All Quotes By Tag: Death

“Let my heiress have full rights,Live in my house, sing songs that I composed.Yet how slowly my strength ebbs,How the tortured breast craves air.The love of my friends, my enemies’ rancorAnd the yellow roses in my bushy garden,And a lover’s burning tenderness—all thisI bestow upon you, messenger of dawn.Also the glory for which I was born,For which my star, like some whirlwind, soaredAnd now falls. Look, its fallingProphesies your power, love and inspiration.Preserving my generous bequest,You will live long and worthily.Thus it will be. You see, I am content,Be happy, but remember me.”

“You Hang on to your pain like it means something; like it’s worth something. Well, let me tell you, it’s not worth shit, so let it go. Infinite Possibilities and all you can do is whine.””Well, what am I supposed to do?””What do you think? You can do anything, you lucky bastard; You’re alive!”

“When you lose a friend [in battle] you have an overpowering desire to go back home and yell in everybody’s ear, “This guy was killed fighting for you. Don’t forget him–ever. Keep him in your mind when you wake up in the morning and when you go to bed at night. Don’t think of him as the statistic which changes 38,788 casualties to 38,789. Think of him as a guy who wanted to live every bit as much as you do. Don’t let him be just one of ‘Our Brave Boys’ from the old home town, to whom a marble monument is erected in the city park, and a civic-minded lady calls the newspaper ten years later and wants to know why that ‘unsightly stone’ isn’t removed.”

“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.”

“As she cried, I could feel growing there, as had once before, a presence between us: the tiny perfect form of Sherry nestled between her parents’ bodies. Our bodies were shaped by her absence, by the almost unbearable weight of her loss.”

“The dead leave their shadows, an echo of the space within which once they lived. They haunt us, never fading or growing older as we do. The loss we grieve is not just their futures but our own.”

“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 between the ribs,said disappear or reappear more fully. so I boardeda red eyeball and shot across America,hoping the nurses had enough quarters to keepthe jukebox of Grandma’s heart playing. She grew uppoor in Appalachia. And while world war IIfunctioned like Prozac for the Great Depression,she believed poverty was a double feature,that the comfort of her adult years was merelyan intermission, that hunger would hobble back,hurl its prosthetic leg through her window,so she clipped, clipped, clipped — became the JacquesCousteau of the bargain bin, her wetsuitstuffed with coupons. And now –pupils fixed, chindangling like the boots of a hanged man –I press my ear to her lampshade-thin chestand listen to that little soldier march toward whateverplateau, or simply exhaust his arsenal of beats.I hate when people ask if she even knew I was there.The point is I knew, holding the one-sidedconversation of her hand. Once I believed the heartwas like a bar of soap — the more you use it,the smaller it gets; care too much and it’ll snap offin your grasp. But when Grandma’s last breathwaltzed from that room, my heart openedwide like a parachute, and I realized she didn’t die.She simply found a silence she could call her own.”

“Sólo yo entiendo lo lejos que está el cielo de nosotros; pero conozco cómo acortar las veredas. Todo consiste en morir, Dios mediante, cuando uno quiera y no cuando Él lo disponga. O, si tú quieres, forzarlo a disponer antes de tiempo.”

“The shortest distance between two points is a time line, a schedule, a map of your time, the itinerary for the rest of your life.Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list.”

“Cure the symptoms, cure the disease.”

“When I shut my eyes on this world I’ll finally have peace.”

“I’m terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I ‘do’ anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on ‘time’s – it doesn’t of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn’t matter if you’ve done anything or not.”

“Death is my lover and he wants to move in.”

“oxygen Everything needs it: bone, muscles, and even, while it calls the earth its home, the soul. So the merciful, noisy machine stands in our house working away in its lung-like voice. I hear it as I kneel before the fire, stirring with a stick of iron, letting the logs lie more loosely. You, in the upstairs room, are in your usual position, leaning on your right shoulder which aches all day. You are breathing patiently; it is a beautiful sound. It is your life, which is so close to my own that I would not know where to drop the knife of separation. And what does this have to do with love, except everything? Now the fire rises and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red roses of flame. Then it settles to quietude, or maybe gratitude, as it feeds as we all do, as we must, upon the invisible gift: our purest, sweet necessity: the air.”

“Enough! we’re tired, my heart and I.We sit beside the headstone thus,And wish that name were carved for us.The moss reprints more tenderlyThe hard types of the mason’s knife,As Heaven’s sweet life renews earth’s lifeWith which we’re tired, my heart and I ….In this abundant earth no doubtIs little room for things worn out:Disdain them, break them, throw them by!And if before the days grew roughWe once were loved, used, – well enough,I think, we’ve fared, my heart and I.”