Close To Death Quotes

The definition of all right changes with the passing winters, I find. I'm about all right by the standards of the last few days. Twenty years ago I'd have considered this close to death. ~ Joe Abercrombie

They were enemies, they had both been very close to death and the other had done little or nothing to intervene, but actually to kill her would be very difficult.
Or maybe he only wanted to pretend that he would find it very difficult; maybe it would be no bother at all, and the sort of bogus camaraderie of doing the same job, though on different sides, was just that: a fake. ~ Iain M. Banks

He is trapped underground, suddenly and unexpectedly close to death, but still in control of his fate. "At that moment I put death in my head and decided I would live with it," he says later. ~ Hector Tobar

Being close to death, I knew that I wanted to live. I wanted to experience it all. With Jack. ~ Jane Harvey-Berrick

You could never understand what it's like, being this close to death all the time. And ~ Ransom Riggs

I was never afraid of failure after that because, I think, coming that close to death you get kissed. With the years, the actual experience of course fades, but the flavor of it doesn't. I just had a real sense of what choice do I have but to live fully? ~ Debra Winger

Until one is close to death, it must be difficult to declare anyone as the love of one's life. ~ Alain De Botton

At some point, there was rape and nothing else. This becomes your normal day. You don't know who is going to open the door next to attack you, just that it will happen and that tomorrow might be worse. You stop thinking about escaping or seeing your family again. Your past life becomes a distant memory, like a dream. Your body doesn't belong to you, and there's no energy to talk or to fight or to think about the world outside. There is only rape and the numbness that comes with accepting that this is now your life. Fear was better. With fear, there is assumption that what is happening isn't normal. Sure, you feel like your heart will explode and you will throw up, you cling desperately to your family and friends and your grovel in front of the terrorists, you cry until you go blind, but at least you do something. Hopelessness is close to death. ~ Nadia Murad

Everyone thinks I have a death wish, you know? But I don't want to die - dying is easy. No, I want to live, but getting close to death is the only way to feel alive. And once you do, it makes you realize that everything you were actually doing before wasn't actually living. It was just making do. Call me crazy, but I think we do the best living when the stakes are high. ~ V.E Schwab

You must know that you are always near to everything! Nothing is far from you! Life means to be close to everything, to be close to death, to smile, to hot, to cold, to joy, to sorrow! We live in a very small island surrounded by everything, surrounded by good, by bad, by sweet, by bitter! We are very close to everything! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I became entirely given over to extreme dread. The fear was so powerful that it seemed to make my personality completely evaporate ... 'Whitley' ceased to exist. What was left was a body and a state of raw fear so great that it swept about me like a thick, suffocating curtain, turning paralysis into a condition that seemed close to death ... I died and a wild animal appeared in my place. ~ Whitley Strieber

A great melancholy was hanging in the air, giving their love a more languid, more tender feeling. It was like the love one feels before a separation, it was like love in a country where there is a war, in a town where epidemics are raging. A strong love, from feeling close to death. Here death reigned, it was as if the town were the Museum of Death. ("The Dead Town") ~ Georges Rodenbach

There is lucidity inspired by the nearness of the grave:to be close to death is to see clearly ~ Victor Hugo

When you have been close to death it makes you think about life. ~ Patrick Dixon

You see, it's actually very good that a human activity is performed very close to death, because that's where life is. Life is, at its most valuable and most full, very close to the boundary of life. ~ Philippe Petit

I want to live, but getting close to death is the only way to feel alive. ~ V.E Schwab

There is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love. ~ Ivan Klima

Is it not strange how quickly one can become detached from everything? How empty life appears when one is close to death! ~ Georges Rodenbach

I am at the hospital waiting for my friend with Noah. Which is a very couple-like thing to do. All you have to do is watch any teen drama - anytime one of the characters is close to death and/or in a coma, the boyfriend/girlfriend teams always end up at the hospital together.
We are eating together. (Another coupley thing to do.)
We are talking about my best friend, his girlfriend, and their secret problems that she somehow neglected to tell me. Which means that Noah is the one telling me secrets that even my best friend won't.
I like it. All of it. Being here, eating food, telling secrets, everything ~ Lauren Barnholdt

