knowledge
night
secret
time
|
Daphne du Maurier |
|
1956874
|
Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can get.
|
|
can-get
death
grab
jealous
life
life-lessons
possessive
tiger
zoo
|
Yann Martel |
|
c63516c
|
"The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my arm, the Berkeley sky cloudless, a smell of jasmine in the air, a car driving by with its window rolled down, trailing a sweet ache of the Allman Brothers' "Melissa," it struck me that in order to have reached only the midpoint of my life I will need to live to be 92. That's pretty old. If you live to be ninety-two, you've done well for yourself. I'd like to be optimistic, and I try to take care of my health, but none of my grandparents even made it past 76, three killed by cancer, one by Parkinson's disease. If I live no longer than any of them did, I have at most thirty years left, which puts me around sixty percent of the way through my time.
|
|
death
mortality
religion
soul
|
Michael Chabon |
|
5579f37
|
To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose: and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness; -it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man's vanity. He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is - so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys - this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: -surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.
|
|
death
failure
|
Robert Louis Stevenson |
|
a9ba5ed
|
You have to be very deep to be dead, he thought, and I'm not. He began to have some concept of forever, and his mind shivered as his body had when he had wakened in the cold nights and thrust his hands between his thighs to keep warm. It will be a long night, he thought.
|
|
death
forever
night
|
Peter S. Beagle |
|
5856385
|
But death is stronger than that and when you cover your eyes you are the one who can't see the dark. The dark still sees you.
|
|
darkness
death
|
Francesca Lia Block |
|
d80ee33
|
Agent Jones switched to the big screen and a grainy video of MoMo sitting at his enormous desk, a swivel-hipped Elvis clock ticking behind his bewigged head. 'Death to the capitalist pigs! Death to your cinnamon bun-smelling malls! Death to your power walking and automatic car windows and I'm With Stupid T-shirts! The Republic of ChaCha will never bend to your side-of-fries -drive -through-please-oh-would-you-like-ketchup-with-that corruption! MoMo B. ChaCha defies you and all you stand for, and one day, you will crumble into the sea and we will pick up the pieces and make them into sand art.
|
|
cinnamon-buns
death
fries
i-m-with-stupid
ketchup
power-walking
|
Libba Bray |
|
78132cc
|
What actually happens when you die is that your brain stops working and your body rots, like Rabbit did when he died and we buried him in the earth at the bottom of the garden. And all his molecules were broken down into other molecules and they went into the earth and were eaten by worms and went into the plants and if we go dig in the same place in 10 years there will be nothing except his skeleton left. And in 1,000 years even his skeleton will be gone. But that is all right because he is part of the flowers and the apple tree and the hawthorn bush now. When people die they are sometimes put into coffins which means that they don't mix with the earth for a very long time until the wood of the coffin rots. But Mother was cremated. This means that she was put into a coffin and burnt and ground up and turned into ash and smoke. I do not know what happens to the ash and I couldn't ask at the crematorium because I didn't go to the funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antartic, or coming down as rain in rainforests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere.
|
|
bodies
burial
cremation
death
decay
decomposition
energy
funeral
life
molecules
nature
rot
science
|
Mark Haddon |
|
0d87621
|
It seems we've been at cross purposes, doesn't it? But it's no use now. As long as there was Bonnie, there was a chance that we might be happy. I liked to think that Bonnie was you, a little girl again, before the war, and poverty had done things to you. She was so like you, and I could pet her, and spoil her, as I wanted to spoil you. But when she went, she took everything.
|
|
death
father-daughter
rhett-to-scarlett
|
Margaret Mitchell |
|
6c57759
|
No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.
|
|
death
meaning-of-life
|
Dan Simmons |
|
0ffc71e
|
Close your eyes and stare into the dark. My father's advice when I couldn't sleep as a little girl. He wouldn't want me to do that now but I've set my mind to the task regardless. I'm staring beyond my closed eyelids. Though I lie still on the ground, I feel perched at the highest point I could possibly be; clutching at a star in the night sky with my legs dangling above cold black nothingness. I take one last look at my fingers wrapped around the light and let go. Down I go, falling, then floating, and, falling again, I wait for the land of my life. I know now, as I knew as that little girl fighting sleep, that behind her gauzed screen of shut-eye, lies colour. It taunts me, dares me to open my eyes and lose sleep. Flashes of red and amber, yellow and white speckle my darkness. I refuse to open them. I rebel and I squeeze my eyelids together tighter to block out the grains of light, mere distractions that keep us awake but a sign that there's life beyond. But there's no life in me. None that I can feel, from where I lie at the bottom of the staircase. My heart beats quicker now, the lone fighter left standing in the ring, a red boxing glove pumping victoriously into the air, refusing to give up. It's the only part of me that cares, the only part that ever cared. It fights to pump the blood around to heal, to replace what I'm losing. But it's all leaving my body as quickly as it's sent; forming a deep black ocean of its own around me where I've fallen. Rushing, rushing, rushing. We are always rushing. Never have enough time here, always trying to make our way there. Need to have left here five minutes ago, need to be there now. The phone rings again and I acknowledge the irony. I could have taken my time and answered it now. Now, not then. I could have taken all the time in the world on each of those steps. But we're always rushing. All, but my heart. That slows now. I don't mind so much. I place my hand on my belly. If my child is gone, and I suspect this is so, I'll join it there. There.....where? Wherever. It; a heartless word. He or she so young; who it was to become, still a question. But there, I will mother it. There, not here. I'll tell it; I'm sorry, sweetheart, I'm sorry I ruined your chances - our chances of a life together.But close your eyes and stare into the darkness now, like Mummy is doing, and we'll find our way together. There's a noise in the room and I feel a presence. 'Oh God, Joyce, oh God. Can you hear me, love? Oh God. Oh God, please no, Hold on love, I'm here. Dad is here.' I don't want to hold on and I feel like telling him so. I hear myself groan, an animal-like whimper and it shocks me, scares me. I have a plan, I want to tell him. I want to go, only then can I be with my baby. Then, not now. He's stopped me from falling but I haven't landed yet. Instead he helps me balance on nothing, hover while I'm forced to make the decision. I want to keep falling but he's calling the ambulance and he's gripping my hand with such ferocity it's as though I'm all he has. He's brushing the hair from my forehead and weeping loudly. I've never heard him weep. Not even when Mum died. He clings to my hand with all of his strength I never knew his old body had and I remember that I am all he has and that he, once again just like before, is my whole world. The blood continues to rush through me. Rushing, rushing, rushing. We are always rushing. Maybe I'm rushing again. Maybe it's not my time to go. I feel the rough skin of old hands squeezing mine, and their intensity and their familiarity force me to open my eyes. Lights fills them and I glimpse his face, a look I never want to see again. He clings to his baby. I know I lost mind; I can't let him lose his. In making my decision I already begin to grieve. I've landed now, the land of my life. And still my heart pumps on. Even when broken it still works.
