Dying Quotes

Life is the jailer, death the angel sent to draw the unwilling bolts and set us free. ~ James Russell Lowell

If you have never felt or known the sheer power and strength of God's love, take another look at Jesus dying on the cross. ~ N. T. Wright

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

The truth is that men don't want to be friends with women. Men know they don't understand women, and they don't much care. They want women as lovers, as wives, as mothers, but they're not really interested in them as friends. They have friends. Men are their friends. And they talk to their male friends about sports, and I have no idea what else.
Women, on the other hand, are dying to be friends with men. Women know they don't understand men, and it bothers them: they think that if only they could be friends with them, they would understand them and, what's more (and this is their gravest mistake), it would help. ~ Nora Ephron

You have been saved through a dying sacrifice, so you are free to be a living one. ~ Timothy J. Keller

Duny," said Geralt seriously, "Calanthe, Pavetta. And you, righteous knight Tuirseach, future king of Cintra. In order to become a witcher, you have to be born in the shadow of destiny, and very few are born like that. That's why there are so few of us. We're growing old, dying, without anyone to pass our knowledge, our gifts, on to. We lack successors. And this world is full of Evil which waits for the day none of us are left." "Geralt," whispered Calanthe. "Yes, you're not wrong, queen. Duny! You will give me that which you already have but do not know. I'll return to Cintra in six years to see if destiny has been kind to me. ~ Andrzej Sapkowski

Dr Seraphina gazed at Gabriella with a cool, assessing eye. "What do you believe Gabriella?"
"I believe that if we do not protect our traditions from those who would destroy them, soon there will be nothing left to interpret."
"Ah, so you are a warrior, then," Dr Seraphina said, challenging Gabriella. "There are always those who would put on armour and go into battle. but the real genius is in finding a way to get what you desire without dying for it. ~ Danielle Trussoni

Having lots of money while not having inner peace is like dying of thirst while bathing in the ocean. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

Ours has been an expansionist society, but that narrative must change as we run out of places to expand into. But our culture is like a cart stuck in the same old rut that has been leading us in one direction. The longer we've been using a path, the deeper the ruts get, the harder it is to escape them. We've been moving ever Westward, but there's only so far we can go in that direction before we fall into the ocean. It's a direction that we cannot continue on forever, but the breaking of those ruts will require a major rupture. The old narrative is dying, and it will be quite a crushing of gears before things are re-adjusted. A shared story is needed for a civilization to endure. ~ James Rozoff

I don't think I've ever been particularly scared of death - but scared of dying, the process. It doesn't seem to be a good way of doing it. ~ Martin Amis

Life is so precious because it's short. Even the most resilient people are fragile. Life isn't about dying or not dying. It's about living well. Living so you can be proud and happy. ~ Ilona Andrews

What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again? ~ Audre Lorde

The first truth about mortals is that none of us wants to die, but all of us are going to. It's in the name – mortals – the dying ones. If you don't understand that bit, you won't understand the rest of it. Here you are, some 5-hundred years old and you haven't yet figured out something that a 3 year old human is starting to understand. You see, as soon as we can even think, our brains are wrapping themselves around that One Truth, that one offensive, undeniable, irrevocable Truth. The rest of our existence grows up in the shadow of a dead leaning tree, which will at one point in the not unimaginable future fall and crush all that has grown up beneath it…



…Rescue them for what? Why from dying! Does that mean they won't die? No, it just means they won't die today. At best, we're talking about delaying the inevitable death sentence laid on our friends. Now how does this particular truth strike you, Mister Immortal…?



…And why? Why not merely stand now and fall sooner rather than later? Because there is something precious and sacred about rearguard action. It's an active retreat that's been repeated valiantly and ceaselessly from the beginning of mortal time. It just seems wrong to give up. It seems invalid and invalorous. More importantly, it's indecent to simply lie down and be overrun…



…Instead we rage against it and sing our defiance through bloodied teeth. Somehow, in our pointless battle, we find moment ~ J. Robert King

But there's quality behind Dustin's eyes when he talks, a dimness, like the slow fade of a dying flashlight. Like someone forgot to replace the batteries in Dustin's face. This kind of emptiness can only be filled with heartache and struggle and I-don't-know-what...the enormity of things. The shit-stink of life. And neither the enormity nor the shit-stink can be found in a pancake breakfast. Pain is what matters. ~ David Arnold

Surely there is a fitness in the institution of the Lord's Supper as a standing memorial by which the church at large may commemorate the grandest act, and by which the heart of each individual believer may be reminded of his dearest friend. You, who have learned to love the Saviour, will prize His ordinance for the Saviour's sake. You who rejoice in the salvation purchased by His dying, will not fail with gratitude and faith to show the Lord's death until He come. ~ William Morley Punshon

