Quotes About Death

People say there's the Angel of Life and the Angel of Death, but there's another one, too. The one who walks among us.' He could tell that she was listening. 'He's nothing fierce or terrible or filled with light. He's like us, sometimes we can't even tell him apart. Sometimes we're the ones who try to save him. He's there to show us who we are. Human beings aren't Gods. We make mistakes.

The wickedness of the world was a part of creation, I knew this, and the Angel of Death had been created on that day when life first appeared, yet i was embittered, I wept for what i had lost and what the world had lost and would yet lose again.

Only her death could prove her innocence; a circle of impossible, deathly judgement.

We came like doves across the desert. In a time when there was nothing but death, we were grateful for anything, and most grateful of all when we awoke to another day.

In the dining hall of the home, Stella had seen so much death, that one Saturday morning she'd been compelled to sink down onto the linoleum floor, overwhelmed not so much by the sorrow of it all, but by the human dignity, the almost supernatural ability to face the abyss and still order scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast.

A glass breaking on its own portended death.

Some of the guys he knew said the only people who didn't fear death were those who had nothing to lose and he thought they were probably right.

He thought about where it was people went when they died, & how when he squinted he could see Cody, racing back & forth, barking, how his father seemed to stand right there on the riverbank, turning back the bees, closer than he'd ever been before.

Once you knew that death was walking alongside you, things came into focus, as they now did for Jet. With only seven days left she had best pay attention to every detail. She had already taken note that the lines on her right palm, showing the fate that she'd been given, and those on the left hand, the fate she had made for herself, were exactly the same; they had converged, as they always do at the end of a life.

Um homem que desaparece ou está morto ou quer que você pense que está. Talvez seja melhor que você pense assim.

They believed babies who died in their cradles had the life sucked out of them by Satan's emissaries or by cats, which were thought to be untrustworthy, evil creatures.

He had lived the sort of life that had soon revealed that any man who asks for undying loyalty is the man most likely to get you killed.

As they held hands through the bars, Dias spied a black beetle burrowing through the wood of the jail. It made a horrid clacking sound. It was said there was no way to stop this beetle's ticking off the hours of a person's life, but Samuel Dias had never heard of a deathwatch beetle. He went over and stomped on it with his boot, crushing it completely

T)he book had convinced her (there in the softly lit waiting room of the abortion clinic) that despite war and death and pain )despite the way the girl with a woman who might have been her mother seemed to gulp air every once in a while, a handkerchief to her mouth), life was lovely, rich with small gifts: a warm fire, a fine meal, love.

In therapy Katya realized how much her relationship with her son had been burdened by the shadows of her childhood, and memories of her mother came back to her more and more clearly, memories of the way she had refused to relate to her eldest daughter. Katya was now able to feel her infant needs and express them in a diary, from which her friend sent me an excerpt after Katya's death:

Love dies all the time, or at any rate it becomes distracted, overlaid--it might as well be dead.

I saw how the forms of love might be maintained with a condemned person but with the love in fact measured and disciplined, because you have to survive. It could be done so discreetly that the object of such care would not suspect, any more than she would suspect the sentence of death itself.

When you died, of course, these wrong opinions were all there was left

She did not have time to wonder about his being late. He died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood out in front of the hardware store... He had not even had time to get into the store...

He said Catholics probably had an advantage, you could hedge your bets right until you were dying.

Quería saber. No había protección como no fuera en el saber. Quería ver la muerte sujeta y aislada detrás de una pared de hechos y circunstancias particulares, y no flotando libremente alrededor, ignorada pero poderosa, lista para colarse en cualquier parte.

scowling, persistent, repeating my questions. I wanted to know. There is no protection, unless it is in knowing. I wanted death pinned down and isolated behind a wall of particular facts and circumstances, not floating around loose, ignored but powerful, waiting to get in anywhere.

Everyone was wrong. She was not timid or acquiescent or natural or pure. When you died, of course, these wrong opinions were all there was left.

The dead are never exactly seen by the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them. They speak of a chill in the air. The mates of the deceased wake from dreams and see a figure standing at the end of thier bed, or in a doorway, or boarding, phantomlike, a city bus.