It’s time, Old Captain, lift anchor, sink!The land rots; we shall sail into the night;if now the sky and sea are black as inkour hearts, as you must know, are filled with light.Only when we...

I know precisely what honor is, Heracles. Honor is the artifice kings sell the peasants’ sons so that they may fight and die without pay. Honor is what drives a peaceful man to bloody vengeance....

How much more than necessary do we spend in sleep, forgetting that the sleeping fox catches no poultry, and that there will be sleeping enough in the grave, as Poor Richard says.

Death is contagious; it is contracted the moment we are conceived.

I didn’t know who tobelievebutone thing I doknow: when a man islivingmany claim relationshipsthat are hardlysoand after he dies, well,then it’s everybody’sparty.

You want to know why God gave us people to love? Because that’s the only way we can understand how he feels about us. Desperate and jealous.

…gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)

When we die, as when the scenes have been fixed on to celluloid and the scenery is pulled down and burnt — we are phantoms in the memories of our descendants. Then we are ghosts,...

Writing, painting, singing- it cannot stop everything. Cannot halt death in its tracks. But perhaps it can make the pause between death’s footsteps sound and look and feel beautiful, can make the space of waiting...

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears...

The money opens many doors. That of the coffin, among other things. (L’argent ouvre de nombreuses portes. – Celle du cercueil, entre autres.)

Death is fugitive; even when you’re watching for it, the actual instant somehow slips between your fingers. You don’t get that sudden drop of the head you see in movies. Instead you simply sit there,...

When you don’t have something anymore, you learn to live without it.” That’s what my dad told me that first night after he found me sleeping inside a closet underneath a pile of my mom’s...

Trying to get stuff straight right at the end when you never cared all through your life. Trying to get into heaven on the affirmative action plan.

The resurrection of the body – what do we really mean by this? …Did not the mystics and sages of all times teach us that the positive meaning of death is precisely that it liberates...

Once I could imagine my soulI could imagine my death.When I imagined my deathmy soul died. ThisI remember clearly.My body persisted.Not thrived, but persisted.Why I do not know.

Ricin – Death by diarrhea

The Everlasting Staircase”Jeffrey McDanielWhen the call came, saying twenty-four hours to live,my first thought was: can’t she postpone her exitfrom this planet for a week? I’ve got places to do,people to be. Then grief hit...

Sometimes it seemed like the whole point of life was not to die the same death as your father.

Dawn and its excesses always reminded me of heaven, a place where I have always known I would not be comfortable.

In a world where death is the hunter, my friend, there is no time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions.

My house says to me, “Do not leave me, for here dwells your past.”And the road says to me, “Come and follow me, for I am your future.”And I say to both my house and...

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can’t avoid....

Spring had been the season for dying in the old days. Invalids who had struggled through the dark comfort of winter took fright as the night receded.

She had been given a wonderful gift: life. Sometimes it was cruelly taken away too soon, but it’s what you did with it that counted, not how long it lasted.

Anyone who has physically incarnated on the Earth is energetically connected to the people they love, and to the Earth, indefinitely…

Her mother had once told her that one could run away from home, from husband, from children, from trouble, but it was impossible to run away from oneself. “You always have to take yourself with...

The endWhen I die bang on cansRomp around in leaps and boundsLet whips crack in the airCall in clowns and acrobats!I want my coffin to go on a donkeyDecked out in Andalusian styleYou can’t refuse...

God? We don’t know what He’s like. But at least now that we’re dead we all know we don’t know, whereas on Earth we all thought we knew, and those who didn’t know didn’t know...

They WERE walking alongside the road, they WERE hit by a car, and now they ARE dead. It doesn’t work. Are is present tense. Dead is — well, dead is past, isn’t it? Present tense...

You’ll forget your inner peace, forget that it comes from impermanence. From knowing that everything will break. And only reason can right you.

It’s a matter of honor, death. It’s your white page, do you see? Or your shame. Either you’re worthy of it or you ain’t. To accept it, to face it with honor and respect and...

If we lived for ever, what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever....

I answer the heroic question, ‘Death, where is thy sting?’ with ‘It is in my heart and mind and memories.

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I...

Don’t you believe that Jacob can be healed?” some persisted, pressuringElizabeth to believe—just believe—and Jacob would be healed. Theunderlying message was that Elizabeth’s faith was not strong enough to save her son. I remembered then...

How often the priest had heard the same confession–Man was so limited: he hadn’t even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had...

birth is more painful than dying”and you burst with dreamswithout even trying, seeking light in your heart, where shadows now restcomfortably next to fear.but you come out of the woods clear,with nature’s breathunder your tongue,...

When someone you love…when they die, you want it undone. You’d do anything to have them back, and it’s easy to believe that if only this had happened or that had happened, everything would be...

Stop sleeping, Get to work! You will have much time to sleep when you die.

It never gets easier, missing you. And sometimes I wonder if it ever will.

If you have never did a mistake, then death is impossibe, but then, death is a possible mistake.

The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

But I think I’m broken too. I just don’t know it yet.

I will one day accept death with gratitude if I meet it having lived a life that became truly my own.

I hadn’t thought about Mom as much as I probably should have lately. It was a relief not to have all those emotional waves rolling through me at the mere vision of her face in...

I thought I loved him when he went away; I love him now in another degree: he is more my own. [ . . . ] Oh! a thousand weepers, praying in agony on waiting...

So this is it ⎯ what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty.

I was not, I was, I am not, I care not. (Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo)

Just when you think you’re in the cat-bird’s seat, the Angel of Death calls “dibs” on shotgun.