Death Of A Pet Quotes

Who shall tell the lady's grief
When her Cat was past relief?
Who shall number the hot tears
Shed o'er her, beloved for years?
Who shall say the dark dismay
Which her dying caused that day? ~ Christina Rossetti

Over half the admits to psych wards are things like cheerleaders who swallow two bottles of Mydol over a high-school breakup or gray lonely asexual depressing people rendered inconsolable
by the death of a pet. The cathartic
trauma of actually going in somewhere officially Psych-, some understanding nods, some bare indication somebody gives half a damn – they rally, back out they go. ~ David Foster Wallace

I am nine.
We are bored
and Karen is dying.

We drove to Austin
that summer
so Sarah's dad-

who described Karen as
/the great and impossible love/
of his life, who taught us

the word /lymphoma/ and then,
the concept of the prefix,
how it explains where the tumor lives-

could say goodbye.

The house is a rind
spooned out by the onset of death,
what's left in the medicine cabinet

full of razors & we are hungry
& alone & sitting
on the living room floor

where the light
from a naked window
slices the hardwood

like a melon, brandishes
each, individualfuzz
on my scabbed calf

a field of erect, yellow poppies
& we have been alive as girls
long enough to know

to scowl at this reveal
& what better time
than now to practice removal.

Once, I watched my mother
skin a potato in six
perfect strokes

I remember this
as Sarah teaches me
to prop up my leg
on the side of the tub

and runs the blade
along my thing, /See?/
she says, /Isn't that so much better?/

Before we left Albuquerque
her father warned us,
/She will have no hair/

a trait
we have just
begun to admire

except, of course
for the hair he is talking about
we hold against our n ~ Olivia Gatwood

Our plan depended on the Renselaeus warriors being fast and accurate and brave, for they were as outnumbered as Bran and I had been up in the mountains.
I was also, therefore, intensely aware that my life was now in the hands of people I had considered enemies not two dawns ago. Did they still consider me one?
I tried to calm my nerves by laughing at myself; for someone who so recently had tried her best to ride to her death, my innards were a pit of snakes, and my palms were sweaty despite the rain. Bran was alive, I was alive, and suddenly I wanted to stay that way. I wanted to go home and clean out the castle and replant Mama's garden. I wanted to see Oria and Julen and Khesot again, and I wanted to walk on the high peaks and dance with the Hill Folk on long summer nights, miming age-old stories to the windborne music…
I blinked. Had I just heard a reed pipe?
I lifted my head and listened, heard nothing but the thud of hooves and clatter of our accoutrements, and the soft rain in the leaves overhead. ~ Sherwood Smith

Why is it when I'm the one shot, I'm a baby, but when it's you, it's a matter of life and death and national security? (Joe)
Because I'm cuter in a short skirt. (Tee) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

To die, and thus avoid poverty or love, or anything painful, is not the part of a brave man, but rather of a coward; for it is cowardice to avoid trouble, and the suicide does not undergo death because it is honorable, but in order to avoid evil. ~ Aristotle.

I think people see death as the hunter, but it's just the ticket taker, the timekeeper. It's the sound of a record playing in the background. ~ Elizabeth Berg

Vonnegut could not help looking back, despite the danger of being turned metaphorically into a pillar of salt, into am emblem of the death that comes to those who cannot let go of the past ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. ~ David Foster Wallace

Nothing can torment you more than yearning for freedom in a world of civic enslavement. No more trees to climb; no more careless adventures; no more dreams - just living a scripted life where you barely even remember who you are, only who you were told to be. Our routine and responsibility becomes a form of amnesia where we forget who we are while we slowly die inside. Many more die by routine than by corporeal death. ~ Bryant McGill

