fear of death Quotes

“We are so afraid of the sight of death . . . As soon as someone dies in a hospital, they pull the sheets up over their head, and they wheel the body to some chute and push it down. . . . It’s not contagious, you know. Death is as natural as life. It’s part of the deal we made.”

″Basically, disappointment, embarrassment, and all these places where we just cannot feel good are a sort of death. We’ve just lost our ground completely; we are unable to hold it together and feel that we’re on top of things. Rather than realizing that it takes death for there to be birth, we just fight against the fear of death.″

″All anxiety, all dissatisfaction, all the reasons for hoping that our experience could be different are rooted in our fear of death. Fear of death is always in the background. As the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said, ‘Life is like getting into a boat that’s just about to sail out to sea and sink.‴

“It seemed to me that everyone knows they will die one day. My feeling was nobody can stop death; it doesn’t matter if it comes from a Talib or cancer. So I should do whatever I want to do.”

Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs.

″ ‘You know that is not true,’ the monster said. ‘You know that your truth, the one that you hide, Conor O’Malley, is the thing you are most afraid of.’ ”

“The result? A sense of inner fragility and overriding vulnerability. She discovers she’s not immune to unfortunate events, and the fear of subsequent similar losses may become a defining characteristic of her personality.”

“Even so, I rather think they understand one thing—fear. The fear of pain and the fear of death.”

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

“Poor Death, no match for the mighty altered carbon technologies of data storage and retrieval arrayed against him. Once we lived in terror of his arrival. Now we flirt outrageously with his sombre dignity, and beings like these won’t even let him in the tradesman’s entrance.”

“You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what’s left to you.”

“Ever since Olly came into my life there’ve been two Maddys: the one who lives through books and doesn’t want to die, and the one who lives and suspects that death will be a small price to pay for it. The first Maddy is surprised at the direction of her thoughts. The second Maddy, the one from the Hawaii photograph? She’s like a god—impervious to cold, famine, disease, natural and man-made disasters. She’s impervious to heartbreak. The second Maddy knows that this pale half life is not really living.”

″... a call went out from one of the overwhelmed Americans: ‘If you don’t get here soon, we’re all going to die!‘”

“A feeling normally as individual as the ache of separation from those one loves suddenly became a feeling in which all shared alike and-together with fear-the greatest affliction of the long period of exile that lay ahead.”

“But religion helps us to face our own mortality.” I spoke to her like she was the only person in the room. She stared at me through a curtain of razor cut bangs. “I agree. Religion is a wonderful pacifier for people who are afraid of death. Every religion—”

“Amy left me her diary. She was afraid to die young like her mother. She was afraid to die. She talks about it in her diary. That’s why I know she didn’t commit suicide.”

“In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside. The more emotional Pathans are powerless to resist. All rational considerations are forgotten.”

‘My child,’ said Vasiliki, ‘may God preserve you from ever wishing for that death which today you so much dread!’

“Here one would think that to get out of all the baseness and the mess, one’s own and other people’s, would be a good thing, and yet I’m afraid of death, awfully afraid of death.”