Death At Bay Quotes

My liveliness is based on an incredible fear of death. In order to keep death at bay, I do a lot of "Yah! Yah! Yah!" And death says, "All right. He's too noisy and busy. I'll wait for someone who's sitting quietly, half asleep." ~ Mel Brooks

When my father was vigorous and lucid, (my mother) regarded medicine as her wily ally in a lifelong campaign to keep old age, sickness, and death at bay. Now ally and foe exchanged masks. Medicine looked more like the enemy, and death the friend. (p. 184) ~ Katy Butler

At best you can hold death at bay, you can pretend it isn't there; but to deny it totally is a sickness. And I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems, and, perversely perhaps, to enjoy a vicarious confrontation with them. ~ Clive Barker

Well, yes,when you no longer have any desire, you are dead. Even desire for a product, a consumer item, is better than no desire at all. Desire for a camera, for instance, even a cheap one, a tawdry one, is enough to keep death at bay." a wicked smile, an inhale of the cigarette with those lips. "If the desire is real, of course. ~ David Cronenberg

Death had come frequently to the bleak village where the family lived. Indeed, death had been a regular visitor in their own house, taking seven of Chase's twelve brothers and sisters before their fifth birthdays. Whenever, he thought of these children, it was to imagine an inexorable shadow advancing over their tiny forms, at length to darken hearts and eyes. ~ S.K. Rizzolo

For all men are equal at the moment of death and who are we to judge them when a much greater judge awaits? ~ Anthony Horowitz

Wild dreams torment me as I lie. And though a god lives in my heart, though all my power waken at his word, though he can move my every inmost part - yet nothing in the outer world is stirred. thus by existence tortured and oppressed I crave for death, I long for rest. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I think my mother is beautiful. But her negative feelings about her body can generate a force field that repels any appreciation of it. I've long known the drill: Boobs, too small. Butt, too big. Face, bird-like. Upper arms, old. But it's not just age - she even disparages the way she looks in baby pictures. I don't know why she has never seen herself as beautiful. I think I've been waiting all these years for her to do so, as if that kind of self-love would somehow offer her body to me. But now I realize - she already gave it to me. At times I imagine her in death, and I know that her body, in all its details, will flood me. I do not know how I will survive it. ~ Maggie Nelson

People have gotten used to living a botched-up life - to be anxious, insecure, hateful, jealous, and in various states of unpleasantness through the day - slowly humanity has begun to see it as normal. None of these things are normal. These are abnormalities. Once you accept them as part of life they become normal because the majority has joined the gang of unpleasantness. They are all saying, "Unpleasantness is normal. Being nasty to each other is normal. Being nasty to myself is normal." Someone trusted that you would be doing good things at least to yourself and said, "Do unto others what you do unto yourself." I am telling you, never do unto others what you are doing to yourself! By being with people, I know what they are doing to themselves is the worst thing. Fortunately, they are not doing such horrible things to others. Only once in a while they are giving a dose to others, but to themselves they are giving it throughout the day. ~ Jaggi Vasudev

Death, with its ancestral weight of terrors, is merely the abandonment of an unserviceable shell at the time the spiritis reintegrated into the unified energy of the cosmos. The end of life, like birth, is a stagein a voyage, and deserves the compassion we accord to its beginnings. There is absolutely no virtue in prolonging the heartbeat and tremors of a body beyond its natural span ... ~ Isabel Allende

Brush snapped. The stag shambled forth from the outer darkness. It loomed above Scobie, its fur rank and steaming. Black blood oozed from gashes along its flanks. Beneath a great jagged crown of antlers its eyes were black, its teeth yellow and broken. Scobie fell to his knees, palms raised in supplication. The stag nuzzled his matted hair and its long tongue lapped at the muddy tears and the streaks of drying blood upon the man's upturned face. Its muzzle unhinged. The teeth closed and there was a sound like a ripe cabbage cracking apart. ~ Laird Barron

There are plenty of violent people, but for any randomly selected person today the chances of meeting a violent death at the hands of his or her fellow humans is lower now than it has ever been in human history. ~ Peter Singer