|
|
darkness
death
motherhood
|
Cecelia Ahern |
|
8fcc33a
|
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.
|
|
concern
death
emotions
family
feelings
life
loss
love
relationship
security
separation
|
Margaret Peterson Haddix |
|
44ab4f5
|
I realized that even if all the people in the world from the day of creation found this to be necessary according to whatever theory, I knew that it was not necessary and that it was wrong. Therefore, my judgements must be based on what is right and necessary and not on what people say and do; I must judge not according to progress but according to my own heart.
|
|
death
existence
|
Leo Tolstoy |
|
6c9873b
|
Everything seems to work with a recurring rhythm except life. There is only one birth and only one death. Nothing else is like that.
|
|
death
life
recurring-rhythm
|
John Steinbeck |
|
bacffbd
|
Once you kill all of us, and you're alone, you'll die! The hate will die. That hate is what moves you, nothing else! That envy moves you. Nothing else! You'll die, inevitably. You're not immortal. You're not even alive, you're nothing but moving hate.
|
|
death
die
hate
|
Ray Bradbury |
|
284906b
|
"Again the ranch is on the market and they've shipped out the last of the horses, paid everybody off the day before, the owner saying, 'Give them to the real estate shark, I'm out a here," dropping the keys in Ennis's hand. He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks up another job, yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream."
|
|
death
love
|
Annie Proulx |
|
2e66850
|
I can't look people in the eye and tell them that they're going to die anymore.
|
|
angel
azrael
dead
death
die
dying
empathy
eye
grim-reaper
look
morality
pale-horseman
sadness
scythe
sympathy
tell
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
8091983
|
I saw to the south a man walking. He was breaking ground in perfect silence. He wore a harness and pulled a plow. His feet trod his figure's blue shadow, and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. He turned back as if to check the furrow, or as if he heard a call. Again I saw another man on the plain to the north. This man walked slowly with a spade, and turned the green ground under. Then before me in the near distance I saw the earth itself walking, the earth walking dark and aerated as it always does in every season, peeling the light back: The earth was plowing the men under, and the space, and the plow. No one sees us go under. No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. The green fields grow up forgetting. Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present.
|
|
death
generations
mortality
time
|
Annie Dillard |
|
ca87f59
|
He brooded on how close destruction always was to all creatures, animals as well as humans, and he realized that there is nothing we can predict or know for certain in this world except death.
|
|
death
life
wisdom
|
Hermann Hesse |
|
8c39c6f
|
"You know, I really liked those days back in Soul Society! Shinigami are always in death's way because of their existence and line of work. We may die the next day. We may be talking at one moment and dead at the next. No one talks about it, but everyone has that thought in the corner of their minds. We saw death up close. We felt death up close. That's why we were able to cherish each day. Death will eventually come to us all. But that's what made us united. That's what I believed. But you... Aizen, I don't hate you because you betrayed us. I hate you because you made me hurt my friends! You used me...and trampled on our bonds and our feelings! Aizen! I'm seething with an anger that's been boiling for a hundred years! I won't go back to the way I was until I kill you!' -Hiyori
|
|
death
hiyori-sarugaki
soul-society
|
Tite Kubo |
|
2c36213
|
Shall I kill her now? Shall I not even investigate, but kill her and burn her? His throat moved. Such thoughts were a hideous testimony to the world he had accepted; a world in which murder was easier than hope.
|
|
change
dead
death
decision
hope
murder
murderer
zombies
|
Richard Matheson |
|
4f43f50
|
I could ask for no better parents.' 'You miss them.' After all this time? 'Every single day out of hundreds of thousands.' What could I say to that? Anything I came up with sounded trite. Silence fell over us. Aric drank, lost in thought. And I knew he was remembering the night he'd killed them...
|
|
death
|
Kresley Cole |
|
cca2b67
|
Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide--one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave--of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.
|
|
abu-musab-al-zarqawi
al-qaeda
al-qaeda-in-iraq
arab-spring
death
death-of-osama-bin-laden
exorcism
feminism
iraq
islamism
life
literature
music
osama-bin-laden
pakistan
secularism
september-11-attacks
sunni-islam
terrorism
theocracy
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
52330aa
|
She is here. And she comes to you, and she does not speak, and the others do not notice her, and she takes your hand, and you ready yourself to die, eyes open, aware this is all an illusion, a last aroma cast up by the chemical stew that is your brain, which will soon cease to function, ad there will be nothing, and you are ready, ready to die well, ready to die like a man, like a woman, like a human, for despite all else you have loved, you have loved your father and your mother and your brother and your sister and your son and, yes, your ex-wife and you have loved the pretty girl, you have been beyond yourself, and so you have courage, and you have dignity, and you have calmness in the face of terror, and awe, and the pretty girl holds your hand, and you contain her, and this book, and me writing it, and I too contain you, who may not even be born, you inside me inside you, though not in a creepy way, and so may you, may I, may we, so may all of us confront the end.
|
|
death
inspirational
life
love
old-age
poignant
self-help
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
135d12e
|
I wouldn't want [the people of Baleyworld] to live that long as a general thing. The pace of historical and intellectual advance would then become too slow. Those at the top would stay in power too long. Baleyworld would sink into conversation and decay - as your world has done.
|
|
death
decadence
immortality
longevity
progress
|
Isaac Asimov |
|
395deb2
|
She wasted and grew so thin that she no longer was a little girl, but the shadow of a little girl. The flame of her life flickered so faintly that it appeared sufficient to blow at it to extinguish it. Stas understood that death did not have to wait for a third attack to take her and he expected it any day or any hour.
