Dying By Inches Quotes

There's no more damage to be done," she said, in a faint, almost thoughtful voice. "No more damage, no salvation. One more of Faerie's glorious monsters lost."
"If you'd left us alone--" I began.
"You'd have sent some hero after me, given time enough. I killed, I die. At least I killed like a monster kills, instead of with iron, and dying by inches. That's Titania's way, the Queen who stands in the darkness and screams about her light. ~ Seanan McGuire

After all these years, his best friend is malaria.
Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old battles. ~ Louis Bayard

I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects ... ~ Charles Darwin

A long time ago she could have nourished herself on her own inner light, but she chose to become what she was now instead, and she exacted her revenge against her wasted destiny by drinking in the light of every artist she found with any sensitivity at all toward the intangible world behind our everyday reality, until she grew giant and swollen, like a sun which demanded that around it every planet must revolve, while the creative people she fed off grew dimmer, until they were like a dying fire, stars winking out until nothing was left but impenetrable darkness.
And how would I tell Artie I knew all this? That I had poked around in her head and the heads of anyone who came near her for the past eight months and I just felt it?
Yeah, right. ~ Lauren Sapala

In mythology, the transformative acts of people who seek self-knowledge by pursuing an epic adventure always seem too activate from some sort of dying to the world. Following this origination formula, I shall enter the unground labyrinth to confront my malevolent self, and wage a battle seeking to annihilate the demonic core of my being. We can only destroy those demons that we take personal ownership of and responsibility for creating. Can I use writing as a sorcerers tool to descend into the crooked lanes of my spiritual labyrinth to confront the warlock of an egotistical self? Can I use writing as an intentional mechanism to attempt undergoing a spiritual purification? ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I've read that the dying often wait to be by themselves. They need the freedom to go, with nobody holding them back. ~ Linda Barrett

Those last months. No way of wrapping it pretty or pretending otherwise: Rafa was dying. By then it was only me and Mami taking care of him and we didn't know what the fuck to do, what the fuck to say. So we just said nothing. My mom wasn't the effusive type anyway, had one of those event-horizon personalities-shit just fell into her and you never really knew how she felt about it. She just seemed to take it, never gave anything off, not light, not heat. ~ Junot Diaz

My lack of initiative was the root cause of all my troubles - of my inability to want something before having thought about it, of my inability to commit myself, of my inability to decide in the only way one can decide: by deciding, not by thinking. I'm like Buridan's donkey, dying at the mathematical midpoint between the water of emotion and the hay of action; if I didn't think, I might still die, but it wouldn't be from thirst or hunger. ~ Fernando Pessoa

They had pulled me from the hemorrhaging, dying body of my mother and turned me over to the care of the man who was not my father. He had taken me home to their tiny apartment above the old hardware store and done what little he knew to take care of me.
It took less than six weeks for him to realize his mistake. Maybe even less than six hours, but he never abandoned me. He clung to me as though I was the last remnant of some great and powerful love.
And that gave me hope that maybe my mother was really something else and not just some girl who got knocked up by a guy whose name she didn't even know. She was something special, someone worthy of a man's loyalty and devotion.
Rocky Evans ~ Gwenn Wright

Don't tell me to believe. Don't tell me to believe in the same God or laws that men believe in who commit these murders. Don't tell me to believe that God can bless this country and that men are judged by their peers. Who among his peers judged him? Was I there? Was the minister there? Was Harry Williams there? Was Farrell Jarreau? Was my aunt? Was Vivian? No, his peers did not judge him, and I will not believe. ~ Ernest Gaines

The worst moment was always taps. It didn't matter if the bugler played it well or poorly, in tune or out; there was something in the mournful ache of the music, and how it spoke of men dying before their time for something they only vaguely understood and being only vaguely appreciated by the people on whose behalf they died, that made it hurt so much. ~ Stephen Hunter

A dear friend best expressed, in a few words, the aim of this book. When she reflected on my recovery from Alzheimer symptoms she stated: "You came back to life." She was right. For me, losing the ability to think, talk, and feed and clothe myself would be the same as dying. If you (or someone you know) suffer these symptoms, I want to bring you back to life." "Avoiding certain foods can reverse the many conditions caused by nerve damage - including damage to the nerves of the brain. The nerves of the brain can recover from years of abuse. ~ William E. Walsh

A warrior confronts colonialism with the truth in order to regenerate authenticity and recreate a life worth living and principles worth dying for. The struggle is to restore connections severed by the colonial machine. The victory is an integrated personality, a cohesive community, and the restoration of respectful and harmonious relationships. ~ Taiaiake Alfred

