Fear Of Dying Quotes

It was almost funny, how even lying here terrified and half-expecting to be dead at any moment, his bureaucratic fear of reprimand, of public embarrassment was stronger than his physical fear of dying. ~ James Jones

...this would be my greatest fear: imagination giving up before the body does. I guess I'm not alone in this. Humans are a strange breed in the way our fear of getting old seems to be even greater than our fear of dying. ~ Fredrik Backman

Unlike previous wars, our enemy now is a stateless network of religious extremists. They do not obey the laws of war, they hide among peaceful populations and launch surprise attacks on civilians. They have no armed forces per se, no territory or citizens to defend and no fear of dying during their attacks. Information is our primary weapon against this enemy, and intelligence gathered from captured operatives is perhaps the most effective means of preventing future attacks. ~ John Yoo

When I announced my party, Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) on 25 April 1996, I had lost all fear of dying. ~ Imran Khan

People help way more than we expect, way more than makes sense. But when you talk to people called heroes, they often say they did it for themselves. In one case, a hero said that the cost of not doing it is so great, the sense of shame, when he knew that he was strong enough, that the fear of not doing anything was more frightening than the fear of dying. ~ Amanda Ripley

Fear is always with us: that we are not good enough or strong enough, and so will fail; that we will be hurt. Fear that what we love will be taken from us. Fear of dying, even fear of God, or of no God. But God surprises us by giving us strength to bear what we must; by giving us joy when we think that nothing but sadness is possible. ~ Marina Endicott

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death. ~ Francis Bacon

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of
life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they
continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It
is as though they were traveling abroad. ~ Marcel Proust

Baste! enough! I sup, I wet, I humect, I moisten my gullet, I drink, and all for fear of dying. Drink always and you shall never die. ~ Francois Rabelais

Fear of dying young isn't an altogether bad thing. Sometimes it makes you try what you might otherwise delay. ~ Jennifer Coburn

Death frees from the fear of dying ~ Paulo Coelho

When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die. ~ Ray Bradbury

I'm slightly pessimistic about human nature, about how close it's possible to bond with those around you. Dying alone is a deep fear for most people. I'm not scared of death but I'm scared of dying scared. Maybe everything else in life comes from those two points: the separation anxiety of childhood and the ultimate fear of dying alone. ~ Jonathan Trigell

Humans are a strange breed in the way our fear of getting old seems to be even greater than our fear of dying. This ~ Fredrik Backman

To live fully we would need to let go of our fear of dying. That fear can only be addressed by the love of living. We have a long history in this nation of believing that to be too celebratory is dangerous, that being optimistic is foolhardy, hence our difficulty in celebrating life, in teaching our children and ourselves how to love life. ~ Bell Hooks

Because the biological mechanisms that affect our health and well-being are so dynamic, when people change their diet and lifestyle, they usually feel so much better, so quickly; it reframes the reason for changing from fear of dying to joy of living. Also, the support that patients give each other is a powerful motivator. ~ Dean Ornish

He wrote arguments for and against life; he began to think the slowest and most painful form of suicide was living, running the whole decathlon of suffering, no breather or bottled water. Fear of dying was irrational. Death was utilitarian. Decrease in net resource consumption and planetary suffering. Increase in net comedy. There was no afterlife but there was a right-before-death, and medical research said it was loopy and nice, all white lights and gentle voices. With booze it wasn't even scary. Some people with terrible lives didn't kill themselves, but that didn't mean they shouldn't. Most people weren't alive and didn't mind. You couldn't regret it. ~ Tony Tulathimutte

He realized now that to be afraid of this death he was staring at with animal terror meant to be afraid of life. Fear of dying justified a limitless attachment to what is alive in man. And all those who had not made the gestures necessary to live their lives, all those who feared and exalted impotence - they were afraid of death because of the sanction it gave to a life in which they had not been involved. They had not lived enough, never having lived at all. And death was a kind of gesture, forever withholding water from the traveler vainly seeking to slake his thirst. But for the others, it was the fatal and tender gesture that erases and denies, smiling at gratitude as at rebellion. ~ Albert Camus

​"If I was afraid of dying, I couldn't do half the shit I do." I told him. ~ Rachel Bach

