On Dying Quotes

Uncle Drew?"
"Yes?"
"Is you gonna die alone?"
i smirk. "I don't plan on dying for a long time, honey"
"Momma says you're gonna die alone. She tol' Daddy that you gonna die and it be days till a Cleanin' lady find your rottin' corpse."
lovely. Thank you, Alexandra
"Wha's a corpse, uncle Drew?"
Wow. ~ Emma Chase

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross a ~ Imperial War Museum

At Camp Half-Blood. The Hades cabin needs a head counsellor. Have you seen the decor? It's disgusting. I'll have to renovate. And someone needs to do the burial rites properly, since demigods insist on dying heroically.'
'That's – that's fantastic! Dude!' Jason opened his arms for a hug, then froze. 'Right. No touching. Sorry.'
Nico grunted. 'I suppose we can make an exception.' Jason squeezed him so hard Nico thought his ribs would crack. ~ Rick Riordan

Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dess? I though that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. OKay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on dying. A scar means, I survivied. ~ Chris Cleave

A person who lives moment to moment, who goes on dying to the past, is never attached to anything. Attachment comes from the accumulated past. If you can be unattached to the past every moment, then you are always fresh, young, just born. You pulsate with life and that pulsation gives you immortality. You are immortal, only unaware of the fact. ~ Rajneesh

This is the work of a lifetime, here on earth: To invent the astral body, to create it. giving it our consciousness. Thus one will survive death. One could also die when one chooses… And on dying, not lose the awareness 'from here.'

What has happened to you is a detachment of your astral body while your physical body sleeps. This occurs to vîras; it's an automatic unconscious process. Sometimes, by simple chance, a glimmer of consciousness reaches this fine body and then, on suddenly awakening or the next day, one gets the impression of experiencing something much more real than physical reality. The deja-vu of psychologists has its explanation in this phenomena of detachment.

Have you seen those children who elevate a kite and send messages with little rolls of paper that go slowly up to the kite? So it is, more or less, with that other. The astral body breaks away, still attached to the physical body by a string which has been called a 'silver cord' that is only cut at death. Thanks to this cord we can go immeasurable distances without losing the connection with our physical bodies. It always returns. So it reaches consciousness, like those messages of children with their kite. Yes, we must become like children to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven… with our astral bodies. Pay attention to this other analogy: As a child finds itself joined to its mother by the umbilical cord, so the astral body is joined to its father, the physical body, by a silver cord ~ Miguel Serrano

And miss the final journey? Never! I wish to take notes on dying, my friend. To my knowledge I have never done it before. ~ Mary Victoria

I am beginning to see the fallacy in the Western world's take on dying. Too often we are taught that this one life is all there is and when it ends, that's it. Or, instead of once again returning to a loving God who welcomes us back Home with open arms, we are told that when we die we must stand in front of a stern and unforgiving deity who sits on a throne and looks at every mistake we have ever made, deciding if we are good enough to enter heaven. And, if we do make it past that stringent test, we certainly aren't able to visit our friends and family still living. No wonder so many of us are afraid of death. I also find it fascinating that most religions believe in angels or wise ascended souls who brought messages to certain people on earth (Moses and Noah, for example) thousands of years ago, but deny that such an occurrence can happen now. What, did God just decide not to talk to us anymore? ~ Donna Visocky

Well, I don't plan on dying anytime soon, and I've got something he didn't."
"And that is ... ?"
"Your hat. Take me with you, or I'll stand on it. ~ Derek Landy

Their country-place, Styles Court, had been purchased by Mr. Cavendish early in their married life. He had been completely under his wife's ascendancy, so much so that, on dying, he left the place to her for her lifetime, as well as the larger part of his income; an arrangement that was distinctly unfair to his two sons. ~ Agatha Christie

Ten years was not enough. Stone should
not crumble after just a decade of neglect. The filth should not have piled up so quickly - not with so few inhabitants, most of whom were incapacitated. It was as if Elantris were intent on dying, a city committing suicide. ~ Brandon Sanderson

One star breaks off from the others, shooting across the sky, a bright light trailing behind it, and I finally understand why people wish on dying stars. Because something always has to die for life to give birth to a new dream. ~ Kimberly Kinrade

Kraunauer smiled, and now the wolf fangs were out for all to see. "Let's just put it this way," he said. "If you're still sitting here in TGK tomorrow at this time, it means I'm dead." He closed the folder and allowed his smile to get much, much broader. "And I don't plan on dying anytime soon, Mr. Morgan. ~ Jeff Lindsay

