All Quotes By Tag: Death

“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.”

“Phoebe asked me, “Tell me, what do you think of the afterlife?”I was a bit nonplussed. I had no idea what she thought, but I knew that the question must be of greater interest to someone of her age than to me. But our conversation had been completely honest, and before I could speak, honesty and tact had joined hands in my answer. “I have no faith at all,” I said, “but sometimes I have hope.”I rather think,” she replied, “that total annihilation is the most comfortable position.”I was shaken. The horse clopped on. The children laughed behind us.When I die,” she said, “I don’t expect to see any of my loved ones again. I’ll just become a part of all this.” She waved her hand at the surrounding countryside. “That’s all right with me.”

“Mothers,fathers,our kind,tell me again that death doesn’t matter.Tell me it’s just a limitation of vision ,a fold of landscape,a deep flax-and-poppy-filled gully hidden on the hill, pleat in our perception a somersault of existence,natural,even beneficent even a gift,the only key to the red-lacquered door at the end of the hall,”water within water,” those old stories.”

“…and yet the idea is hard to accept, it’s so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what’s been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it, if our own will is made in its semblance. It may be, rather, that nothing is ever unmixed and the thirst for totality is never quenched, perhaps because it is a false yearning. Nothing is whole or of a single piece, everything is fractured and evenomed, veins of peace run through the body of war and hatred insinuates itself into love and compassion, there is truce amid the quagmire of bullets and a bullet amid the revelries, nothing can bear to be unique or prevail or be dominant and everything needs fissures and cracks, needs it negation at the same time as its existence. And nothing is known with certainty and everything is told figuratively.”

“It is brutal. Only I never could see the sense in having folks look at your tombstone and say, ‘He was a man who didn’t believe in violence, He’s a good man… and dead.”

“Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting… By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.”

“In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility – but the other side of love, its cruelty, sterility and duplicity. In a way, the decadents did accept Nordau’s idea of the artist as monster. But in nature, the glory and panacea of romanticism, they found nothing. Theirs is an aesthetic that disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty. Decadent work is always morbid, but its attraction to death is through art. What they refused was the condemnation of that monster. And yet despite the decadent celebration of artifice, these stories record art’s failure in the struggle against natural horror. Nature fights back and wins, and decadent writing remains a remarkable account of that failure.”

“But Robin: their dear little Robs. More than ten years later, his death remained an agony; there was no glossing any detail; its horror was not subject to repair or permutation by any of the narrative devices that the Cleves knew. And—since this willful amnesia had kept Robin’s death from being translated into that sweet old family vernacular which smoothed even the bitterest mysteries into comfortable, comprehensible form—the memory of that day’s events had a chaotic, fragmented quality, bright mirrorshards of nightmare which flared at the smell of wisteria, the creaking of a clothes-line, a certain stormy cast of spring light.”

“I am not afraid of death, which after all can’t be far away. What does frighten me, though, is the halfway stage.”

“We are all created by desire and we all die because of desire.”

“I am dead man alive.”

“Only the debris of wreckage, and not much of that, was left behind by the sharks who fed on tragedy: the fishermen, too, mourned the death of a living child.”