|
|
death
death-and-dying
disease
malaria
sickness
wilderness
|
Henryk Sienkiewicz |
|
e0aa484
|
He looked upon this verdant, blossoming spring, a spring Joanna would never see, he looked upon a field of brilliant blue flowers- the bluebells Joanna had so loved- and at that moment he'd willingly have bartered all his tomorrows for but one yesterday.
|
|
death
tomorrow-s
wishes
yesterday-s
|
Sharon Kay Penman |
|
3579b15
|
Yet for quixotic reasons--namely, that I enjoyed writing obits--I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city's dead. For even less money. It was a strange and inexplicable career move.
|
|
death
obituary
|
Avi Steinberg |
|
c385b5d
|
She'd made life poignant for the Irish. The terror she inspired gave peace its serenity; the pain she caused gave health its lustre; her failure to love made me grateful for my ability to do so, and I realized, far too late, that though I never did or could have loved her as she might have wished, I should have loved her more.
|
|
death
love
|
Kevin Hearne |
|
1e49286
|
There are worse ways to die than warm and drunk.
|
|
alcoholic
death
|
George R.R. Martin |
|
e5a5cb0
|
The death of Nighteyes gutted me. I walked wounded through my life in the days that followed, unaware of just how mutilated I was. I was like the man who complains of the itching of his severed leg. The itching distracts from the immense knowledge that one will forever after hobble through life.
|
|
death
denial
effect
forever
itch
knowledge
life
mutilated
pain
result
unimaginable
wound
|
Robin Hobb |
|
cab4389
|
He won't say no, but who cares if he does? Do it. Hell, guys go through this every time they make a move on a woman, and none of them has died yet. In many cases, that is, of course, unfortunate, but rejection is definitely not lethal. Go get him.
|
|
dating
death
die
rejection
|
Jennifer Crusie |
|
f030c61
|
There were three of them in the room now, where only two had first come in. Death was in the room with the two of them.
|
|
crime-thriller
death
noir
noir-fiction
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
03dcdd5
|
She was always left feeling like a murderer. Because the messenger becomes the murderer. Until the fatal words are spoken, the loved one concerned is still alive, waking, sleeping, going about his business, making telephone calls, writing letters, going for walks, breathing, seeing. It was the telling that killed.
|
|
death
reality
|
Rosamunde Pilcher |
|
357c9ba
|
A lark, caught in a hunter's net Sang sweeter then than ever, As if the falling melody Might wing and net dissever At dusk the hunter took his prey, The lark his freedom never. All birds and men are sure to die But songs may live forever.
|
|
death
lark
melody
sad
song
songs-may-live-forever
|
Ken Follett |
|
e690826
|
"Gates got up, but not fast or jerkily, with the same slowness that had always characterized him. He wiped the sweat off his palms by running them lightly down his sides. As though he were going to shake hands with somebody. He was. He was going to shake hands with death. He wasn't particularly frightened. Not that he was particularly brave. It was just that he didn't have very much imagination. Rationalizing, he knew that he wasn't going to be alive anymore ten minutes from now. Yet he wasn't used to casting his imagination ten minutes ahead of him, he'd always kept it by him in the present. He couldn't visualize it. So he wasn't as unnerved by it as the average man would have been. ("3 Kills For 1")"
|
|
death
death-penalty
death-sentence
electric-chair
execution
fear
imagination
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
ed796bb
|
Throw off your grief,' doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away.
|
|
death
grief
mourning
pretending
survival
|
Julian Barnes |
|
059fa50
|
In Sarajevo in 1992, while being shown around the starved, bombarded city by the incomparable John Burns, I experienced four near misses in all, three of them in the course of one day. I certainly thought that the Bosnian cause was worth fighting for and worth defending, but I could not take myself seriously enough to imagine that my own demise would have forwarded the cause. (I also discovered that a famous jaunty Churchillism had its limits: the old war-lover wrote in one of his more youthful reminiscences that there is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result. In my case, the experience of a whirring, whizzing horror just missing my ear was indeed briefly exciting, but on reflection made me want above all to get to the airport. Catching the plane out with a whole skin is the best part .) Or suppose I had been hit by that mortar that burst with an awful shriek so near to me, and turned into a Catherine wheel of body-parts and (even worse) body-ingredients? Once again, I was moved above all not by the thought that my death would 'count,' but that it would not count in the least.
|
|
bosnia
bosnian-war
bullets
causes
churchill
death
john-burns
martyrdom
mortars
near-death-experience
sarajevo
siege-of-sarajevo
war
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
db248a8
|
It's like a memorial to Atlantis or Lyonesse: these are the stone buoys that mark a drowned world.
|
|
cemetery
death
lyonesse
tombstones
wrocław
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
0bb8dcb
|
Believe in me and you shall die, forever.
|
|
death
forever
|
Chuck Palahniuk |
|
ec90339
|
I don't . Religion? Humans desperate to take out infinity insurance. Death? The great big . Love? Dopamine released in the brain, which gets depleted over time, leaving contempt.
|
|
death
love
religion
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
9d30f80
|
I will not speak falsely and say to you: 'Do not grieve for me when I go.' I have loved my children and tried to be a good mother and it is right that my children grieve for me. But let your grief be gentle and brief. And let resignation creep into it. Know that I shall be happy. I shall see face to face the great saints I have loved all my life.
|
|
death
grief
|
Betty Smith |
|
6984399
|
"Pa said, "Won't you say a few words? Ain't none of our folks ever been buried without a few words." Connie led Rose of Sharon to the graveside, she reluctant. "You got to," Connie said. "It ain't decent not to. It'll jus' be a little. The firelight fell on the grouped people, showing their faces and their eyes, dwindling on their dark clothes.All the hats were off now. The light danced, jerking over the people. Casy said, It'll be a short one." He bowed his head, and the others followed his lead. Casy said solemnly, "This here ol' man jus' lived a life an' just died out of it. I don't know whether he was good or bad, but that don't matter much. He was alive, an' that's what matters. An' now his dead, an' that don't matter. Heard a fella tell a poem one time, an' he says 'All that lives is holy.' Got to thinkin', an' purty soon it means more than the words says. An' I woundn' pray for a ol' fella that's dead. He's awright. He got a job to do, but it's all laid out for'im an' there's on'y one way to do it. But us, we got a job to do, an' they's a thousan' ways, an' we don' know which one to take. An' if I was to pray, it'd be for the folks that don' know which way to turn. Grampa here, he got the easy straight. An' now cover 'im up and let'im get to his work." He raised his head."