I will die if I lose you, but I will die if I wait longer. ~ Jean Racine

During the mid-1980s dairy farmers decided there was too much cheap milk at the supermarket. So the government bought and slaughtered 1.6 million dairy cows. How come the government never does anything like this with lawyers? ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Uselessness
Let mine not be the saddest fate of all,
To live beyond my greater self; to see
My faculties decaying, as the tree
Stands stark and helpless while its green leaves fall
Let me hear rather the imperious call,
Which all men dread, in my glad morning time,
And follow death ere I have reached my prime,
Or drunk the strengthening cordial of life's gall.
The lightning's stroke or the fierce tempest blast
Which fells the green tree to the earth to-day
Is kinder than the calm that lets it last,
Unhappy witness of its own decay.
May no man ever look on me and say,
'She lives, but all her usefulness is past. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

My inspiration for writing music is like Don McLean did when he did "American Pie" or "Vincent". Lorraine Hansberry with "A Raisin in the Sun". Like Shakespeare when he does his thing, like deep stories, raw human needs.

I'm trying to think of a good analogy. It's like, you've got the Vietnam War, and because you had reporters showing us pictures of the war at home, that's what made the war end, or that shit would have lasted longer. If no one knew what was going on we would have thought they were just dying valiantly in some beautiful way. But because we saw the horror, that's what made us stop the war.

So I thought, that's what I'm going to do as an artist, as a rapper. I'm gonna show the most graphic details of what I see in my community and hopefully they'll stop it quick.

I've seen all of that-- the crack babies, what we had to go through, losing everything, being poor, and getting beat down. All of that. Being the person I am, I said no no no no. I'm changing this. ~ Tupac Shakur

The monsters crawling through our heads. All the darkness and evil that others perpetrate upon us, all the things we cannot control because we are too young to stop them-they have all stayed with us through the years, waiting in the wings for us to sink to our lowest. Then they leap, ghuls on a dying victim. ~ Sabaa Tahir

Country's friggin' dying, man, you have to triage the motherfucker. ~ Jess Row

My relationship to the desecration of the earth was very theoretical and intellectual until I got sick. I could never watch anything about polar bears dying or the death of bees. There were certain things I knew I couldn't go near because they were too devastating. But I don't think until I got cancer did I get it in my body, what was happening to the earth. I finally went: "Oh! Earth! Organism!" ~ Eve Ensler

I spent hours apart by myself, taking stock of where I stood, mentally, on this my thirtieth birthday. It came to me queerly how, four years ago, I had meant to be a general and knighted, when thirty. Such temporal dignities were now in my grasp, only that my sense of falsity of the Arab position had cured me of crude ambition: while it left me craving for good repute among men. This craving made me profoundly suspect my truthfulness to myself. Only too good an actor could so impress his favorable opinion. Here were the Arabs believing me, Allenby and Clayton trusting me, my bodyguard dying for me: and I began to wonder if all established reputations were founded, like mine, on fraud. ~ T.E. Lawrence

I've filled my whole life trying to preserve the memory of living, in the fight against dying. Perhaps the only thing I've done, since stopping death is impossible, is to show this fight. The fight itself does not satisfy us either. ~ Christian Boltanski

Do not weep for those who have found Death's embrace early, for they weep for us that linger on in this mortal world of pain. ~ Stewart Stafford

I detest farewells and feel that parting, as some foreign poets say, is "dying a little." I do not like to meet death, however easy it may be, nor do I like to be aware of it, to await it, or to fear it. I prefer for it to take me by complete surprise, that it should snatch me away suddenly, that I should exit life as inadvertently as I entered it. ~ Taha Hussein

My people are crumbling and dying and starving, and you're blessing blessed people and serving the saved. ~ Jen Hatmaker

But you could not blame someone for dying. For leaving on purpose, perhaps, as her brother had left her and her parents, but not for dying, the power over which was surely beyond the grasp of any mortal human. ~ Cassandra Clare

Pastor Smith did not have the religious constitution needed to provide salvation for any of us who'd had a hand in this tragic event. We had put on the armour of God, and there was no undoing what we had done. My faith, my belief in myself as a good citizen, everything I had thought was truth was scattered to the wind, and no one on this earth could put that to rights. Things weren't as simple as living and dying. I understood that now. ~ Cheryl R Cowtan

The young man, born to rule England, which his dying father commended to him. Once his father is dead, London will cavil. The kingdom is taken back from his son. ~ Nostradamus

There is a chance that we could have at least as many dying from communicable diseases as we had dying from the tsunami. ~ David Nabarro

I became aware that there is no accessible high quality training that is freely available, free of dogmatic styles, agendas or commercial interest.
Magical training that is heavily tied to profits, fashions, and group politics cannot flourish properly, nor can an individual fully grow in such an environment.
True magical development is dying under the weight of heavy commercialization and group factions: it is time to look at a different way of ensuring that the integrity of magic continues for future generations. ~ Josephine McCarthy

