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Quotes About Dying

DIS ... DIS ... DIS ... it was a word it was a planet and the word thundered like a drum a drum the sound of its thunder surrounded and was a wasteland a planet of death a planet where living was dying and dying was very better than living DIS
~ Harry Harrison
Tell me, Doctor, are you afraid of death? I guess it depends on how you die.
~ Haruki Murakami
You said that the mind is like the wind but perhaps it is we who are like the wind Knowing nothing, simply blowing through. Never aging, never dying.
~ Haruki Murakami
The history of every dead and dying "growth" industry shows a self-deceiving cycle of bountiful expansion and undetected decay.
~ Harvard Business School Press
Our globe is under new dramatic environmental pressure: our globe is warming, our ice caps melting, our glaciers receding, our coral is dying, our soils are eroding, our water tables falling, our fisheries are being depleted, our remaining rainforests shrinking. Something is very, very wrong with our eco-system.
~ Richard Lamm
The problem was with Bill Clinton, the scandals and rumored scandals, the incubating ones and the dying ones never ended. Whatever moral compass the president was consulting was leading him in the wrong direction. His closets were full of skeletons just waiting to burst out.
~ Louis Freeh
Peaceful death is really an essential human right, more essential perhaps even than the right to vote or the right to justice; it is a right on which, all religious traditions tell us, a great deal depends for the well-being and spiritual future of the dying person. There
~ Sogyal Rinpoche
Because the dying also are unable to help themselves, we should relieve them of discomfort and anxiety, and assist them, as far as we can, to die with composure.
~ Sogyal Rinpoche
As Cicely Saunders wrote: "The dying have shed the masks and superficialities of everyday living and they are all the more open and sensitive because of this. They see through all unreality. I remember one man saying, 'No, no reading. I only want what is in your mind and in your heart.'"1
~ Sogyal Rinpoche
Now that the bardo of dying dawns upon me, I will abandon all grasping, yearning, and attachment, Enter undistracted into clear awareness of the teaching, And eject my consciousness into the space of unborn Rigpa; As I leave this compound body of flesh and blood I will know it to be a transitory illusion.
~ Sogyal Rinpoche
Every atom in me feels composed of lead. This is what dying is: a pull to the ground.
~ Sonya Hartnett
Therefore, to obtain blessedness, we need not quit every kind of body, but only the corruptible, cumbersome, painful, dying,—not such bodies as the goodness of God contrived for the first man, but such only as man's sin entailed.
~ St. Augustine
There is no fundamental difference between the preparation for death and the practice of dying, and spiritual practice leading to enlightenment.
~ Stanislav Grof
A number of cases have been reported in which a dying individual has a vision of a person about whose death he or she did not know.
~ Stanislav Grof
They say, the tongues of dying men Enforce attention, like deep harmony; Where words are scarce, they're seldom spent in vain; For they breathe truth, that breathe their words in pain.
~ William Shakespeare
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men, And falsehood, while I lived, was far from mine.
~ Matthew Arnold
Now, watching the old priest comfort the dying man in low, musical Latin, my grandfather felt some inner tether come unlashed. His cheeks burned. His eyes stung. For the first and only time in his life, he felt the beauty that inhered in the idea of Jesus Christ, in the message of comfort that had managed to survive, reasonably intact, despite having been so thoroughly corrupted and profaned over the past two thousand years by Christians.
~ Michael Chabon
She is better, she is safer, if she rests in Richmond; if she does not speak too much, write too much, feel too much; if she does not travel impetuously to London and walk through its streets; and yet she is dying this way, she is gently dying on a bed of roses.
~ Michael Cunningham
Why are you so sad? Why are you crying? You sound so young. Why speak of dying?
~ Michael Ende
There is a greater will, a greater need and purpose hidden within each life, and there is an inner law that knows best how each must live and that is worth stealing for; it's worth dying for, and worth living for as well.
~ Michael Meade
We don't die well in America. Ask people where do you want to die, and they will tell you, at home with their loved ones. But most of us die in an ICU. The biggest taboo in America is the conversation about death. Sure, it's gotten better; now we have hospices, which didn't exist not so long ago. But to a doctor, it's still an insult to let a patient go.
~ Michael Pollan
Katherine MacLean, the former Hopkins researcher who wrote the landmark paper on openness, hopes someday to establish a "psychedelic hospice," a retreat center somewhere out in nature where not only the dying but their loved ones can use psychedelics to help them let go—the patient and the loved ones both.
~ Michael Pollan
I love singing live, actually. And I'm dying to sing in a role, whether it's in a musical or a biographical film about a singer. It's always been one of my aspirations.
~ Michelle Dockery
I did a film called 'Floating' early on that had a scene which was similar to a real-life situation I was in at the time. It involved me having a conversation with my father, who was dying. It was close to home and it made me realise acting wasn't just making faces for the cameras, it was a real art form.
~ Norman Reedus