Death Lessons Quotes

Death is only an experience through which you are meant to learn a great lesson: you cannot die. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

Life is a constant journey. We move from one place to another. The journey is what makes a fish different than a rock, movement different from stillness, light from darkness, life from death. ~ Miquel Reina

We are all exposed to the flash bulb of death. ~ Allen Ginsberg

No. Nothing could make it easier. You lost what you loved. That was death, here as well as there. ~ Cornelia Funke

When Princess Diana died, I couldn't understand why people were mourning her death in such an enormous, hysterical way when they didn't actually know her for real. ~ Alison Jackson

Love is the thing that corrodes the mind and pushes it to do the unimaginable. Love is the thorn that barbs into your flesh and makes you bleed a slow, torturous death. Love is the prison that confines you to the unending darkness that absorbs chunks of your sanity with each fleeting second. Love is an immortal's worst nightmare. ~ Dahlia L. Summers

Tragedy has the great moral defect of giving too much importance to life and death. ~ Nicolas Chamfort

Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one's life! ~ Irvin D. Yalom

I will not sentence myself to such a living death. ~ Madeline Miller

The uncertainty of death is, in effect, the great support of the whole system of life. ~ Samuel Johnson

I went over to the bed and knelt down beside it. I saw that she was still breathing, not in the hoarse, distressing way she had been breathing over the last few days, but almost serenely, as if the sacrament really had brought her relief. Then I took her pulse and felt it beating, rather irregularly, but beating nonetheless, and that was enough to assure me that she was still there. Finally, I carefully tried to prize open her eyelids, so that she could, if possible, see me, or so that I could at least see her, even if she could not see me. If my image could no longer penetrate the place where she now found herself, and I was, for her, merely a dull, meaningless thing, I wanted at least to be able to see my own image in those opaque pupils and feel myself floating on the surface of that world that had once been mine and which, now that it was lost, would bear me up as indifferently as a wave washing over a dead body. And I was thinking this even as I was trying to open her eyelids, which insisted on closing, while, meanwhile, everything inside me rebelled against being made an outcast, an exile, and I wanted her to see me, for my presence once more to illumine her inner world, which was, at that moment, heading into endless night, the desert where she would know nothing about me. ~ Lúcio Cardoso

One of my predecessors used to have people torn to death by wild tortoises. It was not a quick death. ~ Terry Pratchett

He wrapped his hand around mine and moved it from his lips, laying a gentle kiss on my fingers as he did it. 'When I saw you on the television bleeding and hurt I knew you would not die, because I could feel how hurt you were, and I knew we had power to heal you and bring you safely home to me, to us, but it wasn't enough, ma petite.' He pressed my hand to his chest. 'I needed to feel this. I needed to touch your skin, kiss your lips, hold you as close as I could. I would survive your death physically, I believe there is enough power now for that, but my heart …' He raised my hand and kissed it. 'My heart, it beats for you, Anita Blake. If there were a way for us to marry without the other men in our lives feeling excluded, I would ask it of you. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

To reach perfection, we must all pass, one by one, through the death of self-effacement. ~ Dag Hammarskjold

My dad died in 1980, and I found out afterwards from mum that my piano lessons, which cost £2 a week, took up nearly a third of his income. ~ Rick Wakeman

Do the job for the joy of work. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

How long had it had been since she'd thought back on the evenings around the fire, number games at the kitchen table, or listening to her father sing? Too long. Yes, there had been bad times. And she had tallied them like figures in a column, not remembering to factor in the good. She had doctored the books. ~ Julie Klassen

Americanism demands loyalty to the teacher and respect for his lesson. ~ Bainbridge Colby

This is what happens to the plans of humans, it is when they make them in the midst of their pleasures that death cuts the thread of their days without pity, and in the midst of life, without ever concerning themselves with this fatal moment, living as though they were to exist for ever, they disappear into the obscure cloud of immortality, uncertain of the fate which lies in store for them. ~ Marquis De Sade