It's the economics, that's why opera is not dying but gets more and more difficult to put on. ~ Christoph Waltz

I'm not too chicken," she said. "I know exactly what I want. I honestly thought I could do this with you, the whole friends-with-benefits thing." She slowly shook her head, her eyes suspiciously shiny. "But as it turns out, I can't. Now with you, Adam. With you, I want it all."
( ... )
"It's not that simple for me," he heard himself say.
"Of course it is. Life is as simple as you make it, Adam. You're born. You live. You die. I don't plan on dying without doing the living part, though. ~ Jill Shalvis

Of emotions, of love, of breakup, of love and hate and death and dying, mama, apple pie, and the whole thing. It covers a lot of territory, country music does. ~ Johnny Cash

'Beloved Renegade' is a meditation on Walt Whitman, on tenderness, on dying. ~ Robert Gottlieb

How Could You Not - for Jane Kenyon

It is a day after many days of storms.
Having been washed and washed, the air glitters;
small heaped cumuli blow across the sky; a shower
visible against the firs douses the crocuses.

We knew it would happen one day this week.
Now, when I learn you have died, I go
to the open door and look across at New Hampshire
and see that there, too, the sun is bright
and clouds are making their shadowy ways along the horizon;

and I think: How could it not have been today?
In another room, Keri Te Kanawa is singing
the Laudate Dominum of Mozart, very faintly,
as if in the past, to those who once sat
in the steel seat of the old mowing machine,
cheerful descendent of the scythe of the grim reaper,

and drew the cutter bars little
reciprocating triangles through the grass
to make the stalks lie down in sunshine.
Could you have walked in the dark early this morning
and found yourself grown completely tired
of the successes and failures of medicine,
of your year of pain and despair remitted briefly
now and then by hope that had that leaden taste?

Did you glimpse in first light the world as you loved it
and see that, now, it was not wrong to die
and that, on dying, you would leave
your beloved in a day like paradise?

Near sunrise did you loosen your hold a little?
How could you not ~ Galway Kinnell

Death has dominion because it is not only the start of nothing but the end of everything, and how we think and talk about dying - the emphasis we put on dying with 'dignity' - shows how important it is that life ends appropriately, that death keeps faith with the way we have lived it. ~ Ronald Dworkin

If you're planning on dying today I hope you dig your grave first. ~ Larry McMurtry

Everybody dies.
Some die still waiting for inspiration. ~ Christina Escamilla

When they see the light at the end of the tunnel, some people run towards it. I, however, run from it as fast as I can because I know that it's attatched to a speeding train coming in our direction. And if I were you, staring at that light drooling and saying "Ooh, pretty," I would run as fast as my legs could carry me, because I don't plan on dying early with the rest of you fools. ~ Stephanie Tom

I'm an atheist, I always thought, 'This is it.' If there is going to be a heaven, it should be on earth. I feel much happier than most people. I'm fairly stoic about death, but I'm not keen on dying if it's going to be long and protracted. I don't have dark nights of the soul, except occasionally. I'm such a little busy bee. ~ Edmund White

You can donate marrow for her, Alice Faye, you can't cure her. You can win a poker tournament, but that won't make her want to live. So I'll ask you again: Who are you, and what are you doing here? Because Munny sure doesn't want you to be her, and she wants someone to be out in the world living since she's got the market cornered on dying right now. ~ Elle Lothlorien

I'm going to live right on. Dying is none of my business. Dying will have to take care of itself."

He came to me then, an old man weakened and ill, with my Nathan looking out of his eyes. He held me a long time as if under a passing storm, and then the quiet came. ~ Wendell Berry

There is only one courage and that is the courage to go on dying to the past, not to collect it, not to accumulate it, not to cling to it. We all cling to the past and because we cling to the past we become unavailable to the present. ~ Rajneesh

I would prefer to die than to be depressed for depression can hurt you everyday and it'll last for a lifetime while on dying, you can only feel pain the moment you'll die. ~ Cedric Go

if they hadn't both been pretending, but had had what is called a heart-to-heart talk, that is, simply told each other just what they were thinking and feeling, then they would just have looked into each other's eyes, and Constantine would only have said: 'You're dying, dying, dying!' – while Nicholas would simply have replied: 'I know I'm dying, but I'm afraid, afraid, afraid!' That's all they would have said if they'd been talking straight from the heart. But it was impossible to live that way, so Levin tried to do what he'd been trying to do all his life without being able to, what a great many people could do so well, as he observed, and without which life was impossible: he tried to say something different from what he thought, and he always felt it came out false, that his brother caught him out and was irritated by it. ~ Leo Tolstoy