You can be sure that one or both of you must seal his testimony with blood. So be faithful unto death, and the King will give you a crown of life. The one who dies there, although his death will be unnatural and perhaps very painful, will be better off than his companion, not only because he will arrive at the Celestial City sooner, but also because he will escape many of the miseries that the other will meet with on the rest of his journey.
"So ~ John Bunyan

At that point, more than 15,000 women were dying each year from cervical cancer. The Pap smear had the potential to decrease that death rate by 70 percent or more, but there were two things standing in its way: first, many women - like Henrietta - simply didn't get the test; and, second, even when they did, few doctors knew how to interpret the results accurately, because they didn't know what various stages of cervical cancer looked like under a microscope. Some mistook cervical infections for cancer and removed a woman's entire reproductive tract when all she needed was antibiotics. Others mistook malignant changes for infection, sending women home with antibiotics only to have them return later, dying from metastasized cancer. And even when doctors correctly diagnosed precancerous changes, they often didn't know how those changes should be treated. ~ Rebecca Skloot

All men fear death. It's a natural fear that consumes us all. We fear death because we feel that we haven't loved well enough or loved at all, which ultimately are one and the same. However, when you make love with a truly great woman, one that deserves the utmost respect in this world and one that makes you feel truly powerful, that fear of death completely disappears. Because when you are sharing your body and heart with a great woman the world fades away. You two are the only ones in the entire universe. You conquer what most lesser men have never conquered before, you have conquered a great woman's heart, the most vulnerable thing she can offer to another. Death no longer lingers in the mind. Fear no longer clouds your heart. Only passion for living, and for loving, become your sole reality. This is no easy task for it takes insurmountable courage. But remember this, for that moment when you are making love with a woman of true greatness you will feel immortal.
I believe that love that is true and real creates a respite from death. All cowardice comes from not loving or not loving well, which is the same thing. And when the man who is brave and true looks death squarely in the face like some rhino hunters I know or Belmonte, who is truly brave, it is because they love with sufficient passion to push death out of their minds. Until it returns, as it does to all men. And then you must make really good love again. Think about it. ~ Woody Allen

The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay. ~ Steve Jobs

Somewhere, at some point, somehow, somebody decided that death equals credibility. ~ Chuck Klosterman

... What do you want, Ash?"
"Your head," Ash answered softly. "On a pike. But what I want doesn't matter this time." He pointed his sword at me. "I've come for her."
I gasped as my heart and stomach began careening around my chest. He's here for me, to kill me, like he promised at Elysium.
"Over my dead body." Puck smiled, as if this was a friendly conversation on the street, but I felt muscles coiling under his skin.
"This was part of the plan." The prince raised his sword, the icy blade wreathed in mist. "I will avenge her today, and put her memory to rest." For a moment, a shadow of anguish flitted across his face, and he closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were cold and glittered with malice. "Prepare yourself."
"Stay back, princess," Puck warned, pushing me out of the way. He reached into his boot and pullet out a dagger, the curved blade clear as glass. "This might get a little rough."
"Puck, no." I clutched at his sleeve. "Don't fight him. Someone could die."
"Duels to the death tend to end that way." Puck grinned, but it was a savage thing, grim and frightening. "But I'm touched that you care. One moment, princeling," he called to Ash, who inclined his head. Taking my wrist, Puck steered me behind the fountain and bent close, his breath warm on my face.
"I have to do this, princess," he said firmly. "Ash won't let us go without a fight, and this has been coming for a long time now." For a moment, a shadow of regret fl ~ Julie Kagawa

Randy [Rhoads] was laid to rest at a place called Mountain View Cemetery, where his grandparents were buried. I made a vow there and then to honour his death every year by sending flowers. Unlike most of my vows, I kept it. But I've never been back to his graveside. I'd like to go there again one day, before I finally join him on the other side. ~ Ozzy Osbourne

She's life, and I'm death. Prescott Burlington-Smyth is everything I want to be. A storm moving out of a shit situation at the speed of light, not looking back to spare a glance at the casualties of her actions. How ~ L.J. Shen

To see an almost certain horrible death
you know how crowds all sit at the edge of their seats, /praying/ subconsciously for a spectacular accident
and then to be whisked away from it so suddenly
brought to the edge of tragedy, and then to have their better natures win out, showing them how much nicer they always /knew/ they were
that was the supreme thrill. ~ Harlan Ellison

