Quotes About Death

It's not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.

Lo que uno siente hacia los muertos, pensó, se basa siempre en la imposibilidad de toda acción.

achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Joy is not 'the absence of pain,' intelligence is not 'the absence of stupidity,' light is not 'the absence of darkness,' an entity is not 'the absence of a nonentity.

Todo organismo viviente se enfrenta a una alternativa constante: la de la vida o la muerte. La vida es un proceso de acción, autosustentadora y autogenerada. Si un organismo falla en la misma, muere; sus elementos químicos perduran, pero su vida termina. Es sólo el concepto de vida el que hace posible el concepto de valor. Sólo para un ser viviente las cosas pueden resultar buenas o malas.

No saben por que están aquí. En cambio, nosotros lo sabemos. No saben quién es su prisionero. Nosotros, sí. No saben por qué sus jefes quieren que lo vigilen. En cambio, nosotros sabemos muy bien por qué queremos sacarlo de aquí. No se dan cuenta del objetivo de su lucha, pero nosotros sí sabemos cuál es el de la nuestra. Si mueren no sabrán por qué. nosotros sí lo sabemos.

Revenge has probably been the most regular and prominent cause of fighting cited in anthropological accounts of pre-state societies. Violence was activated to avenge injuries to honour, property, women, and kin. If life was taken, revenge reached its peak, often leading to a vicious circle of death and counter-death.

As we grown-ups talked and speculated, my five-year-old daughter looked intently out of the window. Suddenly she turned around and shouted, Mommy, Mommy, he is not dead! Women are still wearing their scarves. I always associate Khomeini's death with Negar's simple pronouncement—for she was right: the day women did not wear the scarf in public would be the real day of his death and the end of his revolution. Until then, we would continue to live with him.

Every now and then I find myself thinking of something my daughter told me when she was in medical school: one sign that a patient is dying is that she feels no pain.

the condemned man's only privilege is to know the time of his death

That was when the myth of America started to take hold of Iran. Even those who wished its death were obsessed by it. America had become both the land of Satan and Paradise Lost.

When in the States we had shouted Death to this or that, those deaths seemed to be more symbolic, more abstract, as if we were encouraged by the impossibility of our slogans to insist upon them even more. But in Tehran in 1979, these slogans were turning into reality with macabre precision.

This had also become a ritual, to call friends and family to make sure they were safe, knowing that your own relief implied someone else's death.

Not how he died, not what he died of, even less why he died, are of concern, to me, only the fact that he did die, he is dead, is important: the loss to me, to us

When someone else offered up the theory that we had all died and entered purgatory, where we were destined to debate Hillary for all eternity, no one laughed. It felt too close to the truth.

mostly I saw her efforts to induct me into adulthood much as a calf might see its mother's explanations of veal: I was being recruited into the great death march of biology—be born, reproduce, die.

Life is of course a misnomer, since viruses, lacking the ability to eat or respire, are officially dead, which is in itself intriguing, showing as it does that the habit of predation can be taken up by clusters of molecules that are in no way alive.

The worst thing about knowing that Gary Fairchild had been dead a month was seeing him every day at work.

The Dead always find ways," Ysidro said, "to get the living to serve them.

It is the blood that feeds the flesh," Ysidro said. "We can—and do, at need—live upon the blood of animals, or blood taken from the living without need of their death. But it is the death that feeds the powers of our minds. Without the kill, we find our abilities fading

The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history. Even the child Ruth May touched history. Everyone is complicit. The okapi complied by living, and the spider by dying. It would have lived if it could. Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger.

You can curse the dead or pray for them, but don't expect them to do a thing for you. They're far too interested in watching us, to see what in heaven's name we will do next.

Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.

Plus," Tig said, "it reminds me to be patient. Seeing all these people that have passed on. I get frustrated sometimes, waiting." "For people to die?" "Yeah. To be honest. The guys in charge of everything right now are so old. They really are, Mom. Older than you. They figured out the meaning of life in, I guess, the nineteen fifties and sixties. When it looked like there would always be plenty of everything.