Physically my brain is in great shape. My motor functions are fine, but I think going through the whole ordeal ... coming pretty close to death, may have affected my priorities. ~ Bill Berry

We musn't forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don't want to think about. We musn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you're twenty and the next day you're eighty. ~ Muriel Barbery

People who are sick, or who have been sick, or have come close to death have a lot to say - and they want you to hear it. ~ Anna Deavere Smith

If there's a fire, I want to be there. Maybe because in being so close to death, I think I understand what it means to be truly alive. ~ Caroline Paul

I had never been so close to death before.
For a long time, as I lay there trying to clear my mind, I couldn't think coherently at all, conscious only of a terrible, blind bitterness. Why had they singled me out? Didn't they understand? Had everything I'd gone through on their behalf been utterly in vain? Did it really count for nothing? What had happened to logic, meaning and sense?
But I feel much calmer now. It helps to discipline oneself like this, writing it down to see it set out on paper, to try and weigh it and find some significance in it.
Prof Bruwer: There are only two kinds of madness one should guard against, Ben. One is the belief that we can do everything. The other is the belief that we can do nothing.
I wanted to help. Right. I meant it very sincerely. But I wanted to do it on my terms. And I am white, and they are black. I thought it was still possible to reach beyond our whiteness and blackness. I thought that to reach out and touch hands across the gulf would be sufficient in itself. But I grasped so little, really: as if good intentions from my side could solve it all. It was presumptuous of me. In an ordinary world, in a natural one, I might have succeeded. But not in this deranged, divided age. I can do all I can for Gordon or scores of others who have come to me; I can imagine myself in their shoes, I can project myself into their suffering. But I cannot, ever, live their lives for them. So what else could come of it but failure?< ~ Andre Brink

After I was assaulted in Egypt, I learned fear. I've just never been so scared in my life. I've never been so close to death. ~ Lara Logan

I missed the war and the freedom that came with it. When you are that close to death, you feel free. Every breath you take could be your last. So you inhale and savor each breath, try not to think about your death even though signs of it are all around you. The freedom comes from knowing that if anybody gives you crap, you can eliminate them and the situation. Just shoot and get it over with. ~ Clint Van Winkle

I did it," I gasp, still reeling from the thrill and the fear. "I really-"
Quince's mouth is on mine in an instant.
His arms around my waist, mine around his neck. It's the fear, i know it's the fear. And the bond. And the adrenaline. That whole i-was-this-close-to-death-and-really-really-really-glad-to-be-alive emotional response. Anxiety and relief and joy swirl between us until i can't tell which are his and which are mine. I can't not be kissing him right now.
The urgency in his kiss tells me he feels the same. ~ Tera Lynn Childs

This wasn't the first time that I'd come close to death, but it was the first time I'd been involved in this part of it, this strange, terrible saying goodbye to someone you've loved. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

It is only those who practice philosophy in the right way, we say, who
always most want to free the soul; and this release and separation of the
soul from the body is the preoccupation of the philosophers?
So it appears.
Therefore, as I said at the beginning, it would be ridiculous for a man
to train himself in life to live in a state as close to death as possible, and
then to resent it when it comes?
Ridiculous, of course. ~ Plato

A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They're on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority's blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options – neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there's cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I'm easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I'll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome drugs. ~ Ian McEwan

We must admit that today conformity is on the Left. To be sure, the Right is not brilliant. But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws. The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty. ~ Albert Camus

I had a very crazy aunt and uncle who we traded my brother Webster to for a Siamese cat. It was heaven to live with my aunt and uncle because you got spoiled to death. ~ Rex Smith

We should have but one desire today - the desire to die so that India may live - the desire to face a martyr's death, so that the path to freedom may be paved with the martyr's blood. ~ Subhas Chandra Bose

If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death Perhaps the world can teach us as when everything seems dead but later proves to be alive. ~ Pablo Neruda

Well, when the fear of death seizes you - when the dark thoughts come - you stare the darkness right back, and you tell it, 'I will not listen to you, for I am infinite Batmans. ~ Brandon Sanderson

