I live now on borrowed time, waiting in the anteroom for the summons that will inevitably come. And then - I go on to the next thing, whatever it is. One doesn't luckily have to bother about that.
I shall tell you a great secret my friend. Do not wait for the last judgement, it takes place every day.
To the well-organised mind, death is but the next great adventure.
A Lizard continues it's life into the wilderness like a human into heaven. Our fate is entirely dependent on our life
Even in the desolate wilderness, stars can still shine.
This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds.To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance. A lifetime is a flash of lightning in the sky. Rushing by,like a torrent down a steep mountain.
100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased.
We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for my being. Already the long shadows of untimely oblivion creep over me, and I shall decrease forever.
We start, then, with nothing, pure zero. But this is not the nothing of negation. For not means other than, and other is merely a synonym of the ordinal numeral second. As such it implies a first; while the present pure zero is prior to every first. The nothing of negation is the nothing of death, which comes second to, or after, everything. But this pure zero is the nothing of not having been born. There is no individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility -- boundless possibility. There is no compulsion and no law. It is boundless freedom.
Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.
All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.
So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.
"You get what anyone gets - you get a lifetime"
They say that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Well I think the gun helps. If you just stood there and yelled BANG, I don't think you'd kill too many people.
Thank Heaven! the crisis --The danger, is past, and the lingering illness, is over at last --, and the fever called "Living" is conquered at last.
You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward, art thou also dead - - dead to the World, to Heaven, and to Hope! In me didst thou exist - - and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what they had to teach; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
I hit him to get his attention. I shot him to calm him down I killed him to reason with him.
We are afraid to live, but scared to die
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
"People, some good, some bad, but in the long run we come out even."
I know one day I'll turn the corner and I won't be ready for it.
I wouldn't mind dying in a plane crash. It'd be a good way to go. I don't want to die in my sleep, or of old age, or OD... I want to feel what it's like. I want to taste it, hear it, smell it. Death is only going to happen to you once; I don't want to miss it.
You see sir; death is an intellectual matter, but dying is pure pain.
The trouble with quotes about death is that 99.999 percent of them are made by people who are still alive.
One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.
As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.
Perhaps passing through the gates of death is like passing quietly through the gate in a pasture fence. On the other side, you keep walking, without the need to look back. No shock, no drama, just the lifting of a plank or two in a simple wooden gate in a clearing. Neither pain, nor floods of light, nor great voices, but just the silent crossing of a meadow.
Somebody ought to tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit every minute of every day. Do it, I say, whatever you want to do, do it now.
Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat.
And the wild regrets and the bloody sweats None knew so well as I: That he who lives more lives than one, More deaths than one shall die.
Why was it that the more advanced a civilization became in conquering sickness, the more expert it became in the destruction of human life? Was there ever a golden age, anywhere, where science was advanced and men were humane? Were the two incompatible some how?
To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that is is the greatest of evils. And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know.
Take death for example. A great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it and often consider its intrusion a tragic event. Yet we'd find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it. If death were indefinitely put off, the human psyche would end up, well, like the gambler in the "Twilight Zone" episode.
"Way I see it, we're all on the Hindenburg, no use fighting over the window seat."
They give birth astride of a grave. The light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.
There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.
Be sure to live your life, because you are a long time dead.
Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death?
From the hour you're born you begin to die. But between birth and death there's life.
Many an ancient lord's last words have been, "You can't kill me because I've got magic aaargh."
what is death but a passage to life
When we are at the end of life, to die means to go away; when we are at the beginning, to go away means to die.
In an artist's life, death is perhaps not the most difficult thing.
Now, my good man,this is no time for making enemies.
Fate succumbs many a species: one alone jeopardizes itself.
Death--the last sleep? No, it is the final awakening.
How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-strings: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.
It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.
"...then laugh, leaning back in my arms, for life is not a paragraph, and death i think is no parenthesis"
there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go.
"I meant," said Iplsore bitterly, "what is there in this world that makes living worthwhile?" Death thought about it. "CATS", he said eventually, "CATS ARE NICE."
How this feels is I'm just another task in God's daily planner: The Renaissance pencilled in for right after the Dark Ages. The Information Age is scheduled immediately after the Industrial Revolution. Then the Post-Modern Era, then The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And between the big events, the earthquakes and tidal waves, God's got me squeezed in for a cameo appearance. Then maybe in thirty years, or maybe next year, God's daily planner has me finished.
"Some people may think you're cute, Babe. But to me you're one very large baked potato!" -- Sylvester Stallone in Death Race 2000
Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is ... delay it for a while.
THIS DRINK'S GOT MAGGOTS IN IT. "That's not a maggot, sir. It's a worm." OH, THAT'S BETTER, IS IT? "It's supposed to be there, sir. They put the worm in to show how strong it is." STRONG ENOUGH TO DROWN WORMS? "It's just something people drink." Death picked up the bottle and held it up to what normally would have been eye level. The worm rotated forlornly. WHAT'S IT LIKE? he said. "Well, it's sort of-" I WASN'T TALKING TO YOU.
For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
Death and damnation, I can dissociate from everything else but my own self; I can't even forget myself when I am asleep.