The banana flavour of his accidental conception, and the banana theme of his accidental death, now all seemed to conspire against him and rather suggest the universe, Mr Fate or whoever did have some sort of master plan after all. Despite all his earlier conjecturing, maybe the universe, Mr Fate or whoever was laughing its fat and meddling head at him. The outlandish evidence did seem to speak for itself, truly suggesting a mocking narrative devised by some mischievous author because quite simply a banana condom had brought Midnight into the world and a banana skin had seen him out. Putting those two seeming truths together, Midnight was once again forced to ask such confused and searching questions like:
What is this place, where am I heading? And what's the deal with all the ruddy bananas? ~ Tom Conrad

What, after all, is so special about genes? The answer is that they are replicators. The laws of physics are supposed to be true all over the accessible universe. Are there any principles of biology which are likely to have similar universal validity? When astronauts voyage to distant planets and look for life, they can expect to find creatures too strange and unearthly for us to imagine. But is there anything which must be true of all life, wherever it is found, and whatever the basis of its chemistry? If forms of life exist whose chemistry is based on silicon rather than carbon, or ammonia rather than water, if creatures are discovered which boil to death at -100 degrees centigrade, if a form of life is found which is not based on chemistry at all, but on electronic reverberating circuits, will there still be any general principle which is true of all life? Obviously I do not know but, if I had to bet, I would put my money on one fundamental principle. This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity which prevails on our own planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to becomethe basis for an evolutionary process. ~ Richard Dawkins

It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and remote, falsifying everything. It was a trick of the lenses. The man is an accurate picture. Then he is upside down. Then he is right side up. You shoot at a series of images conveyed to you through a metal tube. The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you've killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it's ordinary murder. ~ Don DeLillo

Most men fear getting laughed at or humiliated by a romantic prospect while most women fear rape and death. ~ Gavin De Becker

No individual and no nation need fear at any time to have less money than it needs. Government measures designed to regulate the international movement of money in order to ensure that the community shall have the amount it needs, are just as unnecessary and inappropriate as, say, intervention to ensure a sufficiency or corn or iron or the like. This argument dealt the Mercantilist Theory its death-blow. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

We marched. Gates opened and closed. We continued to march between the barbed wire. At every step, white signs with black skulls looked down on us. The inscription: WARNING! DANGER OF DEATH. What irony. Was there here a single place where one was NOT in danger of death? ~ Elie Wiesel

Dying before dying has two important consequences: It liberates the individual from the fear of death and influences the actual experience of dying at the time of biological demise. ~ Stanislav Grof

I come and stand at every door
But none can hear my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead for I am dead

I'm only seven though I died
In Hiroshima long ago
I'm seven now as I was then
When children die they do not grow

My hair was scorched by swirling flame
My eyes grew dim my eyes grew blind
Death came and turned my bones to dust
And that was scattered by the wind

I need no fruit I need no rice
I need no sweets nor even bread
I ask for nothing for myself
For I am dead for I am dead

All that I need is that for peace
You fight today you fight today
So that the children of this world
Can live and grow and laugh and play

- The Girl Child ~ Nazim Hikmet

No, when the stresses are too great for the tired metal, when the ground mechanic who checks the de-icing equipment is crossed in love and skimps his job, way back in London, Idlewild, Gander, Montreal; when those or many things happen, then the little warm room with propellers in front falls straight down out of the sky into the sea or on to the land, heavier than air, fallible, vain. And the forty little heavier-than-air people, fallible within the plane's fallibility, vain within its larger vanity, fall down with it and make little holes in the land or little splashes in the sea. Which is anyway their destiny, so why worry? You are linked to the ground mechanic's careless fingers in Nassau just as you are linked to the weak head of the little man in the family saloon who mistakes the red light for the green and meets you head-on, for the first and last time, as you are motoring quietly home from some private sin. There's nothing to do about it. You start to die the moment you are born. The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death. So take it easy. Light a cigarette and be grateful you are still alive as you suck the smoke deep into your lungs. Your stars have already let you come quite a long way since you left your mother's womb and whimpered at the cold air of the world. Perhaps they'll even let you go to Jamaica tonight. Can't you hear those cheerful voices in the control tower that have said quietly all day long, 'Come in BOAC. Come in Panam. Come in KLM'? ~ Ian Fleming