It's harder to end a war than begin one. Indeed, everything that American troops have done in Iraq
all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering
all of it has led to this moment of success. Now, Iraq is not a perfect place. It has many challenges ahead. But we're leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people. We're building a new partnership between our nations. ~ Barack Obama

Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciting received analyses of current events. All the Manor residents watched television day and night, informed to the eyeballs like everyone else and rushed for time, toward what end no one asked. Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else's, but their many experiences' having taught them so little irked Lou. One hated tourists, another southerners; another despised immigrants. Even dying, they still held themselves in highest regard. Lou would have to watch herself. For this way of thinking began to look like human nature
as if each person of two or three billion would spend his last vital drop to sustain his self-importance. ~ Annie Dillard

Don't depend on death to liberate you from your imperfections. You are exactly the same after death as you were before. Nothing changes; you only give up the body. If you are a thief or a liar or a cheater before death, you don't become an angel merely by dying. If such were possible, then let us all go and jump in the ocean now and become angels at once! Whatever you have made of yourself thus far, so will you be hereafter. And when you reincarnate, you will bring that same nature with you. To change, you have to make the effort. This world is the place to do it. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

I'd support life extension by whatever means, from cryonic suspension to cyborgism to coding ourselves into our computers or whatever. There is nothing noble or beautiful or dignified about dying. Like poverty, it is ugly, nasty, brutal and primitive. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

The idea that a game is anything more than a game ... You know, there are people who are basically unbalanced who are going to misuse a game and have bad results. If a golfer who insists on playing during a lightning storm gets hit by a stroke of lightning and is killed nobody says, 'There's golfers dying by the droves being hit by lightning!' You can overdo what you really like, and if you're unbalanced you go overboard. ~ Gary Gygax

Can you sharpen this for me, please?"

Logan leaned across the table and took the pencil from him. "You want me to play with your pencil, Tate?"

"Hilarious. The sharpener is right by you. You just have to pick it up and slide it in."

As soon as the words left his mouth and Logan's quirked into an arrogant line, Tate bit his tongue.

"Really? Did you really just say that to me?"

Feeling more comfortable than ever with Logan and this group, Tate shrugged and nodded. Time to give it to Logan as good as he gives.

"Yeah. Is there a problem? You just line it up...and slide it in."

"You know, Tate - "

"Don't do it." Tate cut him off as he moved his foot, the one he'd had sitting between Logan's feet all night, so his shin bumped Logan's calf.

"Do what?"

"Say something dirty. I know you're dying to, but just sharpen the pencil."

Logan picked up the sharpener and made a big show of inserting the tip in the hole.

"Jesus," Shelly muttered from beside Logan. "I thought Rachel and Cole were bad. ~ Ella Frank

Samuel Smiles ends his book with the following moving story of the "gentleman" general:

The gentleman is characterized by his sacrifice of self, and preference of others, in the little daily occurrences of life…we may cite the anecdote of the gallant Sir Ralph Abercromby, of whom it is related, that, when mortally wounded in the battle of Aboukir, and, to ease his pain, a soldier's blanket was placed under his head, from which he experienced considerable relief.
He asked what it was.
"It's only a soldier's blanket," was the reply.
"Whose blanket is it?" said he, half lifting himself up.
"Only one of the men's."
"I wish to know the name of the man whose blanket this is."
"It is Duncan Roy's, of the 42nd, Sir Ralph."
"Then see that Duncan Roy gets his blanket this very night."

Even to ease his dying agony the general would not deprive the private soldier of his blanket for one night.
As Samuel wrote: "True courage and gentleness go hand in hand."
It was in this family, belief system, and heritage that Walter, my great-grandfather, grew up and dared to dream. ~ Bear Grylls

But, sir, isn't death a dreadful thing?" asked Malcolm.
"That depends on whether a man regards it as his fate or as the will of a perfect God. Its obscurity is its dread. But if God be light, then death itself must be full of splendor
a splendor probably too keen for our eyes to receive."
"But there's the dying itself; isn't that fearsome? It's that I would be afraid of."
"I don't see why it should be. It's the lack of a God that makes it dreadful, and you would be greatly to blame for that, Malcolm, if you hadn't found your God by the time you had to die. ~ George MacDonald