His mind remained freakishly pin-point sharp until his last days, but his body had shut-down a good six months before. He surprised his hospice doctor and nurses by clinging to life long after he should have expired. It was a fear of dying, driven by guilt over something he did early on. He was afraid of judgment day. His strict Catholic upbringing wreaked havoc in his brain and kept his will from preventing his body to die. ~ Stephen Joseph Mitskavich

Fear of dying is human. Fear of aging is cultural. ~ Ashton Applewhite

I've always had a huge fear of dying or becoming ill. The thing I'm most afraid of, though, is being alone, which I think a lot of performers fear. It's why we seek the limelight - so we're not alone, were adored. We're loved, so people want to be around us. The fear of being alone drives my life. ~ Jennifer Lopez

Fear of dying must surely mean fear of how one dies. If one can be assured of a painless death, how can one fear it, unless one is a religious fanatic with a very guilty conscience? ~ Dimitris Mita

The best part of chronic head lice is it takes away your fear of dying alone. ~ Dana Gould

I am not a machine. For what can a machine know of the smell of wet grass in the morning, or the sound of a crying baby? I am the feeling of the warm sun against my skin; I am the sensation of a cool wave breaking over me. I am the places I have never seen, yet imagine when my eyes are closed. I am the taste of another's breath, the color of her hair.
You mock me for the shortness of my life span, but it is this very fear of dying which breathes life into me. I am the thinker who thinks of thought. I am curiosity, I am reason, I am love, and I am hatred. I am indifference. I am the son of a father, who in turn was a father's son. I am the reason my mother laughed and the reason my mother cried. I am wonder and I am wondrous. Yes, the world may push your buttons as it passes through your circuitry. But the world does not pass through me. It lingers. I am in it and it is in me. I am the means by which the universe has come to know itself. I am the thing no machine can ever make. I am meaning. ~ Bernard Beckett

Joy of living is sustainable; fear of dying is not. ~ Dean Ornish

When we usually think of fears, in comics or in films, it's most often fears on a relatively superficial level: fear of murderous insects, of ghosts, of zombies, or even fear of dying. ~ Boaz Lavie

All soldiers felt the same thing going into battle, whether they admitted it or not: fear. Fear of failure, fear of dying, fear of watching their friends die, fear of being wounded and living out the rest of their days crippled or maimed. The fear was always there, and it would devour you if you let it.
Des knew how to turn that fear to his own advantage. Take what makes you weak and turn it into something that makes you strong. Transform the fear into anger and hate: hatred of the enemy; hatred of the Republic and the Jedi. The hate gave him strength, and the strength brought him victory. ~ Drew Karpyshyn

Why are you afraid of death? Is it perhaps because you do not know how to live? If you knew how to live fully, would you be afraid of death? If you loved the trees, the sunset, the birds, the falling leaf; if you were aware of men and women in tears, of poor people, and really felt love in your heart, would you be afraid of death? Would you? Don't be persuaded by me. Let us think about it together. You do not live with joy, you are not happy, you are not vitally sensitive to things; and is that why you ask what is going to happen when you die? Life for you is sorrow, and so you are much more interested in death. You feel that perhaps there will be happiness after death. But that is a tremendous problem, and I do not know if you want to go into it. After all, fear is at the bottom of all this - fear of dying, fear of living, fear of suffering. If you cannot understand what it is that causes fear and be free of it, then it does not matter very much whether yo u are living or dead. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Humor and laughter - not necessarily derogatory derision - are my pet tools. This may come from my general philosophy of never taking the world too seriously - for fear of dying of boredom. ~ Marcel Duchamp

People jeopardize their lives for the sake of making the moment livable. Nothing sways them from the habit - not illness, not the sacrifice of love and relationship, not the loss of all earthly goods, not the crushing of their dignity, not the fear of dying. The drive is that relentless. ~ Gabor Mate

Verily, a man without fear is either dead or happy to die. ~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

Suddenly Yankel was overcome with a fear of dying, stronger than he felt when his parents passed of natural causes, stronger than when his only brother was killed in the flour mill or when his children died, stronger even than when he was a child and it first occurred to him that he must try to understand what it could mean not to be alive
to be not in darkness, not in unfeeling
to be not being, not to be. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