My thoughts are rancorous, ruinous. They throng through me like a shoal of sharp, silver sprat whenever the outer noises aren't loud or plenty enough to keep them at bay, to keep them out of the bay, the bay of my brain. ~ Sara Baume

Each morning we awaken to the light and the invitation to a new day in the world of time; each night we surrender to the dark to be taken to play in the world of dreams where time is no more. At birth we were awakened and emerged to become visible in the world. At death we will surrender again to the dark to become invisible. Awakening and surrender: they frame each day and each life; between them the journey where anything can happen, the beauty and the frailty. ~ John O'Donohue

He ought to be up there, guarding the pass, or at least striving in some way to keep his country.
His. The thought never failed to thrill him. It was worth death. Worth almost anything to become again the person he had been before the Herran War. Yet here he was, gambling the frail odds of success.
Looking for a plant.
He imagined Cheat's reaction if he could see him now, scouring the ground for a wrinkle of faded green. There would be mockery, which Arin could shrug off, and rage, which Arin could withstand--even understand. But he couldn't bear what he saw in his mind.
Cheat's eyes cutting to Kestrel. Targeting her, stoking his hatred with one more reason.
And the more Arin tried to shield her, the more Cheat's dislike grew.
Arin's hands clenched in the cold. He blew on them, tucked his fingers under his arms, and began to walk.
He should let her go. Let her slip into the countryside, to the isolated farmlands that had no idea of the revolution.
If so, what then? Kestrel would alert her father. She'd find a way. Then the full force of the empire's military would fall on the peninsula, when Arin doubted that the Herrani could deal even with the battalion that would come through the pass in less than two days.
If he let Kestrel go, it was the same as murdering his people.
Arin nudged a rock with his boot and wanted to kick it.
He didn't. He walked.
Thoughts chipped at his sanity, proposing solutions only to reveal pr ~ Marie Rutkoski

If we refuse to forgive, we have stepped into dangerous waters. First, refusing to forgive is to put ourselves in the place of God, as though vengeance were our prerogative, not his. Second, unforgiveness says God's wrath is insufficient. For the unbeliever, we are saying that an eternity in hell is not enough; they need our slap in the face or cold shoulder to "even the scales" of justice. For the believer, we are saying that Christ's humiliation and death are not enough. In other words, we shake our fists at God and say, "Your standards may have been satisfied, but my standard is higher!" Finally, refusing to forgive is the highest form of arrogance. Here we stand forgiven. And as we bask in the forgiveness of a perfectly holy and righteous God, we turn to our brother and say, "My sins are forgivable, but yours are not." In other words, we act as though the sins of others are too significant to forgive while simultaneously believing that ours are not significant enough to matter. ~ Voddie T. Baucham Jr.

As the films of clay are removed from our eyes, Death loses the false aspect of the spectre, and we fall at last into its arms as a wearied child upon the bosom of its mother. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

At once [the buffalo] is a symbol of the tenacity of wilderness and the destruction of wilderness; it's a symbol of Native American culture and the death of Native American culture; it's a symbol of the strength and vitality of America and the pettiness and greed of America; it represents a frontier both forgotten and remembered; it stands for freedom and captivity, extinction and salvation. ~ Steven Rinella

What emotion had filled the breast of Christ when he ordered away the man who was to betray him for thirty pieces of silver. Was it anger? or resentment? Or did these words arise from his love? If it was anger, then at this instant Christ excluded from salvation this man alone of all the men in the world; and then our Lord allowed one man to fall into eternal damnation. But it could not be so. Christ wanted to save even Judas. If not, he would have never made him one of his disciples. And yet why did Christ not stop him when he began to slip from the path of righteousness? This was a problem I had not understood even as a seminarian......If it is not blasphemous to say so, I have the feeling that Judas was no more than the unfortunate puppet for the glory of that drama which was the life and death of Christ. ~ Shusaku Endo