life and death Quotes

“Being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger.”

“O people of the earth, men and women born and made of the elements, but with the spirit of the Divine within you, rise from your sleep of ignorance! Be sober and thoughtful. Realize that your home is not on the earth but in the Light. Why have you delivered yourselves unto death, having power to partake of immortality?”

“Know thyself deathless and able to know all things, all arts, sciences, the way of every life. Become higher than the highest height and lower than the lowest depth. Amass in thyself all senses of animals, fire, water, dryness and moistness. Think of thyself in all places at the same time, earth, sea, sky, not yet born, in the womb, young, old, dead, and in the after death state.”

“David drove Henrietta nearly twenty miles to get [to Hopkins], not because they preferred it, but because it was the only major hospital for miles that treated black patients. This was the era of Jim Crow—when black people showed up at white-only hospitals, the staff was likely to send them away, even it if meant they might die in the parking lot”

“This not only meant that you were scarred for life but that you could never escape from them, because escaping with the carving of the rebels’ initials was asking for death, as soldiers would kill you without any questions and militant civilians would do the same.”

“I wish you all a long and happy life. ”

“That’s death and life, you see. We all shine on. You just have to release your hearts, alert your senses, and pay attention. A leaf, a star, a song, a laugh. Notice the little things, because somebody is reaching out to you. Qualcuno ti ama. Somebody loves you.”

“It did not lead him to meditate upon ... man’s frailty ... able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold. ”

“You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was...”

“Mommy staggered about in an emotional stupor for nearly a year. But while she weebled and wobbled and leaned, she did not fall.”

“The greatest sin a person can do to another is to take away that life. Next to that, all the rule and religions in the world are secondary; mere words and beliefs that people choose to believe and kill and hate by. My life won’t be lived that way, and neither, I hope, will my children’s. I left for New York happy in the knowledge that my grandmother had not suffered and died for nothing.”

“Let this be my final lesson. Everyone and everything has a time to die.”

“Maybe it’s being alive that makes them lie, and being almost not alive makes me sort of accidentally truthful”

“The Clayr saw me, the Wallmaker made me, the King quenched me, the Abhorsen wields me so that no Dead shall walk in Life. For this is not their path.”

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

“Instantly, she turned on her left heel and began racing back to the border with Life, drawing her sword. [...] Sabriel reached the border and, with a furious thrust of will, her spirit emerged back into Life.”

“If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?”

“Beware, Underlanders, time hangs by a thread. The hunters are hunted, white water runs red. The Gnawers will strike to extinguish the rest. The hope of the hopeless resides in a quest. An Overland warrior, a son of the sun, May bring us back light, he may bring us back none. But gather your neighbors and follow his call Or rats will most surely devour us all. Two over, two under, of royal descent, Two flyers, two crawlers, two spinners assent. One gnawer beside and one lost up ahead. And eight will be left when we count up the dead. The last who will die must decide where he stands. The fate of the eight is contained in his hands. So bid him take care, bid him look where he leaps, As life may be death and death life again reaps.”

“In one horrible moment the last piece of the prophecy became clear. So bid him take care, bid him look where he leaps, As life may be death and death life again reaps. He had to leap, and by his death, the others would live. That was it. That was what Sandwich had been trying to say all along, and by now he believed in Sandwich. He put on a final burst of speed, just like the coach taught him in track. He gave everything he had. In the last few steps before the canyon he felt a sharp pain in the back of his leg, and then the ground gave way under his feet. Gregor the Overlander leaped.”

“The odds is gone, And there is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting moon.”

“Heavy matters! heavy matters! but look thee here, boy. Now bless thyself: thou mettest with things dying, I with things newborn.”

“What am I going to regret? My mind cycles through visions: my mom alone in my white room wondering where everyone she’s ever loved went. My mom alone in a green field staring down at my grave and my dad’s grave and my brother’s grave. My mom dying all alone in that house.”

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

“What you are, I once was. What I am, you will become.”

“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?”

“Antony Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness I’th’posture of a whore. ”

“The stone is strong, Bran told himself, the roots of the trees go deep, and under the ground the Kings of Winter sit their thrones. So long as those remained, Winterfell remained. It was not dead, just broken. Like me, he thought. I’m not dead either. ”

“I had it all wrong . . . Before I found you, I thought the only way to hold on was to find something to live for. It isn’t. To hold on, you have to find something you’re willing to die for.”

“Jesus’ suffering and death brought joy and life. His humiliation brought glory; his rejection brought a community of love.”

“Sometimes I think I might be the last human on Earth. Which means I’m the last human in the universe.”

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.”

″‘Thank you! Thank you!’ Isabel cried. Her heart ached with gratitude toward these people. Just a moment’s kindness from each of them might mean the difference between death and survival for her mother and everyone else on the little raft.”

“Life ... is only heavy and none else; there is only the one trip, all heavy. Heavy that leads to the grave. For everyone and everything.”

“In order to rise from its own ashes a phoenix first must burn.”

“It does not matter where his body lies, for it is grass; but where his spirit is, it will be good to be.”

“People, shadows, good, bad, Heaven, Hell: all of these were names, labels, that was all. Humans had created these opposites: Nature recognized no opposites. Even life and death weren’t opposites in Nature: one was merely an extension of the other.”

“Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices.”

″ ‘Those boys looked mean, like they’d start a fire or something like that. That’s why I hollered at them like I did.’ ‘I see. Ima Dean, can you hear me or have your ears gone bad on you again?’ ‘No’m, I can hear you. You’re mad at me, aren’t you?’ ‘Why, no. Why should I be? It’s all right to holler at strangers. I always do. If they run up to you and stick a knife in your ribs, well, what does that matter? We’re Christians. We know this is not the only life.’ ”

“Please, Miss Lockhart, take care, and heed this warning. For the sake of my friendship with your father- for the sake of your own life- come, as soon as you can, and hear what I have to say.”

“But all of us must have something to be proud of, and Doodle had become mine. I did not know then that pride is a wonderful, terrible thing, a seed that bears two vines, life and death.”

“The Sun was pouring his nourishment onto the street and into the buildings, and when I looked over to the spot where Beggar Man and the dog had died, I saw they weren’t dead at all—that a special kind of nourishment from the Sun had saved them.”

“There’s something in that wind and in the hoast beyont that sounds, and looks, and tastes, and smells like death. It’s in the air; I feel it comin’. Lord, make me answer cheerful when my call comes!”

“But tell me,” said Beauchamp, “what is life? Is it not a halt in Death’s anteroom?”

“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.”

“Come, that’s capital,” he said to Sonia, going back and looking brightly at her. “God give peace to the dead, the living have still to live. That is right, isn’t it?”

Ever since, by his beloved brother’s deathbed, Levin had first glanced into the questions of life and death in the light of these new convictions, as he called them, which had during the period from his twentieth to his thirty-fourth year imperceptibly replaced his childish and youthful beliefs—he had been stricken with horror, not so much of death, as of life, without any knowledge of whence, and why, and how, and what it was. The physical organization, its decay, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, evolution, were the words which usurped the place of his old belief. These words and the ideas associated with them were very well for intellectual purposes. But for life they yielded nothing, and Levin felt suddenly like a man who has changed his warm fur cloak for a muslin garment, and going for the first time into the frost is immediately convinced, not by reason, but by his whole nature that he is as good as naked, and that he must infallibly perish miserably.

I determined to depart, yet live—to leave the world, yet continue to exist—