facing death Quotes

“I’d rather be killed fighting for Narnia than grow old and stupid at home and perhaps go about in a bath-chair and then die in the end just the same.”

“Tirian, with his head against Jewel’s flank, slept as soundly as if he were in his royal bed at Cair Paravel, till the sound of a gong beating awoke him and he sat up and saw that there was firelight on the far side of the stable and knew that the hour had come. ‘Kiss me, Jewel,’ he said. ‘For certainly this is our last night on earth. And if ever I offended against you in any matter great or small, forgive me now.’ ‘Dear King,’ said the Unicorn, ‘I could almost wish you had, so that I might forgive it. Farewell. We have known great joys together. If Aslan gave me my choice I would choose no other life than the life I have had and no other death than the one we go to.‘”

“Wanting to live, but accepting death to save others: that was courage. That was to be Gansey’s greatness.”

“When pressed with the choice between life or death, it is not necessary to gain one’s aim.”

“Yet I fall fighting, fighting still!”

“But since Death comes, I meet him still afoot . . . And sword in hand!”

“Within Easy Company they had made the best friends they had ever had, or would ever have. They were prepared to die for each other; more important, they were prepared to kill for each other.”

“The thought of drove him on, but he ran no more than a hundred feet, when he staggered and pitched headlong. It was his last panic. When he had recovered his breath and control, he sat up and entertained in his mind the conception of meeting death with dignity.”

“A certain fear of death, dull and oppressive, came to him. ”

“It was as if I was bulletproof or something. How many times had I cheated death?”

Suppose you fell over with this fish. Is there anything you could do? Sure. Pray. It’d be like falling out of an airplane without a parachute and hoping you’ll land in a haystack. The only thing that’d save you would be God, and since He pushed you overboard in the first place, I wouldn’t give a nickel for your chances.

“When people say it’s for life, it’s for life. You gotta be willing to die in it or die for it. You want out?”

“When they ask how I died, tell them: still angry.”

″... I no longer had any feeling other than the dark terror of the condemned tied to the mouth of a cannon, at the moment when the shot is fired and scatters their limbs into the air.”

“I had fulfilled my purpose and there was no reason for me to be a dog anymore. So whether it happened this summer or the next didn’t matter. Ethan, loving Ethan, was my ultimate purpose, and I had done it as well as I could. I was a good dog.”

“This insect, which marks off time, clicking like a clock, issues the sound no one ever wants to hear beside her beloved. A man’s tenure on earth is limited enough, but once the beetle’s ticking begins there’s no way to stop it; there’s no plug to pull, no pendulum to stop, no switch that will restore the time you once thought you had.”

“This surpassed the fear of death. Death would be a mercy if it would make the feeling stop, the uncontrollable panic mingling with the mind-scrambling certainty of something sinister approaching, something with no need to hurry, something that would not be so kind as to let him die. The fear was palpable, suffocating, irresistible.”

“Is that what death would feel like? The nicest, warmest, heaviest never-ending nap? If that’s what it’s like, I wouldn’t mind. If that’s what dying is like, I wouldn’t mind that at all.”

“‘I can lose you like that if I don’t lose you today. I’ll let you go. If you stay.’”

“All through the long months of winter she lay dying and upon her bed, and for the first time Wang Lung and his children knew what she had been in the house, and how she made comfort for them all and they had not known it.”

“When the time comes that some of us will have to die, you will look into your heart and find the strength you need--just in time.”

“But I know what it’s like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can’t. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.”

“Death is a debt to nature due, Which I have paid, and so must you.”

“What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.”

“Say I am mad and give my madness rein To wreck itself; the worst that can befall Is but to die an honorable death.”

“Death were not wholly bitter with you near.”

“And as for death, if there be any gods, it is no grievous thing to leave the society of men.”

″ I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ‘em. ”

“Seth realized he had made the worst mistake of his life, and that now he would die. Why hadn’t he waited to open the cocoon? Why was he so impatient?”

″‘Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done,’ it suddenly occurred to him. ‘But how could that be, when I did everything properly?’ he replied, and immediately dismissed from his mind this, the sole solution of all the riddles of life and death, as something quite impossible.”

“Grandfather looks at us and says the best words of all with which to end a life. “I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.” We all say it back to him.”

″ Nobody says, ‘You’re dying.’ You have to fool them. They have to fool themselves. ”

“Every time people come at us with the intention of killing us, I close my eyes and wait for death. Even though I am still alive, I feel like each time I accept death, part of me dies.”

“I am dead, but it’s not so bad. I’ve learned to live with it.”

“Give me my robe. Put on my crown. I have Immortal longings in me. Now no more The juice of Egypt’s grape shall moist this lip. ”

“There are a thousand kinds of life and death across the whole metaphysical spectrum, not to mention the metaphorical. You don’t want to stay dead for the rest of your life, do you?”

“I think fear had made us all a little cantankerous. I had spent the night in the waiting room. Gramps offered to get me a motel room, but I was afraid that if I left the hospital, I would never see Gram again.”

″ If dying was required, he intended to die as Roland ... crawling toward the Tower. ”

“The wide corridor up the center of E Block was floored with linoleum the color of tired old limes, and so what was called the Last Mile at other prisons was called the Green Mile at Cold Mountain.”

“Sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.”

“I’m sorry for what I am.”