|
|
death
funeral
last-words
life
|
John Steinbeck |
|
490421e
|
Study history, Alleluia. In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economics is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects. This Gibreel of yours: maybe he's how history happens to you.
|
|
death
history
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
bf387fb
|
What a terrible thing it is for children to see death, you say. We have it all wrong. If you make a child terrified of death, he won't embrace it so easily. And death must be embraced if you wish to follow Christ. Listen to His teaching. 'Unless you become like a child...and unless you take up your cross daily, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.' One is not valuable without the other. Janjic Jovic, The Dance of the Dead, 1959
|
|
death
following-christ
|
Ted Dekker |
|
faf577b
|
An answer is always a form of death.
|
|
death
end
|
John Fowles |
|
d5d5614
|
Death loves death, not life. Dying people love to know that others die with them; it is a comfort to learn you are not alone in the kiln, in the grave.
|
|
death
dying
love
|
Ray Bradbury |
|
d1e01a6
|
"Colored people don't like
|
|
death
fire
|
Ray Bradbury |
|
396b0b7
|
It's a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.
|
|
blackness
death
race
|
Elizabeth Alexander |
|
6043a40
|
The woman who later became his wife was sleeping in his bed, her face buried in the pillows and her feet crossed on top of each other like a child's. He watched her sleep and struggled to see her as she was, but what he saw instead were her muscles and bones. He saw right through the skin to where her femur connected to her tibia by way of the ligaments, to the hair web of nerves and the delicate forest of her lungs, to the abstract heart pumping blood through her arteries. It terrified him how easily these systems could fail her.
|
|
death
life
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
182e490
|
One day you discover you are alive. Explosion! Concussion! Illumination! Delight! You laugh, you dance around, you shout. But, not long after, the sun goes out. Snow falls, but no one sees it, on an August noon.
|
|
death
life
summer
|
Ray Bradbury |
|
301b278
|
And in it all, the sensation of shaking my fists at the sky, shaking my fists high up to the sky, because that is what we do when someone dies too early, too beautiful, too undervalued by the world, or sometimes just at all -- we shake our fists at the big, beautiful, indifferent sky, and the anger is righteous and strong and helpless and huge. I shook and I shook, and I put all of it into the dress.
|
|
death
grief
|
Aimee Bender |
|
4c8d46b
|
"That's a stupid name! Whirly-gig is much better, I think. Who in their right mind would point at this thing and say, 'I'm going to fly in my Model-A1'.
|
|
amnesia
androids
apocalypse
carrack
cityisle
cityspire
count
damnation
death
desolate
dreams
emily-dickinson
empty
fedora
ghosts
gothic
greek-mythology
haunting
haunts
horace-walpole
jazz
life
magic
magick
mannequins
masquerade
music
phillip-k-dick
piano
poems
puddles
rain
reflections
romance
sacrifice
science-fiction
sex
shakespeare
ships
songs
specters
spectre
storms
tempest
waking
water
|
Nathan Reese Maher |
|
ceaf90b
|
"It is life, more than death, that has no limits. Love becomes greater and nobler and mightier in calamity. We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice. But when a women decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root. There is no god worth worrying about. Let time pass and we will see what it brings. Humanity, like the armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest. Those of us who make the rules have the greatest obligation to abide by them. I don't believe in God but I am afraid of him. It's better to arrive in time than to be invited. Unfaithful but not disloyal. Love, no matter what else it might be, is a natural talent. Nobody teaches life anything. The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love. There is no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid and dangerous, than a poet.
|
|
death
gabriel
garcia
limits
love
marquez
|
Gabriel García Márquez |
|
1eb8d62
|
People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist.
|
|
death
reading
writers
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
f5ddfe0
|
Besides, the story is ambivalent and mysterious in its ending. Is this Alkestis returning from down below? Why does she have a veil over her face? Could it be that when we forcefully bring back to life what has been lost through love what we get is only a shate of its former reality? Maybe we can never succeed fully in restoring the soul to life. Maybe she will always be veiled and at least partially shielded from the rigors of actual life. Love demands a submission that is total.
|
|
death
love
submission
|
Thomas Moore |
|
40d6e57
|
We would never go shopping together or eat an entire cake while we complained about men. He'd never invite me over to his house for dinner or a barbecue. We'd never be lovers. But there was a very good chance that one of us would be the last person the other saw before we died. It wasn't friendship the way most people understood it, but it was friendship. There were several people I'd trust with my life, but there is no one else I'd trust with my death. Jean-Claude and even Richard would try to hold me alive out of love or something that passed for it. Even my family and other friends would fight to keep me alive. If I wanted death, Edward would give it to me. Because we both understand that it isn't death that we fear. It's living.
|
|
anita-blake-vampire-hunter
bromance
death
edward-forrester
friends
friendship
laurell-k-hamilton
living
obsidian-butterfly
soulmates
ted-forrester
|
Laurell K. Hamilton |
|
d10c79e
|
But where corpses were buried secretly, there the grass grows thick; such signs (and there are ever so many others!) may be read by those to whom truth is more important than beauty.
|
|
death
secrets
signs
truth
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
a2bd562
|
Before and after the funeral I never ceased to cry and be miserable, but it makes me ashamed when I think back on that sadness of mine, seeing that always in it was an element of self-love - now a desire to show that I prayed more than any one else, now concern about the impression I was producing on others, now an aimless curiosity which caused me to observe Mimi's cap or the faces of those around me. I despised myself for not experiencing sorrow to the exclusion of everything else, and I tried to conceal all other feelings: this made my grief insincere and unnatural. Moreover, I felt a kind of enjoyment in knowing that I was unhappy and I tried to stimulate my sense of unhappiness, and this interest in myself did more than anything else to stifle real sorrow in me.