People on death row, the treatment of animals, women's right to choose. So much in America is based on religious fundamentalist Christianity. Grow up! This is the modern world! ~ Eddie Vedder

A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?"
"Well, sweetheart," I tell her, "yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Fitzgerald never got rid of anything; the ghosts of his adolescence, the failures of his youth, the doubts of his maturity plagued him to the end. He was supremely a part of the world he described, so much a part that he made himself its king and then, when he saw it begin to crumble, he crumbled with it and led it to death. ~ John Aldridge

To those who would submit to the rightful law and authority, all gentleness and forbearance; but to the petulant and persistent secessionists, why, death is mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better. Satan and the rebellious saints of Heaven were allowed a continuous existence in hell merely to swell their just punishment. To such as would rebel against a Government so mild and just as ours was in peace, a punishment equal would not be unjust. ~ William Tecumseh Sherman

We are close to a time when all of humankind will envision a global agenda that encompasses a kind of Global Marshall Plan to address the causes of poverty and suffering and environmental destruction all over the earth. ~ Al Gore

When the body, washed and dressed, lay in the coffin on a table, everyone came to take leave of him and they all wept.

Little Nicholas cried because his heart was rent by painful perplexity. The countess and Sonya cried from pity for Natasha and because he was no more. The old count cried because he felt that before long, he, too, must take the same terrible step.

Natasha and Princess Mary also wept now, but not because of their own personal grief; they wept with a reverent and softening emotion which had taken possession of their souls at the consciousness of the simple and solemn mystery of death that had been accomplished in their presence. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Amy might not have had the most exciting life over the past few years, up here in her room, but she must have been fighting death to the very end. Sara could understand why she had been in denial or so long. It must have been a frightening realization: so many books she would never get to pick up, so many stories that would happen without her, so many authors she would never get to discover.

That night, Sara sat in Amy's library for hours, thinking about how tragic it was that the written word was immortal while people were not, and grieving for her, the woman she had never met. ~ Katarina Bivald

There are people who die and, with all due respect, you don't lose anything. But he was one of those that when they're gone you feel it. As if the whole world had become, from one day to the next, a little heavier. ~ Alessandro Baricco

The only moment football really stops is with a penalty kick - and that is a moment that is really dramatic. A penalty kick becomes a Western duel. It's two guys facing each other. Destiny and potential death, whether metaphorical or literal. That's why in the penalty kick at the end of the film, I shot it like an homage to the Sergio Leone Westerns I saw when I was a kid, especially The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. ~ Carlos Cuaron

I was living my own future and my brother's lost one as well. I represented him here just as he represented me there, in some unguessable other place. His move from life to death might resemble my stepping into the kitchen - into its soft nowhere quality and foggy hum. I breathed the dark air. If I had at that moment a sense of calm kindly death while my heart beat and my lungs expanded, he might know a similar sense of life in the middle of his ongoing death. ~ Michael Cunningham

All my work will explode inside my body, each fragment of my anatomy will acquire a life of its own, outside mine, Humberto won't exist, only these monsters, the despot who imprisoned me at La Rinconada to force me to invent him, Ines's honey complexion, Brigida's death, Iris Mateluna's hysterical pregnancy, the saintly girl who was never beatified, Humberto Penaloza's father pointing out Don Jeronimo dressed up to go to the Jockey Club, and your benign, kind hand, Mother Benita, that does not and will not let go of mine, and your attention fixed on these words of a mute, and your rosaries, the Casa's La Rinconada as it once was, as it is now, as it was afterwards, the escape, the crime, all of it alive in my brain, Peta Ponce's prism refracting and confusing everything and creating simultaneous and contradictory planes, everything without ever reaching paper, because I always hear voices and laughter enveloping and tying me up. ~ Jose Donoso

Just seven minutes after most of Murphysboro was leveled, the Tri-State Tornado hit DeSoto at 2:48 P.M. No town in the path would proportionally suffer a higher fatality rate than this tiny village in which sixty-nine people died. Thirty-three of them were children buried in the burning ruins of the DeSoto Schoolhouse, a heartbreaking record that remains the single worst tornado-related death toll for a school in US history. One in four DeSoto children who walked off to school that day would never come home to supper. ~ Geoff Partlow

