All Quotes By Tag: Death

“There’s a psychological mechanism, I’ve come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being.”

“Sprawled out on the front lawn Looking up at an ordinary sky It could fall on me and somehow be The day I didn’t die”

“L.A. kills people.’ Jacaranda said. ‘You’re lucky you’re leaving. You’ll be able to write.’She looked paler, going through another depression, smoking in bed in her lilac room. The walls were the color of her veins. She was getting too thin, even for the modeling. . .Jacaranda died last winter when the flowering trees were bare. You couldn’t even tell which ones once cried the purple blossoms she named herself after.”

“When your demon was yourself, there really was no way to fight or get rid of it.”

“In my world death will come chasing. In your world it will start whispering in your ear to destroy yourself. I know this because it started whispering to me when I was in the detention center.”

“Instead, he would make death his final project, the center point of his days. Since everyone was going to die, he could be of great value, right? He could be research. A human textbook. Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me.”

“You have to be very deep to be dead, he thought, and I’m not. He began to have some concept of forever, and his mind shivered as his body had when he had wakened in the cold nights and thrust his hands between his thighs to keep warm. It will be a long night, he thought.”

“When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who’d lost children wrote to me. ‘’I lost one, too,’’ they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn’t lost any children. I’m just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)”

“He is dead and I, the self serving coward that I am, still live. Life is not fair. There is no pattern. People die at random. Something everyone knows, but no one truly believes. They think that when it comes to them there will be a lesson, a meaning, a story worth telling. That death will come to them as a dread scholar, a fell knight, a terrible emperor.Death is a bored clerk, with too many orders to fill. There is no reckoning. No profound moment. It creeps up on us from behind, and snatches us away while we shit.”

“Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.”

“The foolish rush to end their lives.Only the steadfast soul survives.”

“The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.”

“You’ve got to think of the fine times you had with your mate, not the moment of his perishin’. Every tear you shed now only wets his windin’ sheet and disturbs his rest”

“Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.”

“…a third [of three] had died in his bunk of natural causes–for a dagger in the heart quite naturally ends one’s life.”