Without warning, Wesley lifted me up onto the pool table. His hands moved to my shoulders, and a second later, I was flat on my back, staring up at him as he smirked. He shifted so that he was on the table too, leaning over me with his face only inches from mine.
"On the pool table?" I said, narrowing my eyes at him. "Seriously?"
"I can't resist," he said. "You know, you're pretty sexy when you're pissed at me, Duffy."
First, I was struck by the irony of that statement. I mean, he used sexy and Duffy-implying I was fat and ugly-in the same sentence. The contrast was almost laughable. Almost. ~ Kody Keplinger

He looks out the window at the falling snow, then turns and takes his wife in his arms, feeling grateful to be here even as he wonders what he is going to do with his life in strictly practical terms. For years he had trained himself to do one thing, and he did it well, but he doesn't know whether he wants to keep doing it for the rest of his life, for that matter, whether anyone will let him. He is still worrying when they go to bed.

Feeling his wife's head nesting in the pillow below his shoulder, he is almost certain that they will find ways to manage. They've been learning to get by with less, and they'll keep learning. It seems to him as if they're taking a course in loss lately. And as he feels himself falling asleep he has an insight he believes is important, which he hopes he will remember in the morning, although it is one of those thoughts that seldom survive translation to the language of daylight hours: knowing that whatever plenty befalls them together or separately in the future, they will become more and more intimate with loss as the years accumulate, friends dying or slipping away undramatically into the crowded past, memory itself finally flickering and growing treacherous toward the end; knowing that even the children who may be in their future will eventually school them in the pain of growth and separation, as their own parents and mentors die off and leave them alone in the world, shivering at the dark threshold. ~ Jay McInerney

Lord, make a channel of Thy peace that, where there is hatred, I may bring love; that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness; that, where there is discord, I may bring harmony; that, where there is error, I may bring truth; that, where there is doubt, I may bring faith; that, where there is despair, I may bring hope; that, where there are shadows, I may bring light; that, where there is sadness, I may bring joy. Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted, to understand than to be understood; to love than to be loved; for it is by forgetting self that one finds; it is forgiving that one is forgiven; it is by dying that one awakens to eternal life. ~ Francis Of Assisi

Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels put dirt into your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called by any angel. As strata of rock shift, your fingers elongate, and your teeth are distended sideways in a great underground grimace indistinguishable from a strip of chalk. And the earth tumbles on, and the sun expires, and unaltering darkness reigns where once there were stars. ~ John Updike

I was dying, I realized vaguely. There was no getting out of that. The vampire author would be drained dry by a vampire. It was almost a poetic way to go. ~ Mari Mancusi

We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by thinking about everything. Think. Think. Think. You can never trust the human mind anyway. It's a death trap. ~ Anthony Hopkins

Consider the generosity of our Savior: what He acquired by dying becomes ours by eating. As often as we receive this Sacrament with proper dispositions, we make our own the fruits of all the labors, injuries and sufferings of His life, especially those borne at the time of His passion and death. Just as the power and the sensations of the head reach all the members of the body, in the same way, because Christ is "the head of the Church which is His Body" (Eph. 1:23), the treasures of His grace are made abundantly available to all who through charity are one with Him as living members. ~ Louis Of Granada

Melanie is the gentlest of dreams and a part of my dreaming. And if the war had not come I would have lived out my life, happily buried at Twelve Oaks, contentedly watching life go by and never being a part of it. But when the war came, life as it really is thrust itself against me. The first time I went into action - it was at Bull Run, you remember - I saw my boyhood friends blown to bits and heard dying horses scream and learned the sickeningly horrible feeling of seeing men crumple up and spit blood when I shot them. But those weren't the worst things about the war, Scarlett. The worst thing about the war was the people I had to live with.

I had sheltered myself from people all my life, I had carefully selected my few friends. But the war taught me I had created a world of my own with dream people in it. It taught me what people really are, but it didn't teach me how to live with them. And I'm afraid I'll never learn. Now, I know that in order to support my wife and child, I will have to make my way among a world of people with whom I have nothing in common. ~ Margaret Mitchell

We live on a spinning rock suspended in darkness, which evolves around a dying star. Our spinning rock was once ruled and owned by gigantic reptiles, all over! In sea, land, and air, gigantic reptiles roamed! Then a smaller rock fell from the sky and made a hole in the ground, so big that all the giant reptiles died! We live on a spinning rock we got from dragons flying through the air, and on this rock we kill each other over things like religion and money! And on this rock we make friends, we fall in love, we work hard to earn papers so we can buy things. On this rock we have dreams at night that remind us of beautiful places we have never been to, beautiful wonders we have never imagined before... we write stories and we make books, we try to travel to other rocks around us, we wonder if anyone else is out there. Our planet, and our existence as a human species, is bizarre! Our reality is bizarre! What we think is normal, when spelled out, is not normal at all. It's only normal because we are familiar with it. We are residents of a universe that is expanding at a rate of more than 5 billion meters per every few seconds, forming new realities and new substances with each expansion! We will never become familiar with even the very tip of what actually is! So why are any of us afraid of the possibilities of what could be? Why does this frighten us, why does this scare us? When we actually never know anything at all! ~ C. JoyBell C.

