Quotes About Death

Once released from life, having lost it in such violence, I couldn't calculate my steps. I didn't have time for contemplation. In violence it is the getting out that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from the shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping to land away from where you are.

I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.

The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.

Ruth had been a girl haunted and now she would be a woman haunted. First by accident and now by choice. All of it, the story of my life and death, was hers if she chose to tell it, even to one person at a time.

And a soul would run by a living being, touch them softly on the shoulder or cheek, and continue on its way to heaven. 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 their bed, or in a doorway, or boarding, phantomlike, a city bus.

When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping only to land away from where you are.

Ruth, que quería que todos creyeran lo que ella sabía: que los muertos realmente nos hablan, que, en el aire que rodea a los vivos, los espíritus se mueven, se entremezclan y ríen con nosotros. Son el oxígeno que respiramos.

y vi, mientras Samuel daba el atrevido paso de besar a Lindsey delante de toda la familia, que emprendían por fin el vuelo, alejándose de mi muerte.

In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping only to land away from where you are.

I always remember your own grandmother, she continued, nodding her head, old Mrs. Taylor. She died on a Christmas Night. Oh, I said shivering. I wouldn't like to die on a Christmas Night. A good night to die, she smiled; they say that the gates of heaven are open on Christmas Night.

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

She sicker than my mama was when she die. But she more evil than my mama and that keep her alive.

The more powerful the powerful appear the more invisible they become, said Armando. This used to work differently than now. In the old days it was said that the powerful merged with the divine and the divine was all that one saw. But now the powerful have merged with the shadow, really with death, and when you encounter them they are really hard to see.

I'm thinking of the moment something dies and how we instinctively know it. And of how we try not to know what we know because we do not yet understand how we are to negotiate change.

Trying to believe his story kilt her.

It not nice to speak ill of the dead, one say, but the truth never can be ill.

Sound like death approaching, angels can't prevent it.

Only dead people need loud music, you know. I call loud rock 'Dracula music' because you look out, and there are all those dead and deaf and soulless zombies clod-hopping across the floor.

Life was giving birth to children—who could have no memory of anything other than brutal enslavement—then dying and being tossed into a ravine or buried at the edge of a swamp or field.

It could be argued that death is inherently absurd, and that grinning is not necessarily an inappropriate response. I mean absurd in the sense of ridiculous, unreasonable. One second a person is there, the next they're not.

Although I'm good at enumerating my father's flaws, it's hard for me to sustain much anger at him. I expect this is partly because he's dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than for mothers.

Or maybe he had gotten too inured to death, and was hoping to elicit from me an expression of the natural horror he was no longer capable of...I have made use of this technique myself, however, this attempts to access emotions vicariously...eager to detect in my listener that flinch of grief that eluded me.

News of the death of James V on 14 December gave even further cause for rejoicing, because his heir was a week-old girl, the infant Mary, Queen of Scots. Scotland would be subject to yet another weakening regency—it had endured six during the past 150 years—and should give no further trouble.

This obsession with death and suffering revealed itself in literature, poetry, art, and particularly in sculpture, with the appearance of cadaver tombs with an effigy of the deceased in life above, and another depicting his or her rotting corpse below—a grisly reminder of the end of all flesh.