|
|
childhood
death
funeral
grief
self-love
sorrow
tolstoy
unhappiness
youth
|
Leo Tolstoy |
|
0f154d2
|
We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them. ... Long after he's dead, someone else will own those stupid little boxes, and then someone after him, just as someone owned them before he did. But no one ever thinks of that: objects survive us and go on living. It's stupid to believe we own them. And it's sinful for them to be so important.
|
|
death
materialism
ownership
possessions
|
Donna Leon |
|
0f7453e
|
It is not just a question of blowing up a building or shooting a prime minister. Such bourgeois horseplay is not contemplated. Our operation must be delicate, refined and aimed at the heart of the Intelligence apparat of the West.
|
|
death
horseplay
james-bond
refinement
|
Ian Fleming |
|
c34a03f
|
I never want to put my whole world in any one person's hands again, Jason. If they die, I won't die with them.' 'So you'll hold a little of yourself back from everybody.' 'No,' I said, 'I'll hold back a piece of myself for myself. No one gets all of me, Jason, no one, except me.
|
|
anita-blake-vampire-hunter
death
independence
jason-schuyler
laurell-k-hamilton
love
relationships
strong-women
|
Laurell K. Hamilton |
|
49bef17
|
"...Do you think there's somewhere else, some other place to go after this one?" Mandy blurted out. "You mean when you die, where will you end up?" Alecto asked her. "...I wouldn't know... back to whatever void there is, I suppose." "I've thought about it... every living thing dies alone, it'll be lonely after death," Mandy sighed sadly. "That freaks me out, does it scare you?" "I don't want to be alone," Alecto replied wearily. "We won't be, though. We'll be dead, so we'll just be darkness, not much else, just memories, nostalgia and darkness." "I don't want to be any of that either though," Mandy exclaimed, bursting into tears and crying, keeping her eyes to the floor, her voice shaky as she spoke to him. "When we die, we'll still be nothing, the world will still be nothing, everything'll just be nothing!" "You're real though, at least that's something," Alecto pointed out, holding his hand out in front of her. Smiling miserably, Mandy took his hand in her own and sat there beside him quietly."
|
|
dead
death
depression
disturbing
dying
frightened
funeral
grief
grim
heaven
imagination
kill
lost
misery
nirvana
nostalgia
purgatory
sadness
scary
spooky
time
truth
void
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
39379b5
|
Trap. Horrible trap. At one's birth it is sprung. Some last day must arrive. When you will need to get out of this body. Bad enough. Then we bring a baby here. The terms of the trap are compounded. That baby also must depart. All pleasures should be tainted by that knowledge. But hopeful dear us, we forget. Lord, what is this?
|
|
death
grief
hope
|
George Saunders |
|
613cef7
|
"He said, "Were he only like his sister--what a difference that would make! For there never was such a sweet and gentle lady! I hear her footsteps, as she goes about the world. I hear the swish-swish-swish of her silken gown and the jingle-jangle of the silver chain about her neck. Her smile is full of comfort and her eyes are kind and happy! How I long to see her!" "Who, sir?" asked Paramore, puzzled. "Why, his sister, John. His sister."
|
|
death
eyes
lady
neil-gaiman
sandman
sister
smile
|
Susanna Clarke |
|
1f971c0
|
For a long time, she sat and saw. She had seen her brother die with one eye open, on still in a dream. She had said goodbye to her mother and imagined her lonely wait for a train back home to oblivion. A woman of wire had laid herself down, her scream traveling the street, till it fell sideways like a rolling coin starved of momentum. A young man was hung by a rope made of Stalingrad snow. She had watched a bomber pilot die in a metal case. She had seen a Jewish man who had twice given her the most beautiful pages of her life marched to a concentration camp. And at the center of all of it, she saw the Fuhrer shouting his words and passing them around. Those images were the world, and it stewed in her as she sat with the lovely books and their manicured titles. It brewed in her as she eyed the pages full to the brims of their bellies with paragraphs and words.
|
|
death
good-bye
hitler
memories
words
|
Markus Zusak |
|
595c27e
|
I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly grey. It was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces.
|
|
dark-sky
death
depressing
depression
doomed
grey-sky
lost-love
morose
mortality
overcast
pity
sadness
temporal
|
Joseph Conrad |
|
2c3e91e
|
But how nothingness invades us! We are scarcely born ere decay begins for us, in such a way that the whole of life is but one long combat with it, more and more triumphant, on its part, to the consummation, namely, death; and then the reign of decay is exclusive.
|
|
death
decay
life
nothingness
|
Gustave Flaubert |
|
6b07ec6
|
Every day is a lie, he said. But you are dying. That is not a lie.
|
|
death
life
post-apocalyptic
road
|
Cormac McCarthy |
|
14877da
|
This seems to me absolutely one of the quintessential things about the human condition. It's what actually distinguishes man from any other animal: living with those who have lived and the companionship of those who are no longer alive. Not necessarily the people that one knew personally, I mean the people perhaps whom one only knows by what they did, or what they left behind, this question of the company of the past, that's what interests me, and archives are a kind of site in the sense of like an archaeological site.
|
|
death
memory
post-mortem
|
John Berger |
|
407a066
|
How scary and sudden the shift from Living to Dead.
|
|
death
fiction
living
scary
shift
sudden
transition
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
708e801
|
Znaesh veche kak da se smeesh na sm'rtta, Aruta - kaza Amos. - Nikoga poveche niama da si s'shchiiat.
|
|
aruta
bulgaria
bulgarian
death
feist
laugh
life
magician
master
raymond
riftwar
saga
trask
амос
война
живот
магьосник
майстор
разлом
реймънд
смърт
смях
|
Raymond E. Feist |
|
3114d80
|
Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life--a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple--the painter is giving you a secret message. He's telling you that living things don't last--it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first, with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer--there it is.
|
|
death
life
philosophy
transience
|
Donna Tartt |
|
a9887f4
|
It was a high ceilinged room with tall, large-panes windows. Apart from the doorway was the desk where book had been checked out in days when books were still being checked out. He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing.
|
|
apocalypse
books
dead
death
decay
empty
library
metaphor
zombies
|
Richard Matheson |
|
5ddc8cd
|
Again he shook his head. The world's gone mad, he thought. The dead walk about and I think nothing of it. The return of corpses has become trivial in import. How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough!