Proverbs 11:4 4 Riches won't help on the day of judgment, but right living can save you from death. ~ Anonymous

One specific, profound moment isn't what you are supposed to spend your life looking for Ellie. Your life should include a billion different instances; ones that include all the people who matter most to you and only you."
He took a deep breath before continuing as a tear fell and slid down one of my cheeks.
"Those moments should be the ones you etch into your mind and think about - not the ones where things were bad or didn't go the way you thought they should. The only moments that matter are those that you give importance too. ~ C.S. Janey

That's the hope, isn't it? To see your family in your time of dying. ~ Saim .A. Cheeda

Kali's nakedness shows that she has cast away illusion; in her, the entire truth about life and death is revealed. Even her color is esoteric; Kali's dark colors stand for the ultimate void state, where as differences dissolve into the absolute beyond all form. Her sword is the force that slices delusion, ignorance, false hope, and lies. Her position on top of Shiva reveals that she is the dynamic force in the universe, the power that churns the stillness of the void, so worlds can be created inside that transcendent nothingness. ~ Sally Kempton

As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death. And to its punitive correlative, the message that if death catches us we have only ourselves to blame. Only ~ Joan Didion

I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need. ~ Ross Macdonald

Stone houses, terrace walls, city walls, streets. Plant any rose and you hit four or five big ones. All the Etruscan sarcophagi with likenesses of the dead carved on top in realistic, living poses must have come out of the most natural transference into death they could imagine. After lifetimes of dealing with stone, why not, in death, turn into it? ~ Frances Mayes

don't worry when situations get bitter. A bitter situation is a better teacher. The greatest lessons in life cannot only be found in comfort but also in the uncomfortable situations of life ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Most of the contexts are life and death, by the way, and God is your only hope. Your ezer. If he is not there beside you ... you are dead. A better translation therefore of ezer would be "lifesaver." Kenegdo means alongside, or opposite to, a counterpart. ~ John Eldredge

She sleeps alone at last. ~ Robert Benchley

Don't imagine you are in a worse place than you actually are. Things could have been far worse. So, seize the day, count your blessings and move on. You can survive a crisis only by dealing it with one day at a time. Don't add up all your problems in your mind and think you are finished. Compartmentalize your problems; put them in different buckets and project-manage them separately. This is how you live through uncertain times – making decisions when there are few or no options to choose from. You never see it this way when you are going through a crisis. But, unfailingly, every crisis leaves you stronger, wiser – and happy! ~ AVIS Viswanathan

When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consultation for death. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?

That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star…

Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago.

I found myself in a strange deserted city – an old city, like London – underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly – past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.

I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors.There was a cluste ~ Donna Tartt

Old friend, there are people - young and old - that I like, and people that I do not like. The former are always in short supply. I am turned off by humorless fanaticism, whether it's revolutionary mumbo-jumbo by a young one, or loud lessons from scripture by and old one. We are all comical, touching, slapstick animals, walking on our hind legs, trying to make it a noble journey from womb to tomb, and the people who can't see it all that way bore hell out of me. ~ John D. MacDonald

I think what you have to realise is that our generation is the first generation since its sexual awakening has come into the world and realised that sex can mean, ultimately, death. That has had a very serious effect on social morals and on the way people deal with each other. As we approach the millennium, people are getting more and more confused and contact is getting more and more sanitised, so there's a lot more mental games being played. ~ Brian Molko

A final stand, then. One last battle. At least he could say that he had fought. When he met his brothers and sisters on the far side of death, he would tell them that he had not yielded. He might have betrayed everything that they had been bred for, but he had never yielded. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

It is not death that kills us, but life. We are done to death by life. ~ Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

The ancients said that for persons who cultivated body and mind, and who are virtuous and honorable, death is an experience of liberation, a long-awaited rest from a lifetime of labors. Death helps the unscrupulous person to put an end to the misery of desire. Death, then, for everyone is a kind of homecoming. That is why the ancient sages speak of a dying person as a person who is 'going home. ~ Liezi