“It occurs to me that there’s no real difference between us, the living and the dead; it’s just a matter of tense: past-dead and future-dead.”

“None of us are going to leave this island. That’s the plan. You know it, of course, perfectly. What, perhaps, you can’t understand is the relief!”

“Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.”

“I will be with my Father. I am ready to see him eye to eye.”

“From sagging to seeking, from mournful to hopeful. From dwellers in the land of good-bye to a heaven of hellos. The Prince has decreed a homecoming.”

“They sentence you to death because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time, with no proof that you had anything at all to do with the crime other than being there when it happened. Yet six months later they come and unlock your cage and tell you, We, us, white folks all, have decided it’s time for you to die, because this is a convenient date and time.”

“Cause I’m go’n die soon? That make me a man, Mr. Wiggins?”

“How do people come up with a date and time to take life from another man? Who made them God?”

“When Nath had been born, then Lydia, Marilyn had not informed her mother, had not even sent a photograph. What was there to say? She and James had never discussed what her mother had said about their marriage that last day: it’s not right. She had not ever wanted to think of it again. So when James came home that night, she said simply, “My mother died.” Then she turned back to the stove and added, “And the lawn needs mowing,” and he understood: they would not talk about it.”

“I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found how to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it.”

“Last night it had been my father who had finally said it, ‘She’s never coming home.’ A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say it.”

“Stones and bones; snow and frost; seeds and beans and polliwogs. Paths and twigs, assorted kisses, We all know who Susie misses .”

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. 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.”

″ It was an elbow. The Gilbert’s dog found it. ”

“None of us wants to die. But it’s a possibility, and if you don’t accept that, it’s going to be in the back of your head the whole time, and you’re not going to be able to function. So you accept it, you realize that you’re not going to be able to talk to your family possibly ever again.”

“You’re letting your emotions cloud your judgement, and it’s going to get you killed.”

“There’s no escape From death’s embrace, though you lead it on a merry chase.”

″‘For that week, she didn’t let me out of her arms.’ ‘Of course not, why would she? You were tiny and scrawny and fuzzy, and also the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen, excepting my own.‘”

“Every morning when I wake up, now, I regard it as having another borrowed day.”

“In spite of having lived with death all these years, in spite of having walked a tightrope of bare existence across an endless maw of death- in spite of that he couldn’t understand it.”

“We saw the light in her eyes we have been looking for ever since. ”

“Personal death still was a thing beyond comprehension.”

“You dead awhile there, mon.”

″‘Don’t you see?’ Lito said. ‘The Jewish people on the ship were seeking asylum, just like us. They needed a place to hide from Hitler. From the Nazis. Mañana, we told them. We’ll let you in mañana. But we never did.’ Lito was crying now, distraught. ‘We sent them back to Europe and Hitler and the Holocaust. Back to their deaths. How many of them died because we turned them away? Because I was just doing my job?‘”

“For now, just think of death as a transformation—a bit more radical than puberty, but nothing to get particularly upset about. It’s just one of the body’s changes. When it happens, it happens. The warrior neither seeks death nor flees from it.”

“He spent several days deciding on the artifacts. Much longer than he had spent deciding to kill himself, and approximately the same time required to get that many reds. He would be found lying on his back, on his bed, with a copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (which would prove he had been a misunderstood superman rejected by the masses and so, in a sense, murdered by their scorn) and an unfinished letter to Exxon protesting the cancellation of his gas credit card. That way he would indict the system and achieve something by his death, over and above what the death itself achieved. Actually, he was not as sure in his mind what the death achieved as what the two artifacts achieved; but anyhow it all added up...”

“Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness and truth? ”

“I remember my mother when she was dyin’, looked all shrunk up and gray. I asked her if she was afraid. She just shook her head. I was afraid to touch the death I seen in her. I couldn’t find nothin’ beautiful or uplifting about her goin’ back to God. I heard of people talk about immortality, but I ain’t seen it....I wondered how it’d be like when I died, what it’d be like to know this breath now was the last one you was ever gonna draw. I just hope I can meet it the same way she did, with the same... calm. ‘Cause that’s where it’s hidden - the immortality I hadn’t seen.”

When compared to the fact that he might very well be dead by this time tomorrow, whether he was courageous or not today was pointless, empty. When compared to the fact that he might be dead tomorrow, everything was pointless. Life was pointless. Whether he looked at a tree or not was pointless. It just didn’t make any difference. It was pointless to the tree, it was pointless to every man in his outfit, pointless to everybody in the whole world. Who cared? It was not pointless only to him; and when he was dead, when he ceased to exist, it would be pointless to him too.”

“Sir, I’m sorry, but your wife had an accident this morning, apparently testing a baby-bottle heater. There was an electrical short, and, uh ... well, she died sir. I’m sorry.”

My dad held me up to look at her. ‘It’s like being asleep,’ he whispered, but she looked no more asleep than a piece of lumbar. She looked dead as a doornail.”

“Master Lan approached the dragon timidly. He held the lamp in one hand and a bamboo stick in the other, ready to defend himself. His work silk slipper squelched in the dragon droppings. The beast roared again, a sound that made the girl want to curl up in a ball and weep.”

“At that point in my life, I had encountered death only in fiction. I had heard about other people’s relatives dying. But I had never seen death up close. I had never held it.”