|
|
change
corpses
dead
death
humour
normality
undead
usual
zombies
|
Richard Matheson |
|
40cf051
|
From across the woods, as if by common accord, birds left their trees and darted upward. I joined them, flew amount them, they did not recognize me as something apart from them, and I was happy, so happy, because for the first time in years, and forevermore, I had not killed, and never would.
|
|
death
dying
happiness
|
George Saunders |
|
23296c1
|
Will these millions of children, for generations upon future generations, know that some of their atoms cycled through this woman? [...] Will they feel what she felt in her life, will their memories have flickering strokes of her memories, will they recall that moment long ago when she stood by the window, guilt ridden and confused, and watched as the tadr bird circled the cistern? No, it is not possible. [...] But I will let them have their own brief glimpse of the Void, just at that moment they pass from living to dead, from animate to inanimate, from consciousness to that which has no consciousness. For a moment, they will understand infinity.
|
|
death
religion
science-fiction
|
Alan Lightman |
|
d3db76f
|
n lns dh '`tqdw 'n tHtDr , y`Twnk kml htmmhm .. dh knt hdhh hy akhr mr@ yrwnk fyh yrwnk Hqan .. wynswn kl shy akhr `n dftr shykthm w'Gny lrdyw w l`ny@ bsh`rhm . nk tZhr bhtmmhm lkml ..
|
|
death
novel
|
Chuck Palahniuk |
|
a8a3c7e
|
Death was silence, loss, guilt. And anger. But life led that way, anyway. From birth, it was a slow, long march to the grave. Who said that? She couldn't remember now. But it was true. They were born dying. If they were very lucky, the dying was called aging. They reached toward if as if they were satellites in unstable orbits. And then when they got there, they were just dead. One moment in time separated the living from the ghosts.
|
|
death
guilt
loss
silence
|
Michelle Sagara West |
|
99fdc23
|
We have talked about Suzy and about her last days, but it's as if our lives stopped then and there. If I say anything to him about feeling lonesome, he goes outside and does some little chore. I can't tell if he is secretly blaming me, or himself, or just too full of pain to talk. That was the one thing we could always do together. I wish for the old days. I wish for the struggling days and the days of Geronimo, and the days of birthing Charlie with no one but Jack to help me. How happy and in love we were then. I want to be in love again, but all I feel is darkness and shadows. Everything is changed and different
|
|
death
depression
life
loneliness
marriage
sadness
|
Nancy E. Turner |
|
63ba007
|
"But we who remain shall grow old We shall know the cold Of cheerless Winter and the rain of Autumn and the sting Of poverty, of love despised and of disgraces, And mirrors showing stained and aging faces, And the long ranges of comfortless years And the long gamut of human fears... But, for you, it shall forever be spring, And only you shall be forever fearless, And only you have white, straight, tireless limbs, And only you, where the water-lily swims Shall walk along the pathways thro' the willows Of your west. You who went West, and only you on silvery twilight pillows Shall take your rest
|
|
death
dying
forever
life
sad
war
youth
|
Ford Madox Ford (Ford Madox Hueffer ) |
|
73a562b
|
"Now life is given in exchange for pain and fear, and that's the basis of the whole deception. Now man is still not what he should be. There will e a new man, happy and proud. Whoever doesn't care whether he lives or doesn't live, he himself will be God. And that other God will no longer be.'
|
|
death
demons
dostoyevsky
fyodor-dostoyevsky
god
russia
russian
russian-lit
russian-literature
suicide
|
Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
|
fe0d395
|
You dont have to know a soul to know what I know --- to expect what I'm expecting --- to feel yourself alive and dying in your chest every minute of the livelong day --- When you're young you wanta cry, when you're old you wanta die. But that's too deep for you now, Ti mon Pousse
|
|
death
youth
|
Jack Kerouac |
|
394a314
|
The night was starless and very dark. Without doubt, in the gloom some mighty angel was standing, with outstretched wings, awaiting the soul.
|
|
death
les-misérables
|
Victor Hugo |
|
10f88e4
|
The naked man who lay splayed out on his face beside the swimming pool might have been dead.
|
|
death
james-bond
|
Ian Fleming |
|
b4a8680
|
He saw either death or the approach of it everywhere. But his undertaking now occupied him all the more. He had to live his life to the end, until death came. Darkness covered everything for him; but precisely because of this darkness he felt that his undertaking was the only guiding thread in this darkness, and he seized it and held on to it with all his remaining strength.
|
|
death
despair
dying
|
Leo Tolstoy |
|
4e49c73
|
"...then in a conversational tone said, "I slapped my Aunt Martha. When my fiance died. She told me God needed him in heaven, and I hauled off and slapped her, a sixty year old woman....People say unbelievable things to you. They deserve slapping."
|
|
death
outrage
slapping
|
Connie Willis |
|
1c9d77f
|
"Why'd you want to kill yourself? Didn't you feel anything, or didn't it hurt you?" Mandy questioned, looking puzzled. "Yes, I suppose it did, ... it was strange, it was sharp, that's all I can think of to describe it... and cold, but not cold like ice, more like... I don't know, like something much worse, something horrible... and it seemed like the ground was falling upwards, becoming the sky... for a moment it made me consider that it was just a dream, that I was on some sort of drug, and then I remember being overjoyed to see the sky was still above me, then just really sad, really tired... and then I don't remember much else about it," Alecto told her, glaring straight ahead at the sky with narrowed eyes. "I don't mind, I'm not supposed to mind, anyway. Mearth already told me that eventually I would want to be dead, that it was inevitable... still, I sometimes wish that I could have done something good for other people in my life, it might have made up for all the bad stuff I've done."
|
|
canada
confusion
creepy
dark
death
drugs
dying
dysfunctional
friend
friends
friendship
grief
halloween
help
loss
morbid
nostalgia
sadness
self-harm
self-mutilation
spooky
suicide
swing-set
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
a0fc83d
|
Nobody really wants to be your friend when they discover that you work with dead people.