'Aging' has been bad ever since we figured out it led to dying. ~ Erin McKean

We have the promises of God as thick as daisies in summer meadows, that death, which men most fear, shall be to us the most blessed of experiences, if we trust in him. Death is unclasping; joy, breaking out in the desert; the heart, come to its blossoming time! Do we call it dying when the bud bursts into flower? ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Dying felt like being tickled. It felt like tiny fingers running across my body in a dark world where it was okay to laugh loudly and badly. ~ R.K. Ryals

The one thing I know for sure is that feelings are rarely mutual, so when they are, drop everything, forget belongings and expectations, forget the games, the two days between texts, the hard to gets because this is it, this is what the entire world is after and you've stumbled upon it by chance, by accident––so take a deep breath, take a step forward, now run, collide like planets in the system of a dying sun, embrace each other with both arms and let all the rules, the opinions and common sense crash down around you. Because this is love kid, and it's all yours. Believe me, you're in for one hell of a ride, after all––this is the one thing I know for sure. ~ Beau Taplin

Sometimes you find that one person, and you just know. And even if you don't love them right away, you know you will. It's just a matter of time. Because no one you've ever known has come close to making you feel the way they do. It keeps you up at night and drives you fucking crazy, but you pray to God the feeling never goes away no matter how much it's killing you." Sloane stared at him. "Wow." "Shut up," Ash mumbled, looking embarrassed. Like he hadn't realized what he'd said until then. "I've never heard you talk like this." He thought he knew everything there was to know about his best friend. Apparently he was wrong. Ash shrugged. "Yeah, well, almost dying makes you think." "About Cael?" Sloane asked quietly. Ash let out a weary sigh, his gaze falling to his hands. "Like I don't think about him every other day." "What are you going to do about him?" "I don't know. I really thought he'd give me some time, but he's going out for drinks with Seb this Friday." "And? ~ Charlie Cochet

What I want you to know: Dying is easy. Comedy is hard. Clinical depression is no fucking picnic. ~ Jenny Lawson

We all die alone. We shall endure death as once we endured birth. You can't share either experience. ~ P.D. James

I don't so much mind that newspapers are dying - it's watching them commit suicide that pisses me off. ~ Molly Ivins

When I said I should die in your service with pleasure, I intended to live in it many long years; since, to tell you the truth, from a child I had always a particular dislike to dying, and I think that with every hour the prejudice grows stronger. ~ Matthew Gregory Lewis

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

Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you, as I'm sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you're looking for, no matter how much of them you have.
~ Mitch Albom

No doubt my books too, like my mortal being, would eventually die, one day. But one has to resign oneself to dying. One accepts the thought that in ten years oneself, in a hundred years one's books, will not exist. Eternal duration is no more promised to books than it is to men. ~ Marcel Proust

I just came by to tell you I'm dying and thank you for our friendship. ~ Seth Cohen

Maitake can achieve humongous sizes, sometimes up to 50 pounds per specimen! Massive maitake can form annually from dying dendritic tree roots for many years, even decades. ~ Paul Stamets

I don't much care for the idea of being dead. It makes me nervous. I'm allergic to dying; I break out in screaming. ~ Garon Whited

And when the creature spoke, it used Harry's mouth, so that in his agony he felt his jaw move ...
"Kill me now Dumbledore ... "
Blinded and dying, every part of him screaming for release, Harry felt the creature use him again ...
"If death is nothing, Dumbledore, kill the boy ... ~ J.K. Rowling

Of course, it's no fun getting old and getting sick and dying; we all know that's coming, and it's a bore. ~ Jerry Hall

When she woke briefly during her last illness and found all her family around her bedside: "Am I dying or is this my birthday?" ~ Nancy Astor

I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker's head if they're not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it's bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God's face when it's bitter ~ Gustave Flaubert

Dying isn't so bad after you've done it once. . . ~ Katja Millay

That is perhaps what we seek throughout life, that and nothing more, the greatest possible sorrow so as to become fully ourselves before dying. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

At death we cross from one territory to another, but we'll have no trouble with visas. Our representative is already there, preparing for our arrival. As citizens of heaven, our entrance is incontestable. ~ Erwin W. Lutzer