Being dead will be no different from being unborn
I shall be just as I was in the time of William the Conqueror or the dinosaurs or the trilobites. There is nothing to fear in that. ~ Richard Dawkins

We fall asleep as close as ears of wheat: chest to back, fingers entwined. I kiss the skin at the nape of her neck, soft like rabbit fur. I dream of nothing. ~ Kirsty Logan

Racism, pollution and the rest of it are themselves very close to extinction. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

The problem is that most people, most of the time, are desperate to believe ridiculous and divisive ideas for patently emotional reasons,and while rarely explicit what they're really worried about is death ~ Sam Harris

Between democracy and rule of law There has always been a close historical association between the rise of democracy and the rise of liberal rule of law.32 As we saw in chapter 27, the rise of accountable government in England was inseparable from the defense of the Common Law. Extension of the rule of law to apply to wider circles of citizens has always been seen as a key component of democracy itself. This association has continued through the third-wave democratic transitions after 1975, where the collapse of Communist dictatorships led to both the rise of electoral democracy and the creation of constitutional governments protecting individuals' rights. ~ Francis Fukuyama

You give me nothing during your life, but you promise to provide for me at your death. If you are not a fool, you know what I wish for! ~ Marcus Valerius Martial

Death
a stopping of impressions through the senses, and of the pulling of the cords of motion, and of the ways of thought, and of service to the flesh. ~ Marcus Aurelius

The months have been good to Tiberias Calore. A life of war suits him. He seems vibrant and alive, even after narrowly escaping death on the walls. ~ Victoria Aveyard

Precious child, what is the meaning of the saying,
"We must die before death?"
It means we must make all the evil qualities,
all the qualities of satan within us, die before our death.
If those qualities die, then the world within us dies.
And if the world within us dies, then all the sins,
ghosts, demons, and satan's contained within it also die.
The desire for earth, gold, and sexual pleasure
all die along with the world within us.
All that is left is Allah and His power (quadrat).
If all the evil qualities die within us,
then we die before death
and only Allah's qualities, actions and conduct will remain.
Then there will be no death for us.
We will have attained eternal life (hayat).
If we attain eternal life, where will we live?
We will live in heaven, in God's kingdom.

To Die Before Death: The Sufi Way of Life- pg. 116-117 ~ Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen

Love
My soul was a light-blue gown, sky-coloured;
I left it on a cliff by the sea
and naked I came to you, resembling a woman.
And like a woman I sat at your table
and drank a toast with wine and breathed in the scent of several roses.
You found me beautiful, resembling something you'd seen dreaming,
I forgot everything, I forgot my childhood and my homeland,
I knew only that your caresses held me captive.
And, smiling, you took up a mirror and bade me look.
I saw that my shoulders were made of dust and crumbled away,
I saw that my beauty was sick and had no desire other than to - disappear.
Oh, hold me close in your arms, so tightly that I need nothing. ~ Edith Sodergran

If we want to set out on the aruous search for the truth, we must all summon up the courage to leave the lines along which we have thought until now and as the first step begin to doubt everything that we previously accepted as correct and true. Can we still afford to close our eyes and stop up our ears because new ideas are supposed to be heretical and absurd? ~ Erich Von Daniken

We get ready for death by beginning to live life as we should have been living it all along. ~ Ronald Rolheiser

I was merely observing; I have no agenda." He looked at his hand, still touching hers. "Where did you get that ring?"

She contracted her hand into a fist as she pulled it away from him. The amethyst in her ring glowed in the firelight. "It was a gift."

"From whom?"

"That's none of your concern."

He shrugged, though she knew betterthan to tell him who'd really given it to her - rather, she knew Chaol wouldn't want Dorian to know.

"I'd like to know who's been giving rings to my Champion."

The way the collar of his black jacket lay across his neck made her unnable to sit still. She wanted to touch him, to trace the line between his tan skin and the golden lining of the fabric.

