One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too...

Je préfère mourir debout que vivre à genoux. (I prefer to die standing than to live on my knees.)

Once to swim I sought the sea-side,There to sport among the billows;With the stone of many colorsSank poor Aino to the bottomOf the deep and boundless blue-sea,Like a pretty son-bird, perished.Never come a-fishing, father,To the...

Nobody can tell what is right and what is wrong; what is righteous and what is evil. Even if there is a god and I had his teachings right before me, I would think it...

I once met a traveler who told me he would live to see the end of time. He laid out all his vitamins before me and told me he slept seven hours every night, no...

I have every reason to be sad, but I don’t have any reason to mourn. People grieve when things end. Nothing has ended tonight. One of us has simply gone ahead as we always knew...

Plans never go as planned, ever; that’s just how life is. People spend way too much time dreaming about a future they should be having more nightmares warning them against. But that doesn’t mean you...

Tombstones covered the dale, the smooth marble surfaces bright. She had spent days here as a teenager, though not out of any awareness of mortality. Like every adolescent, she intended to live forever.

Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.

Americans bred like rabbits, expecting the reaper to slaughter at least a few before they reached ripeness.

I am seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death… . I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless...

I have my own aloneness.” Aloneness is to be at home in ourselves, to be in contact with our inner source of love, while loneliness is to hanker for other people, to hanker for a...

There’s just some kind of men you have to shoot before you can say hidy to ’em. Even then, they ain’t worth the bullet it takes to shoot ’em.

There are people who will always doubt you and you have to live with it. It only gets a lot worse when you have to die with it!

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval

Even from a distance, their eyes conveyed the strength of their souls. And their eyes spoke of death.

[…] But then,What is not vain, by God, in lives of men?All is in vain! We play at blind man’s buffUntil hard edges break into out path.Man life’s is error. Where, then, is relief?In shedding...

And when life’s sweet fable ends,Soul and body part like friends;No quarrels, murmurs, no delay;A kiss, a sigh, and so away.

In 1948 fishing was outlawed in Jacksonville by decree of the king. But nobody, besides my grandpa, listened to him, because he’d been dead for centuries—the king, not my grandpa. My grandpa had only been...

I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn’t believe...

Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.

zoom lens effect,” in which the focus is entirely on oneself, to the exclusion of external considerations.

You must know that I am made of death, from head to foot, and it is a corpse who loves you and adores you and will never, never leave you!

When they had ended their prayers, the Angel of Death recovered his loquacity and his gayety and ascending the chariot again, preceded by Gil Gil, spoke as follows.’The village you see on that mountain is...

Sweet as the tender fragrance that survives,When martyred flowers breathe out their little lives,Sweet as a song that once consoled our pain,But never will be sung to us again,Is they remembrance. Now the hour of...

God is dead and I am his replacement.

Es decir…, lo que yo creo es que el hombre piensa en el significado de la vida porque sabe con certeza que va morir algún día. (…) Nadie sabe lo que va a ocurrir. Por...

Encased in an elaborate illusion of unlimited power and progress, each of us subscribes, at least until one’s midlife crisis, to the belief that existence consists of an eternal, upward spiral of achievement, dependent on...

The Bible says that each person is a sinner and everyone is wicked in the sight of God. God cannot allow sin into Heaven, so we must get rid of our sin somehow. If we...

What is the charm in dying when we fully well know that we are not going to get another chance at living?

When you attempt suicide, the counselors try to talk you out of trying it again by asking you about other people, which is good prevention if you care about other people.

Reproduction is more pleasurable than death.

We can act only in our time, among the people who surround us. We shall be capable of nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right...

Miranda was dark, like a midnight sky. But as she fell, her eyes shone like stars themselves.

Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb...

Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never...

If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.

She cannot possibly be dead, people do not just die

The way black women say “girl” can be magical. Frankly, I have no solid beliefs about the survival of consciousness after physical death. But if it’s going to happen I know what I want to...

When compared to the fact that he might very well be dead by this time tomorrow, whether he was courageous or not today was pointless, empty. When compared to the fact that he might be...

Once upon a time the future was supposed to be brighter, shinier and more fun. When did that vision pass? When did the word ‘new’ lose it’s luster? Now the past is supposed to hold...

I wrapped my hands around the familiar cup and tried to draw strength from it. It was from Thea’s old Moss Rose set, remnant of careful scrimping and saving in her first year of marriage....

What made Olive the saddest about the Gardners was that everyone wanted to be enshrined in someone’s memory. It was the only way of living on after death, really: in the minds of loved ones....

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...

Today will die tomorrow.

Four girls about Mira’s age were standing out on the deck on the upper level of the ferry. They were wearing hoodies, sweatpants and jeans. One of the girls was staring at the screen on...

At the temple there is a poem called “Loss” carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.

I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj...

A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death. Overcoming our fears and wild misconceptions about death will be no small task, but we shouldn’t forget how quickly other cultural prejudices–racism,...

Why bother inflicting enormous pain on yourself when sooner or later Life would certainly get around to doing it for you?