|
|
career
dead
death
dying
friend
friendship
funeral
lonely
morbid
mortician
undertaker
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
5900aae
|
"I've seen a lot of stuff... maybe I've seen too much. I see most humans in a bad light because I've seen what they can do, how evil they can be... I've seen the Holocaust and I've seen Jonestown, I've seen the Vietnam War and I've seen Hiroshima... I've seen the Chernobyl disaster... I've seen the World Trade Center attack... I've been alive too long, over a hundred years is a long time to be alive," Alecto sighed, staring at the cigarette he was holding."
|
|
alive
chernobyl
death
disaster
dying
earth
evil
grief
hazardous
hippie
holocaust
human
jonestown
kami
lonely
nature
nuclear
personification
pollution
sad
smog
steel
vietnam-war
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
235a3fd
|
Your imaginary friend isn't the problem, Amanda. The problem is that you don't seem to have any real friends.
|
|
death
fantasy
friendship
imaginary-friend
imagination
love
psychiatry
real
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
c208f03
|
A collective insanity seemed to have seized the nation and turned them into something worse than beasts. The princess de Lamballe, Marie Antoinette's intimate friend, was literally torn to pieces; her head, breasts, and pudenda were paraded on pikes before the windows of the Temple, where the royal family was imprisoned, while a man boasted drunkenly at a cafe that he had eaten the princess' heart, which he probably had.
|
|
cannibalism
death
french-revolution
massacre
|
J. Christopher Herold |
|
67dbe32
|
It is one thing to look at a mistreated boat and another to look at a tomb. The silence of the bay seemed more intense. And I could see the glint of the carrion flies.
|
|
death
|
John D. MacDonald |
|
c6b5196
|
The vastest things are those we may not learn. We are not taught to die, nor to be born, Nor how to burn With love. How pitiful is our enforced return To those small things we are the masters of.
|
|
death
humans
love
mervyn-peake
poetry
|
Mervyn Peake |
|
7df0e67
|
I lost something after Hailey died. I'm not sure what to call it, but it's the device that stops ypu from telling the truth when people ask you how you're doing, that vital valve that keeps you deeper, truer emotions under lock and key. I don't know exactly when I lost it, or how to get it back, but for now when it comes to tact, civility, and discretion, I'm an accident waiting to happen, over and over again. Socially, that makes me something of a liability.
|
|
death
fear
protectiveness
wall
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
9c2067b
|
In all its beautiful, tragic fragility, there was still life.
|
|
death
life
tragedy
|
Sara Gruen |
|
acdce78
|
Death is only frightening from the near side.
|
|
death
|
Jim Butcher |
|
6141374
|
Sometimes I felt the bloated Toad, hideous and pampered with the poisonous vapours of the dungeon, dragging his loathsome length along my bosom: Sometimes the quick cold Lizard rouzed me leaving his slimy track upon my face, and entangling itself in the tresses of my wild and matted hair: Often have I at waking found my fingers ringed with the long worms which bred in the corrupted flesh of my Infant.
|
|
death
gothic
lizards
toads
|
Matthew Gregory Lewis |
|
bafbb06
|
"After that there was silence for a while, only the sound of the shovel biting into the earth and the hissing splatter of the loose dirt. They stood him up, his back to the well.
|
|
death
night
night-sky
sky
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
84364bd
|
"My God, Justin, do you hate him so?" "Bah!" said his Grace..."does one hate an adder? Because it is venomous and loathsome one crushes it underfoot, as I shall crush this Comte."
|
|
cold-hatred
death
hatred
revenge
|
Georgette Heyer |
|
bad00ff
|
The sun, the hero of every day, the impersonal old man that beams as brightly on death as on birth, came up every morning and raced across the blue dome and dipped into the sea of fire every evening.
|
|
death
heartache
heartbreak
hero
renewal
sun
|
Zora Neale Hurston |
|
1fc7021
|
Sure, black holes can kill us, and in a variety of interesting and gruesome ways. But, all in all, we may owe our very existence to them.
|
|
death
existence
|
Philip C. Plait |
|
b6ec2a5
|
She got on a plane to see a client in California and somewhere over Colorado, the pilot somehow missed the sky.
|
|
death
plane
sadness
travel
vivid-descriptions
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
718ddb5
|
"I have waited twenty years for this phone call . . . and all this time I thought it would go away. I knew I would always be sad for my sister. But I thought the other would go away." "What is the other, Henrik?" Though he knew the answer. "Anger . . . I am still angry, Detective Bosch." Bosch nodded. He looked down at his desk, at the photos of all the victims under the glass top. Cases and faces. His eyes moved from the photo of Anneke Jespersen to some of the others. The ones he had not yet spoken for. "So am I, Henrik," he said. "So am I." - "The Burning Room" by Michael Connelly"
|
|
death
life
mission
|
Michael Connelly |
|
9a7cbfb
|
Because they died, we know we still live. Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.
|
|
death
possibilities
smile
|
John Fowles |
|
b861949
|
We are medium-sized mammals who only prosper because we've developed a half-arsed ability to terraform the less suitable bits of the planet we evolved on, and we're conscious of our inevitable decay and death, and we can't live anywhere else. There is no invisible sky daddy to give us immortal life and a harp and wings when we die.
|
|
death
humanity
life
religion
|
Charles Stross Cory Doctorow |
|
31ef7a1
|
A last note from your narrator: I am haunted by humans.
|
|
death
life
|
Markus Zusak |
|
552c244
|
From the first, Istanbul had given him the impression of a town where, with the night, horror creeps out of the stones. It seemed to him a town the centuries had so drenched in blood and violence that, when daylight went out, the ghosts of its dead were its only population.
|
|
death
horror
istanbul
night
turkey
|
Ian Fleming |
|
9ca53af
|
Al final del verdadero amor esta la muerte y solo un amor que termina en muerte es amor
|
|
death
love
muerte
|
Milan Kundera |
|
da9fa08
|
We live and we die and anything else is just delusion. it's just passive chick bullshit about feelings and sensitivity. Just made-up subjective emotional crap. There is no soul. There is no God. There's just decisions and disease and death.
|
|
death
humor
life-and-death
|
Chuck Palahniuk |
|
925f225
|
When my mother passed away several years ago--well, wait a minute. Actually, she didn't 'pass away.' She died. Something about that verb, 'to pass away' always sounds to me as if someone just drifted through the wallpaper. No, my mother did not pass away. She definitely died.