When I was a kid I adored Katharine Hepburn, especially when she played Jo, the ballsy sister in Little Women. All the kids in school started calling me "Jo." I also loved Barbara Stanwyck, Ann Sheridan, Bette Davis, Claire Trevor - I didn't know them but after seeing them in so many movies, I felt like I knew them. They weren't feminists, they were just strong women, and I always admired anyone who had some guts. All those sweet, quiet, polite, ladylike little things just bored me to death. Back then there were so many wonderful women's stories being filmed, and so many strong actresses. But by the time I started doing movies they were mostly making men's stories. It has always saddened me that I never got to work with directors like George Cukor and William Wyler, directors who could really pull such marvelous performances from actresses." - Jane Russell ~ Ray Hagen

Son. Everyone dies alone. That's what it is. It's a door. It's one person wide. When you go through it, you do it alone. But it doesn't mean you've got to be alone before you go through the door. And believe me, you aren't alone on the other side. ~ Jim Butcher

They are flying now above a dreamscape of rollercoasting white cloud crests. It feels sometimes like a premonition of death. Being so high up in the sky where no other living creature can survive. Where there is nothing solid. Just shifting transparency, luminous endless space. ~ Glenn Haybittle

It's natural to fear death, as a conscious, thinking being - it's the literal end of you. I'm not even afraid of death itself. It's more of a profound... not wanting to leave the party ~ EXO Books

We all think we understand each other,' Kin heard Silver say. 'We eat together, we trade, many of us pride ourselves on having alien friends - but all this is only possible, only possible, Kin, because we do not fully comprehend the other. You've studied Earth history. Do you think you could understand the workings of of the mind of a Japanese warrior a thousand years ago? But he is as a twin to you compared with Marco, or with myself. When we use the word "cosmopolitan" we use it too lightly - it's flippant, it means we're galactic tourists who communicate in superficialities. We don't comprehend. Different worlds, Kin. Different anvils of gravity and radiation and evolution. ~ Terry Pratchett

I hear about death so often that I don't even notice anymore. Have you ever heard kids talk about death? My seventh-graders argue about it: is it scary or not? Kids used to ask: where do we come from? How are babies made? Now they're worried about what'll happen after the nuclear war. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

The witch's hair was too short and too dark for blond. She wasn't sure if that relieved her or disturbed her.
Riley had immediately begun his interrogation, and it had gone something like this:
Riley: Where is the meeting between your kind and Aden Stone supposed to take place?
Witch: Go suck yourself.
Riley: Maybe later. Meeting?
Witch: Enjoy death.
Riley: I have once already. Now, decide to talk or lose a body part.
Witch: May I recommend a finger?
Riley: Sure. After I take one of your very necessary hands. ~ Gena Showalter

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them, and that is eternity. ~ Edvard Munch

- "Do you know the difference between us and them.... We are awake. We sense the truth: that something is deeply wrong with the world.... Deep down, they know it too. The feeling ebbs and flows. Some events cover it up for a time: you fall in love, you get a new job, you win the game. You think that's all you needed, that the feeling will go away, but it doesn't. It returns, again and again. Our species has become exceedingly adept at covering up the feeling. We work ourselves to death. We buy things. We go to parties and ball games. We laugh, shout, and cheer - and worse, we fight, and argue, and say things we don't mean. Alcohol and drugs quiet the most acute episodes. But we are constantly keeping the beast at bay. Underneath it all, our subconscious is crying out for help. For a solution - a cure for the root problem. We're all suffering from the same thing."
- "Which is?"
- "We've been told that it's simply the human condition. But that's not true. Our problem is really very simple: the world is not as it seems."
- "Then what is it?"
- "Science gives you one answer. Religious texts offer countless others. But the human population is slowly tiring of those answers. They are starting not to believe. They are awakening - and that awakening will soon tear the world apart. It will be a catastrophe with no equal. ~ A.G. Riddle

I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid. I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end. ~ Kurt Vonnegut