Nobody but the dead know whether all these things people talk about are worth dying for or not. And the dead can't talk. So the words about noble deaths and sacred blood and honor and such are all put into dead lips by grave robbers and fakes who have no right to speak for the dead. If a man says death before dishonor he is either a fool or a liar because he doesn't know what death is. He isn't able to judge. He only knows about living. He doesn't know anything about dying. ~ Dalton Trumbo

Oscar hung his jacket on the back of a chair and undid the first few buttons of his checked shirt. Camille's fingers trembled as she reached for the lamp on the dresser and twisted the knob, lowering the wick until the light it gave off was that of a small candle's flame. She sat on the bed, and the other side of the hand-rolled mattress dipped with Oscar's weight. She didn't know how to look at him, if she should lie down or just come to her senses and ask him to leave. God, she wasn't doing any of this right.
"You sleep sitting up?" he asked.
Camille smiled, thankful he'd lightened the moment enough for her to lean back onto one of the pillows. Turning on her side, she saw he'd already taken the same position. They lay without touching, without talking, only looking. His eyes grazed her body, slowly absorbing the pink skin of her neck, the slight curves of her breasts, and the arc of her hip. He didn't need to lay a finger on her for the breath to stall in her lungs.
He breeched the few inches between them by sliding his hand atop hers, his skin warm and dry while beads of nervous sweat formed hot on her back. Camille reached out and let her fingertip travel along the fullness of his lower lip and down the curve of his chin. With one sweeping movement, Oscar pulled her tight against his chest and kissed her. A sensation kindled between her hips, spreading to every nerve ending in her body. This was it, the fire and heat she'd always yearned for. All these yea ~ Angie Frazier

Whites walk on eggshells for fear of being called racists, while many blacks are preoccupied with protecting the image of black students, rather than protecting their future by telling the blunt truth. It is understandable that some people are concerned about image, about what in private life might be expressed as: "What will the neighbors think?" But, when your children are dying, you don't worry about what the neighbors think. ~ Thomas Sowell

At the time of solitude, I went where Narmada was sleeping. She got awake and sat up. She neither got scared nor nervous but she immediately got off the bed. She kept both her hands tied on her chest. I was standing so close to her that my face was near her face. We could sense each other's breath.

I called out her name and could not speak anything else.

After a moment, I started - "I love you Narmada…I like to be with you…I want to marry you."

She got nervous and said - "Please, go to your room, why have you come here? It may cause trouble if Jaanki sees us like this." She was neck down. Her eyes were on the floor. Her heart was beating fast.

"Don't you want to talk to me? Why are you angry with me? Why don't you trust on my feelings for you?" - I softly asked her.

"I guess you don't like my friendship with Varsha. You and Varsha are poles apart." - I added.

She said - "You please go. It would not be nice if someone sees us like this. I do not want anything from you."

I said - "But I am dying for you and I know you too are made for me."

Her eyes suddenly fell on maid behind the curtains of the door who was trying to listen to our conversation. Narmada said - "You please leave right now, we'll talk later. Mom is not at home."

I went by on her prescriptive tone.

She was fighting for her self-being and the reason was only Varsha. She felt suffocated with my friendshi ~ Laxman Rao

Someone stepped through the garage doorway. I squinted against the light. Mad Rogan.
He wore a dark suit. It fit him like a glove, from the broad shoulders and powerful chest to the flat stomach and long legs. Well. A visit from the dragon. Never good.
He started toward me. The track vehicle on his left slid out of his way, as if pushed aside by an invisible hand. The Humvee on his right slid across the floor. I raised my eyebrows.
He kept coming, his blue eyes clear and fixed on me. I stepped back on pure instinct. My back bumped into the wall.
The multiton hover tank hovered off to the wall. So that was the secret to making it work. You just needed Mad Rogan to move it around.
Rogan closed in and stopped barely two inches from me. Anticipation squirmed through me, turning into a giddy excitement spiced with alarm.
"Hi," I said. "Are you planning on putting all of this back together the way you found it?"
His eyes were so blue. I could look into them forever. He offered me his hand. "Time to go."
"To go where?"
"Wherever you want. Pick a spot on the planet."
Wow. "No."
He leaned forward slightly. We were almost touching. "I gave you a week with your family. Now it's time to go with me. Don't be stubborn, Nevada. That kiss told me everything I needed to know. You and I both understand how this ends."
I shook my head. "How did this encounter go in your head? Did you plan on walking in here, picking me up, and carryin ~ Ilona Andrews