"Billiards?" she asked, rising to her feet. I could use another lesson." Celaena didn't wait for his answer as she strode toward the gaming room. She very much wanted to stand close to him and have her skin warm under his breath. She liked that. Worse than that, she realized, she liked him. ~ Sarah J. Maas

The fact was, it was safer to stay uninvolved. He was perfectly fine with emotions, so long as they belonged to other people. Oh, he tried relationships after Peg's death, for a while he really tried, but he couldn't bear to get closed ... [it was easier] to disconnect from that part of life and turn his back on love altogether.Easier to find what he needed in music. ~ Rachel Joyce

To die tomorrow was no worse than dying on any other day. Every day was there to be lived or to mark one's departure from this world. ~ Paulo Coelho

Metaphysically, his bowl filled and emptied at the same time. Violent and maniacal to push himself so far, he'd both created and destroyed his body's energy. In other words he had complete power, self-sustaining, self-sacrificing power at the origin of himself. ~ E.J. Koh

You just got what was coming for you! Anger stripped the niceties from her speech. Lilith spun around to face him again - her fists clenched - as if she could strike him, and wipe the sneer from his dead lips. He infuriated her. Nauseated her. Drove her mad with his mockery. Death had made him bitter, and any charm had sloughed away, along with his flesh. ~ Georgina Anne Taylor

To deal justice by death has this disadvantage that the victim has no knowledge that justice has overtaken him. Had you died, had you been torn limb from limb that night, I should now repine in the thought of your eternal and untroubled slumber. Not in euthanasia, but in torment of mind should the guilty atone. You see, I am not sure that hell hereafter is a certainty, whilst I am quite sure that it can be a certainty in this life; and I desire you to continue to live yet awhile that you may taste something of its bitterness. ~ Rafael Sabatini

One day, you will find yourself close to the end, and thinking about the beginning. TODAY is that beginning. TODAY is life. You've got to live it.
Live for what's right. Live for what you believe in. Live for what's important to you. Live for the people you love, and never forget to tell them how much they mean to you. Realize that today you're lucky because you still have a chance. So stop for a moment and think. Whatever you still need to do, start doing it now. There are only so many todays left. ~ Anonymous

We must learn that any person who will not accept what he knows to be truth for the very love of truth alone is very definitely undermining his mental integrity ... you have not been a close observer of such men if you have not seen them shrivel, become commonplace, mean without influence, without friends, and without the enthusiasm of youth and growth, like a tree covered with fungus, the foliage deceased, the life gone out of the heart with dry rot and indelibly marked for destruction
dead, but not yet handed over to the undertaker. ~ Luther Burbank

A heavy silence as the first sparks of revolution are struck. Sevro comes close. "That was rousing." "Too demokratic?" I whisper. "I don't think autocratic demokracy counts." Sevro wrinkles his nose. "You did threaten to vent them into space." "Threaten? I thought I implied it rather smoothly." "Smooth as gravel, dipshit." Sevro cackles a bit too enthusiastically and slaps his leg with his mech hand, denting the metal there. ~ Pierce Brown

The effect of civilization is to impose human law upon environment until it becomes machine-like in its regularity. The objectionable is eliminated, the inevitable is foreseen. One is not even made wet by the rain nor cold by the frost; while death, instead of stalking about gruesome and accidental, becomes a prearranged pageant, moving along a well-oiled groove to the family vault, where the hinges are kept from rusting and the dust from the air is swept continually away. ~ Jack London

Mankind's most dangerous enemy is the human imagination. What their minds can imagine is far more malicious than the deepest furnaces of their chimerical Hell. They imagined an invisible god to corrupt their thoughts with everlasting fantasies and eternal lies. When the human species invented God the darkness of imagination was present. Mankind imagined an unseen creator to form their bodies and then to reform them indestructible upon death. The mortal truth became the immortal delusion. They possessed no knowledge of God so they invented him. Where human knowledge ends the imagined God begins. ~ C.J. Anderson

The issue of climate change, it really does bring home the fact that we are on one planet, and that some of the impact of what human beings do in one corner of the world is going to affect people in a distant corner of the world. So we may still feel very far from each other, but we are really very close to each other because of the changes we have made with travel and technology and especially the information technology. ~ Wangari Maathai