Quotes About Death

The resolution of earthly embodiment and divinization is what I call incarnational mysticism. As has been said many times, there are finally only two subjects in all of literature and poetry: love and death. Only that which is limited and even dies grows in value and appreciation; it is the spiritual version of supply and demand. If we lived forever, they say, we would never take life seriously or learn to love what is. I think that is probably true.

Without a sense of the inherent sacredness of the world—of every tiny bit of life and death—we struggle to see God in our own reality, let alone to respect reality, protect it, or love it.

As my father, Saint Francis, put it, "If you have once faced the great death, the second death can do you no harm.

To hold the full mystery of life is always to endure its other half, which is the equal mystery of death and doubt. To know anything fully is always to hold that part of it which is still mysterious and unknowable.

the opposite of rational is not always irrational, but it can also be transrational or bigger than the rational mind can process; things like love, death, suffering, God, and infinity are transrational experiences. Both myth and mature religion understand this. The transrational has the capacity to keep us inside an open system and a larger horizon so that the soul, the heart, and the mind do not close down inside of small and constricted space.

God protects us into and through death, just as the Father did with Jesus.

When you first discharge your loyal soldier, it will feel like a loss of faith or loss of self. But it is only the death of the false self, and is often the very birth of the soul.

In the larger-than-life, spiritually transformed people I have met, I always find one common denominator: in some sense, they have all died before they died. They have followed in the self-emptying steps of Jesus, a path from death to life that Christians from all over the world celebrate during Easter week.

our fear of death is actually our fear of God. If we resolve one, we normally resolve the other. To totally resolve the God issue would be to totally resolve the death issue. And we have the full wherewithal to do just that! That wherewithal we call Trinity, which is saying that God is an outpouring in one direction. God is only for and never against.

The trouble is that most Christians pushed this great liberation off into the next world, and many Twelve Steppers settled for mere sobriety from a substance instead of a real transformation of the self. We have all been the losers, as a result—waiting around for "enlightenment at gunpoint" (death) instead of enjoying God's banquet much earlier in life.

The global issues of injustice, the culture of death that we are a part of, the sufferings of the oppressed, all of these demand t hat we bring the Voice of the Spirit to these well-denied and disguised situations, and not just our own tiny judgments or anger. This i the difference between true Gospel and mere political correctness or Band-Aid liberal responses. We are holding out for the great Gospel...

He was dead, all right. He had been shot, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled. Either somebody had really had it in for him or four people had killed him. Or else it was the cleverest suicide I'd ever heard of.

Tell me we're dead and I'll love you even more.

character cries out accusingly at Grofield, "God damn it, all you want to do is die a smart-ass!" (177). The net

a knowledge of how to live was a knowledge of how to die.

How could one find out about life when one was about to die?

Bob had been caught by the white death, the threat of which hung over every male black in the South. I had heard whispered tales of black boys having sex relations with white prostitutes in the hotels in town, but I had never paid any close attention to them; now those tales came home to me in the form of the death of a man I knew. I did not search for a job that day; I returned home

To live, he had created a new world for himself, and for that he was to die.

In death, we never much resemble who we were in life, for all the mystery is gone.

So my two buildings are the funeral parlor and the doctor's house. But when I started finding stuff on Dr. Fuller, I started finding stuff about an epidemic, too. I mean, they called it an epidemic, but nobody knew what was causing it." "And when was this?" "Around nineteen hundred. The statistics were unbelievable, so many people died. And lots of them were children." Parker automatically grabbed a tissue off the nightstand and gave it to Ashley.

Death... The voice dropped even more, black-gloved hands disappearing into the black folds of material. Don't you feel it? We're all dead here...all...very...dead.

With one sweep of his gorry blade three pleecemen's heads roled of into a heep. He shot another through the brane, another fell strangled, an' another, wot had a week hart, fell down dead at the horrible site. Only one was left.

There is romantic nonsense these days about the beauty of death, about the terrible end becoming the lovely beginning, and I think that's wrong, a diminution of the beauty of life. Death is as terrible as birth is wonderful. The laws of physics and nature—not romance—dictate this. It occurs to me that sometimes even nature—raw, silent, solemn, and joyous nature—fears, even if only slightly, rot.

I pointed to a red-tailed hawk half a mile above us. I watched the hawk to see if it was Chubb. Strange things happen in the animal world when a loved one dies, that's a fact. They honor our passage with far more reverence than we do theirs.