Each unto himself has his own world that he looks out upon, and though someone else were to stand on the very selfsame inch of ground your feet were placed upon, guided by chalk marks, he would not see the same things you did. ~ Cornell Woolrich

Wake up, folks, wake up! As intimidated as you are by the fear of going against the stream and looking racist (a grossly erroneous word, by the way, because the problem has nothing to do with a race: it has to do with a religion) you don't understand or don't want to understand that a Reverse Crusade is on the march. As blinded as you are by the myopia and the stupidity of the Politically Correct, you don't realize or don't want to realize that a war of religion is being carried out. A war they call Jihad. … A war which is conducted to destroy our civilization, our ways of living and dying, or praying or not praying, of eating and drinking and dressing and studying and enjoying Life. ~ Oriana Fallaci

We only came close to dying six or seven times, which I thought was pretty good. Once, I lost my grip and found myself dangling by one hand from a ledge fifty feet above the rocky surf. But I found another handhold and kept climbing. A minute later Annabeth hit a slippery patch of moss and her foot slipped. Fortunately, she found something else to put it against. Unfortunately, that something was my face.
"Sorry," she murrmured.
"S'okay," I grunted, though I'd never really wanted to know what Annabeth's sneaker tasted like. ~ Rick Riordan

Just when I despaired -- she was there, filling me as a melody fills a cottage. I was with her, running beside the Acis when we were a child. I knew the ancient villa moated by a dark lake, the view through the dusty windows of the belvedere, and the secret space in the odd angle between two rooms where we sat at noon to read by candlelight. I knew the life of the Autarch's court, where poison waited in a diamond cup. I learned what it was for one who had never seen a cell or felt a whip to be a prisoner of the torturers, what dying meant, and death.

I learned that I had been more to her than I had ever guessed, and at last fell into a sleep in which my dreams were all of her. Not memories merely -- memories I had possessed in plenty before. I held her poor, cold hands in mine, and I no longer wore the rags of an apprentice, nor the fuligin of a journeyman. We were one, naked and happy and clean, and we knew that she was no more and that I still lived, and we struggled against neither of those things, but with woven hair read from a single book and talked and sang of other matters. ~ Gene Wolfe

She was so warm, her drenched clothes had almost dried. Her eyes were rolled back in her head. She started muttering, and I could've sworn she said, "Dung balls. Time to roll the dung balls."
It might've been funny - except for the fact that she was dying.
"That's Khepri talking," Setne explained. "He's the divine dung beetle, rolling the sun across the sky."
I didn't want to process that - the idea that the girl I liked had been possessed by a dung beetle and was now having dreams about pushing a giant sphere of flaming poo across the sky. ~ Rick Riordan

The thousand thousand grasses, dry now in the late-summer heat, bristle like the brittle pages of a thousand ancient books being turned by invisible scholars. Every blade and leaf and rock speaking of loss and endurance, the birds settling down for another night or two before their long, familiar hegira. The landscape he walks is an endless cascade of loss and dying and coming to life again, and he feels the immense silence of the dead and the eternal pulse of the living in the soles of his feet. ~ Robert Goolrick

Barefooted workers would take apart, bit by bit, the dying ships with their bare hands, shipyard in Gaddani, Pakistan. On their shoulders, workers bore great metal plates to their destination. People complain about their crappy lives working in an air conditioned work place, imagine having this as your only option in life. ~ G.M.B. Akash

A bead of cold sweat dangled on my fingertip before dripping onto the doorbell. What if I got electrocuted from my wet fingers? I would die literally inches from my first high school party. And everyone would be like, oh, poor thing was so nervous, what a tragedy. Death by sweat. ~ Lindsey Leavitt