Ryzek will be in a huge crowd of people, many of whom are his most ardent supporters and fiercest soldiers. What kind of 'move' do you suggest we make?"
Cyra replied, "You said it yourself, didn't you? Kill him."
"Oh, right!" Teka smacked the table, obviously annoyed. "Why didn't I think of killing him? How simple!"
Cyra rolled her eyes. "This time you won't have to sneak into his house while he's asleep. This time, I'll challenge him to the arena."
Everybody got quiet again. For different reasons, Akos was sure. Cyra was a good fighter, everybody knew that, but no one knew how good Ryzek was--they hadn't seen him in action. And then there was the matter of getting to a place where Cyra could actually challenge him. And getting him to do it instead of just arresting her.
"Cyra," Akos said.
"He declared nemhalzak--he erased your status, your citizenship," Teka said, talking over him. "He has no reason to honor your challenge."
"Of course he does." Isae was frowning. "He could have gotten rid of her quietly when he learned she was a renegade, but he didn't. He wanted her disgrace, and her death, to be public. That means he's afraid of her, afraid she has power over Shotet. If she challenges hi in front of everyone, he won't be able to back down. He'll look like a coward."
"Cyra," Akos said again, quiet this time.
"Akos," Cyra answered, with just a touch of the gentleness he had seen in the stairwell. "He is no match for me."
The ~ Veronica Roth

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless. ~ Paul Bowles

I do not know…who turned me, your Grace."
His downcast gaze said it all: How terribly sad.
For she had known all her life as a Vampire it was most…disgraceful to never know the one who turned you; that was where a Vampire could find a sense of great peace amidst the life that was the constant need for blood. She had only passed by these remarks, this cloud on her person for being 'Princess of the Vampires,' Dracula's special child… ~ S.C. Parris

He held up a book then. "I'm going to read it to you for relax."
"Does it have any sports in it?"
"Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True Love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest Ladies. Snakes. Spiders ... Pain. Death. Brave men. Cowardly men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles."
"Sounds okay," I said and I kind of closed my eyes. ~ William Goldman

The pro-death view should be of interest even to those who do not accept it. One of its valuable features is that it offers a unique challenge to those pro-lifers who reject a legal right to abortion. Whereas a legal pro-choice position does not require a pro-lifer to have an abortion - it allows a choice - a legal pro-life position does prevent a pro-choicer from having an abortion. Those who think that the law should embody the pro-life position might want to ask themselves what they would say about a lobby group that, contrary to my arguments in Chapter 4 but in accordance with pro-lifers' commitment to the restriction of procreative freedom, recommended that the law become pro-death. A legal pro-death policy would require even pro-lifers to have abortions. Faced with this idea, legal pro-lifers might have a newfound interest in the value of choice. ~ David Benatar

Real life is all beginnings. Days, weeks, children, journeys, marriages, inventions. Even a murder is the beginning of a criminal. Perhaps even a spree. Everything is prologue. Every story has a stutter. It just keeps starting and starting until you decide to shut the camera off. Half the time you don't even realise that what you're choosing for breakfast is the beginning of a story that won't pan out till you're sixty and staring at the pastry that made you a widower. No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story. Or never even get one so much as half-begun. ~ Catherynne M Valente

In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life ~ Paul Auster

Jenks kept me alive for two years through two death threats, a crazy banshee, and at least two serial killers. Its about time I return the favor! And if I can't, then I can sit by his bed and hold his hand as he dies, 'cause I've had plenty of practice doing that, too! ~ Kim Harrison

I don't think people ever were free of fear of death, but clinging to life and being so unprepared for it is a modern experience. ~ Katy Butler

I don't really enjoy experiencing pain. No one does. But we will become less human if we learn to detach ourselves from one another to the point that when we experience death of a beautiful being (our mothers, our fathers, our sisters, our brothers, our soul mates, our friends etc.) that it will not bother us that we will not feel. But see that's suppression. It will bother us somewhere deep inside. So, love someone. Hold them tight. Don't fear the loss. Fear the part of being too afraid to love someone. Love Everyone. It's inevitable: we all die. Thats the ugly part of life. But Love and being alive is so beautiful and so strong that the love, the memories stay even in death. Life is love, life is being alive to feel pain. The love the beautiful love always remains. Love. Life. Joy. Peace ~ Jill Telford

Death, the real simile for disease - for when we are ill, do we not always feel like we are dying, even if it's only a little? - remains, despite our secularism, the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all. ~ Will Self