It is a part of our office to stand uncloaked, masked, sword bared, upon the scaffold for a long time before the client is brought out. Some say this is to symbolize the unsleeping omnipresence of justice, but I believe the real reason is to give the crowd a focus, and the feeling that something is about to take place. A crowd is not the sum of the individuals who compose it. Rather it is a species of animal, without language or real consciousness, born when they gather, dying when they depart. Before the Hall of Justice, a ring of dimarchi surrounded the scaffold with their lances, and the pistol their officer carried could, I suppose, have killed fifty or sixty before someone could snatch it from him and knock him to the cobblestones to die. Still it is better to have a focus, and some open symbol of power.
Wolfe, Gene (1994-10-15). Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun' (p. 184). Tom Doherty Associates. Kindle Edition. ~ Gene Wolfe

Sleep was a vehicle for passing the time, for avoiding the present. It was a trolley for the depressed, the impatient, and the dying. ~ Hugh Howey

If it is necessary to die in order to live like men, what harm in dying? ~ Rabindranath Tagore

One could speculate that lichens would be among the last inhabitants to succumb on a dying earth at some distant point in the future. ~ Steven L. Stephenson

In the eyes of her oldest friends and colleagues and extended family, she wasn't a painfully thin seventy-five-year-old gray haired woman dying of cancer- she was a grade school class president, the young friend you gossiped with, a date or double date, someone to share a tent with in Darfur, a fellow election monitor in Bosnia, a mentor, a teacher you'd laughed within a classroom or a faculty lounge, or the board member you'd groaned with after a contentious meeting ~ Will Schwalbe

Martyrdom does not consist only in dying for one's faith. Martyrdom also consists in serving God with love and purity of heart every day of one's life ~ St. Jerome

And instead of dying Immediately after they shot him, he would go on to survive several days solely because of the cold that January. Maybe that's why we are drawn to those who posses the coldest of hearts ... In effort to survive. ~ Bethany Brookbank

Behind every individual closes organization; before him opens liberty,
the Better, the Best. The first and worse races are dead.The second and imperfect races are dying out, or remain for the maturing of the higher. In the latest race, in man, every generosity, every new perception, the love and praise he extorts from his fellows, are certificates of advance out of fate into freedom. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

You can't make anyone love you and you can't stop anyone from dying. ~ Sue Grafton

Poems 1959-2009_

I turn into the man they photograph.
I think I'll ask him for his autograph.
He's older than I am and more distinguished.
The beauty of the boy has been extinguished.
He smiles a lot and then not.
Hauteur is the new hot.
He tilts his nose up and looks imperious.
He wants to make sure he looks serious.
He smiles at the photographer but not
The camera. He thinks cold is the look that's hot.
You know the poems. It's an experience.
The way that Shylock is a Shakespearience.
A Jew found frozen on the mountain at the howling summit,
Immortally preserved singing to the dying planet from it. ~ Frederick Seidel

I was thinking about dying the other day the death thought came while I was sitting on the toilet peeing - that's where I have my most contemplative thoughts. ~ Madonna Ciccone

Those sages of the ancient world, unbound by dogma of any kind, thought as we do in terms of physics, or rather, physiology, as applied to the whole universe: they envisaged the end of man and the dying out of this sphere. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar

The light was crude. It made Artaud's eyes shrink into darkness, as they are deep-set. This brought into relief the intensity of his gestures. He looked tormented. His hair, rather long, fell at times over his forehead. He has the actor's nimbleness and quickness of gestures. His face is lean, as if ravaged by fevers. His eyes do not seem to see the people. They are the eyes of a visionary. His hands are long, long-fingered.
Beside him Allendy looks earthy, heavy, gray. He sits at the desk, massive, brooding. Artaud steps out on the platform, and begins to talk about " The Theatre and the Plague."
He asked me to sit in the front row. It seems to me that all he is asking for is intensity, a more heightened form of feeling and living. Is he trying to remind us that it was during the Plague that so many marvelous works of art and theater came to be, because, whipped by the fear of death, man seeks immortality, or to escape, or to surpass himself? But then, imperceptibly almost, he let go of the thread we were following and began to act out dying by plague. No one quite knew when it began. To illustrate his conference, he was acting out an agony. "La Peste" in French is so much more terrible than "The Plague" in English. But no word could describe what Artaud acted out on the platform of the Sorbonne. He forgot about his conference, the theatre, his ideas, Dr. Allendy sitting there, the public, the young students, his wife, professors, and directors.
His face was ~ Anais Nin

Kung saan ka nadapa doon ka babangon." Literally it meant 'you rise where you fall'. Symbolically it meant bloodied, beat or dying you let your enemy see you stand. ~ L C Clark