I have seen," he said, "the most beautiful scenes of my own country; I have visited the lakes of Lucerne and Uri, where the snowy mountains descend almost perpendicularly to the water, casting black and impenetrable shades, which would cause a gloomy and mournful appearance, were it not for the most verdant islands that relieve the eye by their gay appearance; I have seen this lake agitated by a tempest, when the wind tore up whirlwinds of water, and gave you an idea of what the waterspout must be on the great ocean; and the waves dash with fury the base of the mountain, where the priest and his mistress were overwhelmed by an avalanche, and where their dying voices are still said to be heard amid the pauses of the nightly wind; I have seen the mountains of La Valais, and the Pays de Vaud: but this country, Victor, pleases me more than all those wonders. The mountains of Switzerland are more majestic and strange; but there is a charm in the banks of this divine river, that I never before saw equalled. Look at that castle which overhangs yon precipice; and that also on the island, almost concealed amongst the foliage of those lovely trees; and now that group of labourers coming from among their vines; and that village half hid in the recess of the mountain. Oh, surely, the spirit that inhabits and guards this place has a soul more in harmony with man than those who pile the glacier, or retire to the inaccessible peaks of the mountains of our own country. "Clerval! beloved frie ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

... * to know a lot of people I love pieces of, and to want to synthesize those pieces in me somehow, be it by painting or writing. * to know that millions of others are unhappy and that life is a gentleman's agreement to grin and paint your face gay so others will feel they are silly to be unhappy, and try to catch the contagion of joy, while inside so many are dying of bitterness and unfulfillment ... ~ Sylvia Plath

The universe is just there; that's the only way a Fedaykin can view it and remain the master of his senses. The universe neither threatens nor promises. It holds things beyond our sway: the fall of a meteor, the eruption of a spiceblow, growing old and dying. These are the realities of this universe and they must be faced regardless of how you feel about them. You cannot fend off such realities with words. They will come at you in their own wordless way and then, then you will understand what is meant by "life and death." Understanding this, you will be filled with joy. - MUAD'DIB TO HIS FEDAYKIN ~ Frank Herbert

He stopped the flyers
And by his rare example made the coward
Turn terror into sport. As weeds before
A vessel under sail, so men obeyed
And fell below his stem. His sword, Death's stamp,
Where it did mark, it took; from face to foot
He was a thing of blood, whose every motion
Was timed with dying cries. Alone he entered
The mortal gate o' th' city, which he painted
With shunless destiny; aidless came off
And with a sudden reinforcement struck
Corioles like a planet. Now all's his,
When by and by the dim of war gan pierce
His ready sense; then straight his doubled spirit
Requickened what in flesh was fatigate,
And to the battle came he, where he did
Run reeking o'er the lives of men as if
'Twere a perpetual spoil; and till we called
Both field and city ours, he never stood
To ease his breast with panting. ~ William Shakespeare

Tormented by remembering, tortured by forgetting - she is the master of reincarnation, dying each time her thoughts dwell upon him. ~ Noor Shirazie

Why do the living assume the dead know better than we do? Like they gained some knowledge by dying, but why wouldn't they just be the same confused people they were before they died? ~ Samantha Hunt

Azrael raised his finger to a face that filled the sky, lit by the faint glow of dying galaxies.

There are a billion Deaths, but they are all aspects of the one Death: Azrael, the Great Attractor, the Death of Universes, the beginning and end of time.

Most of the universe is made up of dark matter, and only Azrael knows who it is.

Eyes so big that a supernova would be a mere suggestion of a gleam on the iris turned slowly and focused on the tiny figure on the immense whorled plains of his fingertips. Beside Azrael the big Clock hung in the center of the entire web of the dimensions, and ticked onward. Stars glittered in Azrael's eyes.

The Death of the Discworld stood up.

LORD I ASK FOR -

Three of the servants of oblivion slid into existence alongside him.

One said, Do not listen. He stands accused of meddling.

One said, And morticide.

One said, And pride. And living with intent to survive.

One said, And siding with chaos against good order.

Azrael raised an eyebrow.

The servants drifted away from Death, expectantly.

LORD, WE KNOW THERE IS NO GOOD ORDER EXCEPT THAT WHICH WE CREATE....

Azrael's expression did not change.

THERE IS NO HOPE BUT US. THERE IS NO MERCY BUT US. THERE IS NO JUSTICE. THERE IS JUST US.

The dark, sad face filled the sky.

ALL THINGS THAT ARE ARE OURS. BUT WE MUST CARE. FOR ~ Terry Pratchett

In view of my services in Africa, I have the chance of dying by poison. Two generals have brought it with them. It is fatal in three seconds. If I take the poison, none of the usual steps will be taken against my family; that is, against you. They will also leave my staff alone. ~ Erwin Rommel