|
|
death
euphemism
humor
|
Steve Allen |
|
c8ca9e1
|
"There was no one she wanted to see more. There was no one she wanted to see less. "Why?" she whispered. "Why are you here?" "The winds blew," he said."
|
|
death
heaven
marriage
|
Mitch Albom |
|
b1116f1
|
Without warning a lady appeared. She came from the direction of Friday-street, for she had just been with Mr. Newbolt. She strode capably through the snow. She wore a black silk gown and something very queer swung from a silver chain about her neck. Her smile was full of comfort and her eyes were kind and happy. She was just as Mr. Newbolt had described. And the name of this lady was Death.
|
|
death
neil-gaiman
sandman
|
Susanna Clarke |
|
3c20d7b
|
That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.
|
|
death
government
government-corruption
hemingway
illness
life
syphilis
war
|
Ernest Hemingway |
|
58abad7
|
All beings tremble before danger, all fear death. When a man considers this, he does not kill or cause to kill.
|
|
death
killing
pacifism
|
Anonymous |
|
104ab4f
|
By the time she awoke she couldn't even remember if she had a dream or a nightmare. There had only been a deathlike peace.
|
|
amanda
awoke
building-122
death
deathlike
dream
dreams
group-2
hospital
jason-medina
kings-park
kings-park-psychiatric-center
kings-park-state-hospital
kppc
kpsh
nightmare
peace
psych-ward
sleep
|
Jason Medina |
|
cc24819
|
I could croak with no warning, and the only tragedy anyone would experience would be showing up on the last day of my estate sale simply to discover that all remaining items had copious amounts of dog hair on them.
|
|
death
dogs
humor
|
Laurie Notaro |
|
06ae49b
|
"My funeral," the Blue Man said. "Look at the mourners. Some did not even know me well, yet they came. Why? Did you ever wonder? Why people gather when others die? Why people feel they should? "It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed. "You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole. "It is why we are drawn to babies . . ." He turned to the mourners. "And to funerals."
|
|
birth
connected
cycle
death
funeral
karma
life
love
marriage
spirit
we-are-one
|
Mitch Albom |
|
99d16c9
|
He's turned against me too, Theon realized. Of late it seemed to him as if the very stones of Winterfell had turned against him. If I die, I die friendless and abandoned. What choice did that leave him, but to live?
|
|
death
friendless
game-of-thrones
life
lorren
theon
winterfell
|
George R.R. Martin |
|
3438e51
|
This is a night for song and sin and drink, for come the morrow, the virtuous and the vile burn together.
|
|
death
fire-and-blood
hell
night
pious
sin
tomorrow
vile
virtuous
|
George R.R. Martin |
|
9fa5020
|
If I beat my grandmother to death to-morrow in the middle of Battersea Park, you may be perfectly certain that people will say everything about it except the simple and fairly obvious fact that it is wrong. Some will call it insane; that is, will accuse it of a deficiency of intelligence. This is not necessarily true at all. You could not tell whether the act was unintelligent or not unless you knew my grandmother. Some will call it vulgar, disgusting, and the rest of it; that is, they will accuse it of a lack of manners. Perhaps it does show a lack of manners; but this is scarcely its most serious disadvantage. Others will talk about the loathsome spectacle and the revolting scene; that is, they will accuse it of a deficiency of art, or aesthetic beauty. This again depends on the circumstances: in order to be quite certain that the appearance of the old lady has definitely deteriorated under the process of being beaten to death, it is necessary for the philosophical critic to be quite certain how ugly she was before. Another school of thinkers will say that the action is lacking in efficiency: that it is an uneconomic waste of a good grandmother. But that could only depend on the value, which is again an individual matter. The only real point that is worth mentioning is that the action is wicked, because your grandmother has a right not to be beaten to death. But of this simple moral explanation modern journalism has, as I say, a standing fear. It will call the action anything else--mad, bestial, vulgar, idiotic, rather than call it sinful.
|
|
death
efficiency
evil
good
insanity
journalism
manners
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
8e189a5
|
"I don't want anything else bad to happen," she whispered, her voice choked with tears. "I'm so sick to death of bad things happening, of seeing bad things that happened in the past! And I'm guilty of so many things. I'm sorry that I killed Mrs. Matthias and wrecked her stupid greenhouse back in the Eighties and I'm sorry I left you here alone while I went around the world." "I wasn't alone though, I knew you were doing what you wanted to do and that you were still alive, so I wasn't really alone, I knew you were still there somewhere," Alecto told her. His damaged smile and downcast, sorrowful eyes were draped in the shadow of the night, saving Mandy the trouble of seeing."
|
|
apart
bad
crying
damaged
death
eighties
friend
friendship
greenhouse
grief
guilt
hopelessness
lonliness
love
murder
omen
shadow
smile
sorrow
tears
together
travel
trouble
world
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
c557c46
|
The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth. They were discalced to a man like pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen.
|
|
corpses
death
the-road
|
Cormac McCarthy |
|
f93063f
|
There was a heaven beyond anything he knew where there was no jet fuel, no jumping, no burning towers... but he wasn't looking beyond yet. He was still looking back.
|
|
death
heaven
life
new-york
new-york-city
september-11-attacks
september-11th
skyscrapers
terrorism
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
1adb6c9
|
People never like pollution, it has become very wrong to like pollution at all. But just like there are good and bad things about people, there are good and bad things about pollution. If people were pollution we would get rid of anyone who was different, anyone who was considered an inconvenience... but we'd be getting rid of a life, a lot of lives... because we didn't like them. If pollution was a person would we still be trying to get rid of it? Would we have environmentalists still complaining and protesting and trying to get rid of all pollution?
|
|
animals
canada
dangerous
death
earth
environment
environmentalism
evil
garbage
help
hippie
hope
human
life
litter
mental-illness
people
plants
pollution
scary
smog
water
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
81453d1
|
Let whoever can win glory before death.
|
|
death
glory
mgg
seamus-heaney
|
Seamus Heaney |
|
ff61bba
|
It was a dark story.
|
|
dark
death
kidnapping
marriage
ominous
pirate
short
theft
|
Joseph Conrad |