It's a lie. Man has created God out of fear of dying. ~ Hannah Kent

She entered a kind of euphoric state, as if death had freed her from the fear of dying. ~ Paulo Coelho

Mr. Codro's destiny is Ptolemaic; in other words, based on fiction. Ptolemaic says it all; it means above all fixed and unchanging, that is to say different from real life which is by nature changing and temporary. It means: not according to natural truth, but according to man's desire and the pretense inspired by his fear of dying and his desire for permanence. ~ Alberto Savinio

With every plus there must be a minus; with every tear there must be a smile; and for every skunk there must be a fragrant flower. We live our lives in fear of dying and we overlook the simple truth that living is all we can control. Never too high, never too low will get you stuck in the middle of the road. A sense of equilibrium is needed to see life as it is, not what you would like it to be. ~ Phil Wohl

How do you tell someone it's surprisingly easy to surrender to horror once you accept there's no way out? Survival is simply the art of suffering gracefully when we're up against forces out of our control. I lost my fear of dying because I expected it every minute of every day.
Tomorrows only exist in our minds. ~ J.T. Geissinger

We should laugh before being happy, for fear of dying without having laughed. ~ Jean De La Bruyere

Des felt a familiar feeling in the pit of his stomach. All soldiers felt the same thing going into battle, whether they admitted it or not: fear. Fear of failure, fear of dying, fear of watching their friends die, fear of being wounded and living out the rest of their days crippled or maimed. The fear was always there, and it would devour you if you let it.
Des knew how to turn that fear to his own advantage. Take what makes you weak and turn it into something that makes you strong. Transform the fear into anger and hate: hatred of the enemy; hatred of the Republic and the Jedi. The hate gave him strength, and the strength brought him victory.
For Des the transformation came easily once the fighting started. Thanks to his abusive father, he'd been turning fear into anger and hate ever since he was a child. Maybe that was why he was such a good soldier. Maybe that was why the others looked to him for leadership. ~ Drew Karpyshyn

We must laugh before we are happy, for fear of dying without having laughed at all. ~ Jean De La Bruyere

I have a fear of dying partway through a book - of never knowing the ending. It's silly, I know, but it makes me a quick reader. ~ Steve Robinson

People with eating disorders tend to be very diametrical thinkers – everything is the end of the world, everything rides on this one thing, and everyone tells you you're very dramatic, very intense, and they see it as an affectation, but it´s actually just how you think. It really seems to you that the sky will fall if you are not personally holding it up. On the one hand, this is sheer arrogance; on the other hand, this is a very real fear. And it isn't that you ignore the potential repercussions of your actions. You don't think there are any. Because you are not even there. ~ Marya Hornbacher

All new technologies are feared at first. But that fear can't be allowed to hinder the search for potential in the unknown. Think about electricity, or the airplane or one of the first vaccines ever administered. Of course, they were a bit... scary at first. But think of how far they have brought civilization. There is nothing unethical going on here, just unadulterated pioneering. ~ S.L. Dunn

We prate of freedom; we are in deadly fear of life, as much of our own American scene betrays. ~ Learned Hand

Humanity would sink into eternal darkness, it would fall into a dull and primitive state, were the Jews to win this war. They are the incarnation of that destructive force that in these terrible years has guided the enemy war leadership in a fight against all that we see as noble, beautiful, and worth keeping. For that reason alone the Jews hate us. They despise our culture and learning, which they perceive as towering over their nomadic worldview. They fear our economic and social standards, which leave no room for their parasitic drives. ~ Joseph Goebbels

Fate has not been kinder to him than he deserves. The sight of the ruin of all that he thought so strong and magnificent must have been almost punishment enough. But I fear that worse awaits him. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

