All Quotes By Tag: Death

“Mr. Codro’s destiny is Ptolemaic; in other words, based on fiction. Ptolemaic says it all; it means above all fixed and unchanging, that is to say different from real life which is by nature changing and temporary. It means: not according to natural truth, but according to man’s desire and the pretense inspired by his fear of dying and his desire for permanence.”

“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”

“The face of the dead man was concealed, of course, our customs not being those of the south, where corpses are carried to the grave in open coffins, that they might – one last time before slipping into the pit – be warmed by the light of the sun.”

“This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compassion a few hours old. That can happen when people die–the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration. In which estimate lies the greater reality–the uncharitable one permitted us before the funeral, forged, without any claptrap, in the skirmish of daily life, or the one that suffuses us with sadness at the family gathering afterward–this even an outsider can’t judge. The sight of a coffin can effect a great change of heart–all at once you find you are not so disappointed in the person who is dead–but what the sight of a coffin does for a mind in its search for the truth, this I don’t profess to know.”

“Curiosity is a good thing, like onion soup. But too much onion soup makes your breath smell terrible. And too much curiosity can make your whole body smell terrible, if it causes you to be dead. ”

“Your father was no longer a young man. he was already in his fifties.’Fifty-six,’ Eddie said blankly.Fifty-six,’ the old woman repeated. ‘His body had been weakened, the ocean had left him vulnerable, pneumonia took hold of him, and in time, he died.’Because of Mickey?’ Eddie said.Because of loyalty,’ she said.People don’t die because of loyalty.’They don’t?’ she smiled. ‘Religion? government? Are we not loyal to such things, sometimes to the death?’Eddie shrugged.Better,’ she said, ‘To be loyal to one another.”

“Even now, I found it difficult to believe that my father could or might be dying. He had always been a strong man, a good leader. No one had ever seen him with his head bowed in despair or defeat, no one had ever seen him slump in resignation, nor had anyone ever had even so much as a hint from him that he might ever give up. It was hard to picture all that strength drained from my father’s body.”

“I found it idiotically distressing that a sharp finger whistle could no longer summon them outdoors into a playful twilight. An ancient discovery was now mine to make: to leave is to make nothing less than a mortal action. The suspicion came to me for the fist time that they were figures of my dreaming, like the loved dead: my mother and all these vanished boys. And after Mama’s cremation I could not rid myself of the notion that she had been placed in the furnace of memory even when alive and, by extension, that one’s dealings with others, ostensibly vital, at a certain point become dealings with the dead.”

“For it would be only for a time. Until what he knew and thought became no longer relevant or necessary and was forgotten. But that was the same with all of us. We were only what we were for a time, at that time. Then our own silver began to mix with the tin of our future to change us. I knew this to be so and grieved for Windlow while I grieved for me. In time I would not be this Peter, even as I now was not the peter of two years ago…. Yet that Peter was not lost.”

“The Death’s Field is the mirror which allows us the knowledge of the world we living in.”

“Only fools insist upon life at any cost…. Others would say that life may be laid down when it becomes too heavy. Where does it go, after all, but into the keeping of the Powers who gave it and will give it once again?”

“I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.”

“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.I am comfortable with the idea of mortality, or at least I always have been, up until now. I never felt the need to believe in heaven or an afterlife. It has been decades since I stopped believing-a belief that was never more than fitful and self-serving to begin with-in the possibility of reincarnation of the soul. I’m not totally certain where I stand on the whole “soul” question. Though I certainly feel as if I possess one, I’m inclined to disbelieve in its existence. I can live with that contradiction, as with the knowledge that my time is finite, and growing shorter by the day. It’s just that lately, for the first time, that shortening has become perceptible. I can feel each tiny skyward lurch of the balloon as another bag of sand goes over the side of my basket.”

“Life is short, death is forever.”

“[…] death is only a small interruption.”