“Little sleep’s-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,when I come backwe will go out together,we will walk out together among,the ten thousand things,each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.”

“Suicide is an attack on society–an attack on its omnipotence, on its denial of death, and on its own despair.”

“Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages”

“Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.”

“I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.”

“A child’s reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its vast sources of recuperation, he is bound to envisage, at once, the very worst; yet at the same time, because of his inability to imagine death, the worst remains totally unreal to him. Gerard went on repeating: “Paul’s dying; Paul’s going to die”‘ but he did not believe it. Paul’s death would be part of the dream, a dream of snow, of journeying forever.”

“People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?”

“The world begins anew with every birth, my father used to say. He forgot to say, with every death it ends. Or did not think he needed to. Because for a goodly part of his life he worked in a graveyard.”

“Just for a while”: Death’s opening chat-up line in His great seduction, before he drugged you with soporific comforts, distracted you with minor luxuries and ensnared you with long-term payment plans.Join the Rat Race “just for a while.”Concentrate on your career “just for a while.”Move in with your girlfriend “just for a while.”Find a bigger place, out in the burbs “just for a while.”Lie down in that wooden box “just for a while.”

“It is my wish to die of unique causes, perhaps in a high-speed tricycle crash, a bizarre stapling incient, or as a result of inadvertently sucking my brains out through my ear while trying to untwist the vacuum hose.”

“Poets are interested primarily in death and commas. ”

“I have triumphed over both life and death because I no longer desire to live, nor do I any longer fear to die.”

“Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays cosily tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.”

“Maybe it’s wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either.”

“Life seemed to him to be a narrow cage, and her iron bars were many and dense, and there was only one way out.”