A scream is a sound we make that is born of intense feeling. A scream of fear, of being startled, is often high-pitched. It may be short or prolonged. A scream may also accompany delight or amusement, though often that is more of a squeal. And a scream of sorrow or rage ... well, that is an entirely different thing. That comes from a darker place, from the depths of our souls, and when we scream in those times, because we are sad or angry, there is a terrible knowledge that accompanies it, that we are giving voice to our emotions, to what is simply too big for our hearts to contain.
And as Li Wei cries out, I know Feng Ji is right. It is his heart I am hearing, a way of expressing what he feels over his father's loss that is both primal and beautiful, and it comes from his soul and reaches something within mine. It is the sound my own heart made when my parents died, only I didn't know it until now. ~ Richelle Mead

An old Russian proverb . . . "Where hangs the smoke of hate burns a fiercer fire called fear."
The trick . . . was to keep that fire alive, but to know at the same time it might consume you also. Then the truck was to make the fear invisible in the smokes of hatred. Having accomplished that, you would own men's souls and your power would be absolute, so long as you never allowed men to see that their hate was but fear, and so long as you, afraid, knowing it, hence more shrewd and cautious than the rest, did not become a corpse at the hands of the hating fearful.
There, in a nutshell, was the recipe for dictatorship. Over the proletariat. Over the godly believers. Over the heathen. Over all men, even those who imagined they were free and yet could be made to hate.
Frighten; then furnish the whipping boys. Then seize. ~ Philip Wylie

And then there's me, terribly afraid to step out of the box and date someone different. Afraid to get hurt in a different, more complex way - by somebody who I actually trust and care about. My biggest fear. Nice guy was a bad word to me because I feared that lurching-stomach feeling of losing someone I love. Nice meant future, and the future was always uncertain. ~ Alida Nugent

That fear of missing out on things makes you miss out on everything. ~ Etty Hillesum

We are overcome by the "cares ... of this life" when we are paralyzed by fear of the future, which hinders our going forward in faith, trusting in God and His promises. It is up to each of us to set the priorities and to do the things that make our soil good and our harvest plentiful. ~ Dallin H. Oaks

Seasons may change winter to spring, but I love you until the end of time
Come what may, come what may, I will love you until my dying day
Suddenly the world seems such a perfect place
Suddenly it moves with such a perfect grace
Suddenly my life doesn't seem such a waste, it all revolves around you.
And there's no mountain too high no river too wide
Sing out this song and I'll be there by your side
Storm clouds may gather and stars may collide
But I love you until the end of time ~ Ewan McGregor

Human being" is more a verb than a noun. Each of us is unfinished, a work in progress. Perhaps it would be most accurate to add the word "yet" to all our assessments of ourselves and each other . . . If life is process, all judgments are provisional, we can't judge something until it is finished. No one has won or lost until the race is over . . .

In our instinctive attachments, our fear of change, and our wish for certainty and permanence, we may undercut the impermanence which is our greatest strength, our most fundamental identity. Without impermanence, there is no process. The nature of life is change. All hope is based on process . . .

It is taken me somewhat longer to recognize that a diagnosis is simply another form of judgment. Naming a disease has limited usefulness. It does not capture life or even reflect it accurately. Illness, on the other hand, is a process, like life is.

Much in the concept of diagnosis and cure is about fixing, and the narrow-bore focus on fixing people's problems can lead to denial of the power of their process. Years ago, I took full credit when people became well; their recovery was testimony to my skill and knowledge as a physician. I never recognized that without their biological, emotional, and spiritual process which could respond to my interventions, nothing could have changed at all. All the time I thought I was repairing, I was collaborating. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

If we want to be spiritual, then, let us first of all live our lives. Let us not fear the responsibilities and the inevitable distractions of the work appointed for us by the will of God. ~ Thomas Merton

The first step is to distinguish the loving parts of your personality that are active from the frightened parts of your personality that are active - in other words, to learn to distinguish love from fear in you. The second step is to choose love, no matter what. ~ Gary Zukav

All that guides me is fear,
And all that finds me is loss
Death defines which paths I cross
It is within the shadows that I stumble
And I am desperate without a voice
Here I am threatened by the resolve that you are
my soul
But if my lies are the path that I have to wander
because there is no choice
Will you love me still?
In the darkness of the night when I wish to do
nothing more than take flight?
Will you hold me to this plane and ease the
suffering and pain?
When all you know is the truth
And all they see is the lies
Will I be the one you find, or the one you leave
behind?
Alone may be the only home I shall find ~ Cassandra Giovanni