My view is different from this, only to the extent that if a decision is taken, by the parents and doctors, that it is better that a baby should die, I believe it should be possible to carry out that decision, not only by withholding or withdrawing life-support - which can lead to the baby dying slowly from dehydration or from an infection - but also by taking active steps to end the baby's life swiftly and humanely ~ Peter Singer

Instead of falling to the ground like a heavy doll, as Kermin had seen the prisoners do at the Chetnik executions, his mother shrank into herself, a reverse blossoming, coming to rest in a sitting position, like a ruminative Buddha ~ Reif Larsen

If you saw a wounded person, torn and mangled, on the highway, the sight of so deplorable an object would fill you with compassion; the sight of your friends under the disease I am now speaking ought to move you much more, for it is tearing them to pieces every moment. Every moment it preys upon their vitals, and they are continually dying, yet cannot die. ~ Timothy Rogers

I'm dying, but otherwise I'm in very good health. ~ Edith Sitwell

Living takes courage. So does dying. ~ Juliet Blackwell

Don't cry for me, for I go where music was born. ~ J. S. Bach

If you can take something as ultimately frivolous [as a comic book] in the cosmic scale of things in the universe and what's important - people being born and dying and everything else that's gonna happen today - if one gay kid in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, reads an X-Men comic and feels for a second like maybe they're not entirely alone in the world - that's amazing. I'll take it. Whatever size victory that is, I will take. ~ Matt Fraction

I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. ~ Jack Kerouac

The purpose of poetry is not to provide a solution or, say, to stop a war or prevent millions of people from dying, etc. Poetry can never do that. Poetry is all about keeping the dialogue alive. Poetry must bring forth, time and again, issues that need attention and are intentionally or unintentionally forgotten. ~ Abhijit Sarmah

My father was a doctor,' she says, 'a very kind man. He died in the early '70s, relatively young.' She taps the cigarette packet on the table. 'Of lung cancer.'
'Oh.'
'But the thing about that is,' she says as she exhales, 'it doesn't take very long at all. ~ Anna Funder

She swallowed it. So bitter.
"Vile," she said. "Vile."
"I know, but it helps. Trust me. I know."
"Trust you," she said. "Hah."
"Clearly you are not dying."
"No. Devil won't take me."
The low chuckle again. "Then we're all safe. ~ Loretta Chase

I'm in a win-win playoff. Response of a Christian dying of cancer at thirty on the prospect of miraculous healing. ~ Billy Graham

Dying in vain isn't really all that bad since nearly everyone does it. It's the living in vain you really have to watch out for. ~ Ross Thomas

And then he spent three years wondering why everyone found that so hard to understand. All he was doing was living instead of dying. Some people get cancer. Some people get crazy. Nobody tries to take the chemo away. ~ John Corey Whaley

Workers of lungless labs- when dying
Will you be proud you were midwife
To implements exemplifying
Assaults against the heart of life?
You knew their purpose, yet you made them.
If you had scruples, you betrayed them.
What pastoral response acquits
Those who made ovens for Auschwitz?
Indeed it is said that the banality
Of evil is its greatest shock.
It jokes. It punches its time clock,
Plays with its kids. The triviality
Of slaughtering millions can't impinge
Upon its peace, or make it cringe. ~ Vikram Seth

Eleanor should never have told them about Park's house, but she'd been dying to tell somebody. (This was how people ended up in jail after committing the perfect crime.) ~ Rainbow Rowell

Waking to the sound of the bells for third-gold, I found myself staring up at a pair of interested brown eyes.
"She's awake!" my watcher called over her shoulder. Then she turned back to me and grinned. She had a pointed face, curly dark hair escaping from two short braids, and a merry voice as she said, "Splat!" She clapped her hands lightly. "We were fair guffered when you toppled right off Drith, facedown in the chickenyard mud. Lucky it was so early, for no one was about but us."
I winced.
She grinned again. "You're either the worst horse thief in the entire kingdom, or else you're that missing countess. Which is it?"
"Ara." The voice of quiet reproach came from the doorway.
I lifted my eyes without moving my head, saw a matron of pleasant demeanor and comfortable build come into the room bearing a tray.
Ara jumped up. She seemed a couple years younger than I. "Let me!"
"Only if you promise not to pester her with questions," the mother replied. "She's still much too ill."
Ara shrugged, looking unrepentant. "But I'm dying to know."
The mother set the tray down on a side table and smiled down at me. She had the same brown eyes as her daughter, but hers were harder to read. "Can you sit up yet?"
"I can try," I said hoarsely.
"Just high enough so's we can put these pillows behind you." Ara spoke over her shoulder as she dashed across the room.
My head ached just to watch her, and I closed my eyes again.
"Ara."Sherwood Smith