I had often thought that if I managed to live through the war I wouldn’t expect too much of life. How could one resent disappointment in love if life itself was continuously in doubt? Since...

A cult leader alone in his beliefs is just a crazy dude with a beard.

Like the end, the myth of the beginning overlaps the cycle of birth and death, unfolding like a Möbius strip in ceaseless continuum, which is the paradox that sits above and beyond intellectual explanation in...

Quit lying to yourself and accept your power and beauty. Liberate yourself from the slow-death you call life.

All through life there were distinctions – toilets for men, toilets for women; clothes for men, clothes for women – then, at the end, the graves are identical.

And when you die only your thoughts that have reached paper remain. Finally when someone stumbles upon those words, reads about your loves and your losses, you touch them emotionally and for a time they...

Because it isn’t a loss; just a little piece of their haven had broken off. People can patch things; it still may hurt, but that’s life.

Life is too short not to look beyond it.

I didn’t want to die. I just found death soothing to think about.

So I do fear death in the sense that I find the prospect of dying pretty scary. But I no longer fear that I will one day be annihilated and cease to exist.

Though she would have preferred long ago to have died, fled, gotten it all over with, the body–Jesus, how the body!–took its time. It possessed its own wishes and nostalgias. You could not just turn...

A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we’re married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we...

The thing with dying, well, with death really, is that there’s a difference between being someone who knows they can really die at any time and someone who doesn’t.

The trees are a thousand times taller than me, and hundreds of years older, and the rocks and leaves and plants and animals never do anything silly like kill each other or fall in love...

Only the dying know what real loneliness is.

JD/Dr Cox: The second you start blaming yourself for people’s deaths, there’s no coming back.

I firmly disbelieve in death. A spirit never dies. Where it wanders when it leaves the flesh, is a cognitive proposition.

Though sometimes when he wakes in the night all he can think about is death. His own death, of course, but also the death of those around him,the fact that one day in the not-too-distant...

The problem with living forever, of course, is you have to live forever before you know you’re immortal…or invincible. Even the gods, in this way, must always remain uncertain. Time trumps immortality just as uncertainty...

Do not contemplate the Essence of the UnVeiled, for the UnVeiled therein your World does not hold to polarities, nor of your conjectures; Chapter “The Unveiling

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...

To make yourself something less than you can be – that too is a form of suicide.

My mom told me once that Wyatt loved her the way a boy will love his mother, but I loved her the way an artist loves another. Jo taught me what that meant.

The Angel of Death is always a young person, or a group of young people, you’ll begin seeing them left and right soon.

Cassandra wondered at the mind’s cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life’s end, her grandmother’s head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was...

The moonlight covered the tombstones with an ethereal glow, and the statues above the tombs stood like silent guards waiting for something to happen.

Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.

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...

Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higer the fences get.

And there they ring the walls, the young, the lithe. The handsome hold the graves they won in Troy; the enemy earth rides over those who conquered.

If I should go before the rest of youBreak not a flower nor inscribe a stone, Nor when I’m gone speak in a Sunday voice But be the usual selves that I have known. Weep...

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;Thus unlamented let me die;Steal from the world, and not a stoneTell where I lie.

Gage is waiting on the makeshift bed when she enters the room she’s been sleeping in. The small lantern in the corner barely lights his features. His shoulders are hunched, his hands clasped together before...

Corpses sour you. They are bad for objectivity.

The dead know everything, but don’t give a damn.

What happens to anything beautiful? Viy ate it up.

I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly . . . I feel sometimes as...

His own true hidden reality that he had desired to know grew palpable, recognizable. It seemed to him just this: a great, glad, abounding hope that he had saved his brother; too expansive to be...

Not every loss was confirmed by an officer at the door. Nor a telegram with the power to sink a fleet. Loss, often the worst kind, also arrived through the deafening quiet of an absence.

They say, ‘The coward dies many times’; so does the beloved. Didn’t the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?

When I die, I plan to be laughing hysterically.

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)

Careful. When you dabble too much with reason life becomes nothing but a process of dying.

It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse.

Another site of Leftist struggle [other than Detroit] that has parallels to New Orleans: Palestine. From the central role of displacement to the ways in which culture and community serve as tools of resistance, there...

Death is not the end but the beginning of the eternal life.

I don’t get you people. You watch the Godfather on television and tons of people are getting shot and stabbed to death, blood splattering everywhere and it is entertaining. But, when they killed a horse,...

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

Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness, of fear; then she wished that it were...

There really is only one ending to any story. Human life ends in death. Until then, it keeps going and gets complicated and there’s loss. Everything involves loss; every relationship ends in one way or...