He concluded that governments were like wars: the reasons and the forces might change, but it was still the same dying over the same soil. ~ Nick Harkaway

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

Dogs can tell how many times a person's heart beats, how many breaths they've taken, whether they're sick, whether they're dying. Dogs can find the secrets their people don't know, tip them over, spill them onto the ground, roll in them ~ Maria Dahvana Headley

What is death if not these words that I say ~ Sanchit Gupta

I've never had a block. I'm talking within the limits of my abilities. But in my own small way, I've had an embarrassment of riches. I'll have five ideas and I'm dying to do them all. It takes weeks or months where I agonize and obsess over which to do next. I wish sometimes someone would choose for me. If someone said, Do idea number three next, that would be fine. But I have never had any sense of running dry. ~ Woody Allen

We do not look for reason for logic in the passionate entreaties of those who are sick unto death; we are stung with the recollection of a thousand slighted opportunities of fulfilling the wishes of those who will soon pass away from among us: and do they ask us for the future happiness of our lives, we lay it at their feet, and will it away from us. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

All men think that all men are mortal but themselves. ~ Edward Young

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

If one cannot accept failure and scorn, how is he to make his art? It's like wanting to go to heaven without dying. ~ Russell Edson

Father," she said late one night. "I can't keep up. Our goats are dying. We're going to have to ask the neighbors for help."
"Have we ever done that before?" he said.
"We've never needed help before," said Capable.
"Well I'm against it," he said. "If we haven't done it before, it stands to reason that this time is the first time we've done it, which means that, relative to what we've done in the past, this is different, which I am very much against, as I always have been, as you well know. I have consistently been very very consistent about this. ~ George Saunders

If only I could understand
The reason for my crying
If only I could stop this fear
Of dreaming that I'm dying. ~ Jennifer Lynch

And then last autumn his heart had stopped working properly. The veterinarian said that they just had to care for him and love him, and Batty had loved him, and loved him, and loved him, but it hadn't been enough. No one in her family had ever said that Hound's dying was her fault, but she knew the truth. She hadn't been able to keep him with her, to stop him from leaving her behind. ~ Jeanne Birdsall

And now I demand that you do what the ignorant might feel is the easier thing. You must refrain from dying in battle. Revenge is not redress. Revenge is a wheel, and it turns backwards. The dead are not your masters. ~ Terry Pratchett

At one time or another we are all called to leave the safety of our homes, the certainty of what we know, the illusions of who we are. Not everyone will heed this call, of course. And those who do will risk losing themselves completely. But if we choose to ignore the invitation, we risk never knowing who we might have become. We risk dying without knowing what it is to live. ~ Thomas Lloyd Qualls

God help me now to preach the Word to all the dying around, and tell them how. ~ John Alexander Dowie

When we died, no one would know, and that fraction of a moment that was so important to who we were would be gone. ~ Kiera Cass

We're all of us dying ... from the moment we're born ~ Peter David

I feel that I am dying of solitude, of
love, of despair, of hatred, of all that this world offers me. (...) Life breeds both plenitude and void, exuberance and depression. What are we when confronted
with the interior vortex which swallows us into absurdity? ~ Emil M. Cioran

The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo – even when it's not working. It attaches to past and present and fears the future. ~ Richard Rohr

When one teenager dying of cystic fibrosis asked me, 'Why am I different?' I answered, 'Tony, because it makes you beautiful.' He loved my answer because he knew full well how much he had done for the world and that he would be immortal through his love and the fund raising of those who knew him hoping to find a cure for cystic fibrosis. ~ Bernie Siegel

It wasn't the first time Moss had heard the pop of a gunshot. Nor was it the first time he'd heard the sickening sound of air leaving someone's body. The sound meant the worst. ~ Mark Oshiro

When the old men kill themselves, the cities are dying. ~ Robert Ludlum

My father, my father, and dost thou not hear
The words that the Erl-King now breathes in mine ear?
'Be calm, dearest child, 'tis thy fancy deceives;
Tis the sad wind that sighs through the withering leaves. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Everyone dies. That is a universal constant. The only variable is how one dies. ~ Chris De Pavilly

My wife never look at me anymore, my children, my wife ... we only die once in our life. I'm dying every day when I get up in the morning. ~ Bikram Choudhury

Dying sucks big fat donkey balls. ~ Tara West