Don't permit fear of failure to prevent effort. We are all imperfect and will fail on occasions, but fear of failure is the greatest failure of all. ~ John Wooden

If there's a lot of fear that's going on, if there's a lot of anxiety, it's manifesting itself in your nocturnal world so that analyzing it can help open up basically thoughts about what you need to do during the day. So a lot of people who subscribe to the psychoanalysis, the Jungian thought will really focus a lot on dreams, the meaning, and how it can be used to help you during the day. ~ Shelby Harris

Nothing is ever born out of fear. Love gives birth, love is creative; fear is impotent. It has never created anything. It cannot create anything because it has no substance. But it can destroy your whole life, it can surround you like a dark cloud, it can exploit all of your energies. It will not allow you to move into any deep experience of beauty. ~ Osho

How like a beautiful statue of ice it was, melting in the sun. I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths. No one wanted them back. No one missed them. And then the Government, seeing how advantageous it was to have people reading only about passionate lips and the fist in the stomach, circled the situation with your fire-eaters. So, ~ Ray Bradbury

They drove farther north like that. In perfect loving antagonism. It occurred to Ted that maybe Marty was like all the red and gold leaves he saw burning on the trees. In nature, it seems, things reached their most vibrant and beautiful right at the point of death, flaming out with all they had - why not natural man? His father was red, green, yellow, and gold, like a beautiful bird falling from the sky. Parodoxical undressing again. ~ David Duchovny

Most people are slow to champion love because they fear the transformation it brings into their lives. And make no mistake about it: love does take over and transform the schemes and operations of our egos in a very mighty way. ~ Aberjhani

Is it that our needs grew smaller?" asked Hugh. "Or is it just that the fear and deprivation makes one appreciate simple things more?" "I think our ability to be happy gets covered up by the years of petty rubbing along in the world, the getting ahead," said Daniel. "But war burns away all the years of decay, like an old penny dropped into vinegar. ~ Helen Simonson

I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print. ~ John Mortimer

All I knew was what I wasn't, and it took me some years to discover what I was.
Which was a writer.
By which I mean not a "good" writer or a "bad" writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hourse are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind? ~ Joan Didion

Through this tradition of face-to-face oral communication, now in danger of disappearing, black folks maintained the conviction of their own worth and saved their own souls by refusing to fall victim to fear or the hatred of their oppressors, which they recognized would have been more destructive to themselves than to their enemies. As the poet Lucille Clifton put it, "Ultimately if you fill yourself with venom you will be poisoned."3 There were incidents of individual violence, usually crimes of passion committed by someone under the influence of alcohol and over a man or a woman. But despite the unimaginable cruelty that they suffered, blacks kept their sense of humor and created the art form of the blues as a way to work through and transcend the harshness of their lives. Living under the American equivalent of Nazism, they developed an oasis of civility in the spiritual desert of "me-firstism" that characterized the rest of the country. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

The threat, thus, in anxiety is not necessarily more intense than fear. Rather, it attacks us on a deeper level. The threat must be to something in the 'core' or 'essence' of the personality. My self-esteem, my experience of myself as a person, my feeling of being of worth - all of these are imperfect descriptions of what is threatened. ~ Rollo May

Fortune helps the intrepid and abandons the cowards. I am the daughter of a man who did not know of fear. Whatever may come, I am resolved to follow that course until death. ~ Caterina Sforza

If you have intercourse you run the risk of dying and the ramifications of death are final. ~ Cyndi Lauper

They were a motley assembly, each with some cause for anxiety stirring at his heart; though, after all, that is saying little or nothing, for we are all of us in the same predicament through life; each with a fear and a hope from childhood to death. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so. When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise for ourselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work - the writer might have died long ago. ~ Jasper Fforde

I recommend people develop a fear of elevators, like I have. Even if something is on the tenth floor, I'm walking up. If you don't have claustrophobia, pretend you do and take the stairs everywhere! It ends up being so healthy! ~ Tamara Taylor

At a time when hundreds of men have been put to death without trial or any sort of evidence of guilt, and when the population literally trembles with fear, animals have rights guaranteed them which men and women cannot think of expecting. ~ Erik Larson

Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying. ~ Langston Hughes

Faith and fear, they tell me, can't coexist. I try to practice by doing what I'm afraid to do, and I manage (now and then, anyway) by means of faith. Faith that I will do myself more good than harm by the risks I am willing to take as a writer. And faith, finally, that the best service I can do myself is to do the best and most honest work of which I am capable. ~ Lawrence Block

Sometimes the most beautiful things are in front of our eyes, and we don't even notice because we're either too busy or too afraid to take a closer look. ~ Katja Michael

In the years of its rise the movement little by little brought the community's attitude toward the teacher around from respect and envy to resentment, from trust and fear to suspicion. The development seems to have been inherent; it needed no planning and had none. As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, "blood," "folkishness") seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the "little man," the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society. Germany was preparing to cut its own head off. By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon "intellectuals" as unreliable and, among those unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated. ~ Milton Sanford Mayer

My first quarter at Lowood seemed an age; and not the golden age either; it comprised an irksome struggle with difficulties in habituating myself to new rules and unwonted tasks. The fear of failure in these points harassed me worse than the physical hardships of my lot; though these were no trifles. ~ Charlotte Bronte

Think of mission like the paddles of a defibrillator applied to the chest of a dying church. ~ Alan Hirsch

The fear of the violent and the lawless is no less a tyranny than the edicts that come from the Emperor's throne. ~ Timothy Zahn

I praise mirth" [Eccl. viii. 15]. This means the righteous man rejoices when he performs a meritorious act. "And of joy, what doth this do?" [Eccl. ii. 2] alludes to rejoicing that comes not through a Heaven-pleasing deed. This teaches that the divine presence (Shekhina) comes not by sadness, by indolence, by hilarity, by levity, by gossip, or by senseless talk, but through rejoicing in a meritorious deed; as it is written: "Now bring me a minstrel; and when the minstrel played, the power of the Lord was upon him" [II Kings, iii. 15]. Rabba said: The same (should be done) in order to enjoy good dreams. R. Jehudah says: The same (should be done) to predispose one's self for legislative work, as Rabba did: Before commencing to expound a Halakha he introduced it with a simile and caused the masters to become joyful; afterward, he sat down in the fear of the Lord and began to expound the Halakha. ~ Michael Rodkinson

Positive health means becoming whole-heartedly engaged with our own health care. It means not outsourcing our health to the health care system. It means getting rid of the fear and paralysis we too often feel, and instead cultivating a sense of agency. ~ Jane McGonigal

Here it is necessary briefly to consider the question of the cult of ancestors before venturing farther. The spirits of the departed are believed to be possessed of supernatural powers which they did not enjoy in the flesh. They may also be dissatisfied or malignant in consequence of being suddenly deprived of life, and if they are neglected by the living, are apt to be revengeful. Therefore they must be cajoled and propitiated. Fear of beings belonging to a mysterious state or sphere of which he knew nothing continually haunted and terrified primitive man and induced in him what is known as" the dread of the sacred." It was every man's personal duty to attend to the demands or requirements of his deceased ancestors. At first he would succour his own immediate forebears with food and gifts; but it must have been borne in upon him that when his parents joined the great majority, the care of the spirits of their parents likewise devolved upon him... and, by degrees, he might even come to regard himself as responsible for the well-being of a line of spirit ancestors of quite formidable genealogy. These, through his neglect, might starve in their tombs; or, alternatively, they might crave his company. Because of vengeance or loneliness they might send disease upon him, for the savage almost invariably believes illness to be brought about by the action of jealous or neglected ancestors. The loneliness of the spirit-world is the dead man's greatest excuse for desiring the company o ~ Lewis Spence

If you wish to attain to lasting happiness you must be ready to hate father, mother, even your own life and to take leave of all your possessions. How? Not by renouncing them or giving them up because what you give up violently you are forever bound to. But rather by seeing them for the nightmare they are; and then, whether you keep them or not, they will have lost their grip over you, their power to hurt you, and you will be out of your dream at last, out of your darkness, your fear, your unhappiness. ~ Anthony De Mello