The world doesn't need to be fixed,it only needs to be balanced.And the art of balance demands you tread lightly,not leap ahead in a continual frenzy.The art of balance demands you know your designated role in the game of life,not start muscling in on everyone else's.The art of balance demands knowledge of timelessness,of birth and death and rebirth.The art of balance demands you know the world cannot be fixed it must be endured. It must simply forever be kept in a splendid play. ~ Tarun J. Tejpal

The awfulness of sudden death and the glory of heaven stunned me! The thing that had been mystery at twilight, lay clear, pure, open in the rosy hue of dawn. Out of the gates of the morning poured a light which glorified the palaces and pyramids, purged and purified the afternoon's inscrutable clefts, swept away the shadows of the mesas, and bathed that broad, deep world of mighty mountains, stately spars of rock, sculptured cathedrals and alabaster terraces in an artist's dream of color. A pearl from heaven had burst, flinging its heart of fire into this chasm. A stream of opal flowed out of the sun, to touch each peak, mesa, dome, parapet, temple and tower, cliff and cleft into the new-born life of another day.

I sat there for a long time and knew that every second the scene changed, yet I could not tell how. I knew I sat high over a hole of broken, splintered, barren mountains; I knew I could see a hundred miles of the length of it, and eighteen miles of the width of it, and a mile of the depth of it, and the shafts and rays of rose light on a million glancing, many-hued surfaces at once; but that knowledge was no help to me. I repeated a lot of meaningless superlatives to myself, and I found words inadequate and superfluous. The spectacle was too elusive and too great. It was life and death, heaven and hell. ~ Zane Grey

Those who pass by us, do not go alone, and do not leave us alone; they leave a bit of themselves, and take a little of us. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

He prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity's potential for building a better world. ~ Mohsin Hamid

We Let the Boat Drift

I set out for the pond, crossing the ravine
where seedling pines start up like sparks
between the disused rails of the Boston and Maine.

The grass in the field would make a second crop
if early autumn rains hadn't washed
the goodness out. After the night's hard frost
it makes a brittle rustling as I walk.

The water is utterly still. Here and there
a black twig sticks up. It's five years today,
and even now I can't accept what cancer did
to him -- not death so much as the annihilation
of the whole man, sense by sense, thought
by thought, hope by hope.

Once we talked about the life to come.
I took the Bible from the nightstand
and offered John 14: "I go to prepare
a place for you.""Fine. Good," he said.
"But what about Matthew? 'You, therefore,
must be perfect, as your heavenly Father
is perfect.'" And he wept.

My neighbor honks and waves driving by.
She counsels troubled students; keeps bees;
her goats follow her to the mailbox.

Last Sunday afternoon we went canoeing on the pond. Something terrible at school had shaken her. We talked quietly far from shore. The paddles
rested across our laps; glittering drops
fell randomly from their tips. The light
around us seemed alive. A loon-itinerant-
let us get quite close before it dove, coming up
after a long time, and ~ Jane Kenyon

He reached up for his elegant neck cloth and began to unfasten it, and she watched his long, pale, bejeweled fingers in something of a daze.
He pulled the cloth free, his shirt coming open, and she averted her gaze from the disturbing sight of his bare chest. She heard his laugh, and then his hands were on her once more, catching her shoulders and turning her around. "Don't worry, my pet. You won't be seeing anything that might shock you." And he pulled the neck cloth over her eyes, effectively blinding her.
She wanted to fight back, to struggle, but that would give him an excuse to touch her further, and the less she felt the brush of his cool fingers the better. "That's right," he said, his voice soft and approving. "Now give me your arm and we'll give you a taste of damnation."
"Do you really find blasphemy that entertaining?" she said, trying not to start when he took her hand and placed it on his arm.
"Always."
She'd never put her hand on any arm that wasn't covered by layers of clothing, including a coat. The devil who oversaw these revels, be he Monsieur le Comte or something else, wore only a thin shirt made of the finest lawn. In her sudden world of darkness she was acutely aware of the feel of his arm beneath her fingers. The sinew and bone. The unexpected warmth of his skin, when his hands and his heart were so cold. ~ Anne Stuart

