All Quotes By Tag: Death

“Erik, Erik! I saved your life! Remember? You were scentenced to death! But for me you would be dead by now. ”

“We read off the ancient Hebrew words, with no idea of what they might mean, and the congregation responds with more words that they don’t understand either. We are gathered together on a Saturday morning to speak gibberish to each other, and you would think, in these godless times, that the experience would be empty, but somehow it isn’t. The five of us, huddled together shoulder to shoulder over the bima, read the words aloud slowly, and the congregation, these old friends and acquaintances and strangers, all respond, and for reasons I can’t begin to articulate, it feels like something is actually happening. It’s got nothing to do with God or souls, just the palpable sense of goodwill and support emanating in waves from the pews around us, and I can’t help but be moved by it. When we reach the end of the page, and the last “amen” has been said, I’m sorry that’ it’s over. I could stay up here a while longer. And as we step down to make our way back to the pews, a quick survey of the sadness in my family’s wet eyes tells me that I’m not the only one who feels that way. I don’t feel any closer to my father than I did before, but for a moment there I was comforted, and that’s more than I expected.”

“Glory is the sunshine of the dead”

“The lapse of ages changes all things – time – language – the earth – the bounds of the sea – the stars of the sky, and everything ‘about, around, and underneath’ man, except man himself, who has always been and always will be, an unlucky rascal. The infinite variety of lives conduct but to death, and the infinity of wishes lead but to disappointment. All the discoveries which have yet been made have multiplied little but existence.”

“Till her appointed course be run;Till on the darkness faint her breathFlown to the silent void, and DeathSit crowned upon the ashen sun.(“The Testimony of the Suns”)”

“They had…finished their lives before their death – which is not always the end of life and often comes long before the end.”

“Everybody was dying, or already dead, or leaving other people, and the year was dying into winter, and the only thing to do was make some noise.”

“She’s had a long life. Now she’s going to the Lord.” “Frankly it creeps me out a little when you say things like that,” Simon said. “It shouldn’t. If you don’t like ‘Lord,’ pick another word. She’s going home. She’s going back to the party. Whatever you like.” “I suppose you have some definite ideas about an afterlife.” “Sure. We get reabsorbed into the earthly and celestial mechanism.” “No heaven?” “That’s heaven.” “What about realms of glory? What about walking around in golden slippers?” “We abandon consciousness as if we were waking from a bad dream. We throw it off like clothes that never fit us right. It’s an ecstatic release we’re physically unable to apprehend while we’re in our bodies. Orgasm is our best hint, but it’s crude and minor by comparison.”

“In ten years time I’ll be… (dead) sixty.”

“As he watches the sun rise, what grieves him is that he failed her. He thinks of the terror she felt. They tell him it was quick, as if that will somehow confine the horror.”

“He held her and rocked her, believing, rightly or wrongly, that Ellie wept for the very intractability of death, its imperviousness to argument or to a little girl’s tears; that she wept over its cruel unpredictability; and that she wept because of the human being’s wonderful, deadly ability to translate symbols into conclusions that were either fine and noble or blackly terrifying. If all those animals had died and been buried, then Church could die (any time!) and be buried; and if that could happen to Church, it could happen to her mother, her father, her baby brother. To herself. Death was a vague idea; the Pet Sematary was real. In the texture of those rude markers were truths which even a child’s hands could feel.”

“Each day death corrodes what we call living, and life ceaselessly swallows our desire for the void.”

“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 neatly into light and slip out the window. You couldn’t go like that. Within one’s own departing but stubborn flesh, there was only the long, sentimental, piecemeal farewell. Sir? A towel. Is there a towel? The body, hauling sadness, pursued the soul, hobbled after. The body was like a sweet, dim dog trotting lamely toward the gate as you tried slowly to drive off, out the long driveway. Take me, take me, too, barked the dog. Don’t go, don’t go, it said, running along the fence, almost keeping pace but not quite, its reflection a shrinking charm in the car mirrors as you trundled past the viburnium, past the pin grove, past the property line, past every last patch of land, straight down the swallowing road, disappearing and disappearing. Until at last it was true: you had disappeared.”

“One mile farther and I come to a second grave beside the road, nameless like the other, marked only with the dull blue-black stones of the badlands. I do not pause this time. The more often you stop the more difficult it is to continue. Stop too long and they cover you with rocks.”

“That kind of imagination is why we’re not dead.”