Because life is a game and we're all just trading cards. We play the right hand to get ahead." I studied the smiling, ignorant face of Sal as he stared at his bride. "Death stops the game. It's too final, too inflexible. Death is viciously stubborn. ~ Karina Halle

The key isn't winning
or losing, it's making the attempt. I may never be what I ought to be, want to be
but how will I know unless I try? Sure, it's scary, but what's the alternative? Stagnation - A safer, more terrible form of death. Not of the body, but of the spirit. An animal knows what it is, and accepts it. A man may know what he is
but he questions. He dreams. He strives. Changes. Grows. ~ Chris Claremont

Toward the end of the Cold War, capitalism created a military horror: the neutron bomb, a weapon that destroys life while leaving buildings intact. During the Fourth World War, however, a new wonder has been discovered: the financial bomb. Unlike those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this new bomb not only destroys the polis (here, the nation), imposing death, terror, and misery on those who live there, but also transforms its target into just another piece in the puzzle of economic globalization. ~ Subcomandante Marcos

The Pension Dressler stood in a side street and had, at first glance, the air rather of a farm than of a hotel. Frau Dressler's pig, tethered by one hind trotter to the jamb of the front door, roamed the yard and disputed the kitchen scraps with the poultry. He was a prodigious beast. Frau Dressler's guests prodded him appreciatively on the way to the dining-room, speculating on how soon he would be ripe for killing. The milch-goat was allowed a narrower radius; those who kept strictly to the causeway were safe, but she never reconciled herself to this limitation and, day in, day out, essayed a series of meteoric onslaughts on the passers-by, ending, at the end of her rope, with a jerk which would have been death to an animal of any other species. One day the rope would break; she knew it, and so did Frau Dressler's guests. ~ Evelyn Waugh

The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

There is no death! What seems so is transition; this life of mortal breath is but a suburb of the life elysian, whose portal we call Death. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It was the best kind of class to have in the afternoon, an exercise in almost pure language, demanding nothing more than fractional consciousness since there wasn't the slightest hope of understanding what those poems were all about, and we drowsed and smiled, happy in our own little angel-infancy, snug in our Thamesian punt, and when the sonic belch of experimental jets went ripping across the desert we came close to applauding the symbolism; but a trembling applause it would have been, for we knew that it signaled the death of our drowsy England and the beginning of a new mortality, just months away now, the start of job, mate, child, desk, drink, sit, squat, quiver, die. ~ Don DeLillo

But that is the way with killers, I suppose. What is the end of all innocence for you is just another Tuesday morning for them, and they walk off back to their planet of death giving no more thought to the world of the living that we would give to any other tourist destination: a place to be briefly visited and returned from with souvenirs and a haunting sensation that we could have paid less for them. ~ Chris Cleave

Kids are supposed to relax on vacations, and enjoy themselves, not sitting in the back seat of a car making peace with death and gripping a rosary because Mom is playing chicken with oncoming cars in the mountains. ~ Joshua David Swift

But, who is Death? A figure that harrows and wastes wherever and however it pleases. This is also a possible description of the Countess Bathory. Never did anyone wish so hard not to grow old; I mean, to die. That is why, perhaps, she acted and played the role of Death. Because, how can Death possibly die? ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

They were about the same age, but thirty-five years might have been forty-five if Mamma's face had been a place for measuring time, while Coletta's might have been twenty-five. You saw four children in Mamma's face, you even saw Hugo there; you saw centuries of worry, ages of toil, aeons of work and distress. There was no record of children upon the face of Coletta Drigo, nor of worry, nor of distress; instead you saw a rare nuance of youth to maturity; you saw excitement; you saw great cities, happy times, the whole wonderful world; and, above all, her beauty, black hair, black eyes, the dark whitish skin. You were sure that if she had a pet it wasn't a dog but a cat, a Siamese cat. ~ John Fante

When you buy a pet-store puppy, you know nothing about the health or temperament of the parents. You have no connection to the breeder of the dog, no resource to go to if you have questions or problems a few months or years from now. But perhaps most important, when you buy a pet-store puppy, you contribute to the demand for puppy-mill-bred puppies, and add to the cycle of misery of mill-owned breeding dogs. ~ Denise Flaim

I'm in the theater because of two plays: 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and 'Death of a Salesman.' ~ Mike Nichols

Bodisham insisted upon a series of conferences with practically all the Group present and participating. The egg of the world revolution was indeed incubated in meetings very like tutorial classes. Our dramatic and romantic dispositions would have it otherwise, but that was the course reality chose to take. It was begotten of a sentence, it was fostered in talk. In the beginning was the Word. There is no strong, silent man in the history of the world renascence.

"I've got so little to say," said Dreed, and he was the nearest approach to speechlessness in the Group.

"All the more reason for coming to listen," said Rud.

They had to understand each other, Bodisham urged, and to keep on understanding each other. "You have to talk a movement into being," he said, "and you have to keep it alert by talk. You have to write and keep on writing memoranda on the different expressions of our fundamental ideas, as fact challenges them. It is laborious but absolutely
necessary."

So long as Lenin lived, Bodisham argued, he wrote and talked and explained, and when he died progress in Russia turned its face to the wall. The hope went out of the Russian experiment. "You have to play the role of Lenin in our movement," said Bodisham. The Common-sense Party had to keep alive mentally even if it risked serious internal conflicts. Rigidity was a sign of death. Fixed creeds were the coffins of belief. ~ H.G. Wells

When dreams are turned away, death becomes the ultimate salvation ... .There are only two extremes in human madness: the instant when you become aware of your own impotence and the instant when you become aware of the vulnerability of others. It's a question of accepting one's madness ... or suffering it. ~ Yasmina Khadra

If God on the Cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste for death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to the mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love. That was Father Martin's answer. ~ Yann Martel

I simply can't build my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery and death ... I think ... peace and tranquillity will return again. ~ Anne Frank

We have all heard of the web of life. The way we live threatens to trap us in a web of death. ~ Ban Ki-moon

. . . Yes, I'm an aesthete. I like beauty.
Yes – poor countries are beautiful. Poor people are beautiful. It's a wonderful feeling to have money in a country where most people are poor, to ride in a taxi through horrible slums.
Yes – a beggar can be beautiful. A beggar can have beautiful lips, beautiful eyes. You're far from home. To you, her simple shawl seems elegant, direct, the right way to dress. You see her approaching from a great distance. She's old, thin, and yes, she looks sick, very sick, near death. But her face is beautiful – seductive, luminous. You like her – you're drawn to her. Yes, you think – there's money in your purse – you'll give her some of it.
And a voice says – Why not all of it? Why not give her all you have?
Be careful, that's a question that could poison your life. Your love of beauty could actually kill you.
If you hear that question, it means you're sick. You're mentally sick. You've had a breakdown. ~ Wallace Shawn

the first riddle of the universe: asking, when is a man not a man?: telling them take their time, yungfries, and wait till the tide stops (for from the first his day was a fortnight) and offering the prize of a bittersweet crab, a little present from the past, for their copper age was yet un-minted, to the winner. One said when the heavens are quakers, a second said when Bohemeand lips, a third said when he, no, when hold hard a jiffy, when he is a gnawstick and detarmined to, the next one said when the angel of death kicks the bucket of life, still another said when the wine's at witsends, and still another when lovely wooman stoops to conk him, one of the littliest said me, me, Sem, when pappa papared the harbour, one of the wittiest said, when he yeat ye abblokooken and he zmear he zelf zo zhooken, still one said when you are old I'm grey fall full wi sleep, and still another when wee deader walkner, and another when he is just only after having being semisized, another when yea, he hath no mananas, and one when dose pigs they begin now that they will flies up intil the looft. All were wrong, so Shem himself, the doctator, took the cake, the correct solution being - all give it up? - when he is a - yours till the rending of the rocks, - Sham. ~ James Joyce

The way black women say "girl" can be magical. Frankly, I have no solid beliefs about the survival of consciousness after physical death. But if it's going to happen I know what I want to see after my trek toward the light. I want to see a black woman who will smile and say, "Girl ... ~ Abigail Padgett