When I first accepted my own death, the world was intantly changed. It was a completely new sensation. It took something like this to finally open my eyes. Before, I had simply shut myself off so that I could not see, could not hear. What had I been ...
I've spent all the years since full of guilt and misery, even though I didn't remember it. I've let it run my thoughts, my plans, my whole life. But the experience doesn't own me. I own it. What I do with it is up to me, just like what Molly does wit...
The conversation progressed, bumper-car style, to a very heated discussion about death and the survival of the soul. It amazes me that we, as a species, can argue so fervently over something that is, when all is said and done, unknowable and unprovab...
I am now convinced that children should not be subjected to the frightfulness of the Christian religion [...]. If the concept of a father who plots to have his own son put to death is presented to children as beautiful and as worthy of society's admi...
Every work cancels the dark. Every work is a hymn from the other side of memory to a memory that is spellbound. Beauty is death's gift to vulgar life so that it can live in beauty.
I first became aware of death when my father held me up to see the view from the top of the Empire State Building. I thought that if he moved me just one foot over, I would die. But I trusted him to hold me tight. I wouldn’t fall over, and he would...
How can non-existence get sick of itself? Everytime you wake up, you appear again out of nowhere. And so does everything else. Death just means the replacement of the usual morning waking with something else, something quite impossible even to think ...
On the black cotton was printed a white skull and crossbones - the skull head grinning as if he were mocking her. The nun struggled for her breath and wanted to drop the evil little banner, but her fingers wouldn't let go of it - making her stare int...
When you have dogs, you witness their uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, their bright desire to make the most of life in spite of the limitations of age and disease, their calm awareness of the approaching end when their final hours come. They ac...
It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the...
I held out my book. It was precious to me, as were all the things I'd written; even where I despised their inadequacy there was not one I would disown. Each tore its way from my entrails. Each had shortened my life, killed me with its own special lit...
For Blake, the news was as a storm that tore him apart. How dare an enemy soldier hurt his father, how could an enemy soldier kill his father. This just could not have happened. He would have to do something about it. He would have to avenge his fath...
In all, 86 per cent of the increased life expectancy was due to decreases in infectious diseases. And the bulk of the decline in infectious disease deaths occurred prior to the age of antibiotics. Less than 4 per cent of the total improvement in life...
raped reason. He implanted in the dominant schools of philosophy the attractive belief that there can be discrete separation between mind and body. This led quite naturally to corollary delusions such as the one that power can be understood without a...
sunset and evening star hunching and bending sleeping and slipping virus pneumonia coughing and crying hope in the small things heaven looks brighter aching and falling earth is still darkness slip into sleeping sleepings of death dead now and buried...
She wondered If I had woken up, would I have smelled his sadness, his desperation, and his detachment? His death, her breath. He told her once, she remembers, these two words have no other rhyme but each other. If she could go back, she thinks -- She...
Ah—now you think I have been lying to you, that this is only a story. It has a king in it. And while a story with Death might be true, a story with a king in it is always a fairy tale. But remember, this comes from a time when kings were as common ...
...But this number, like all the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one. This does not mean some generic image of a Jew passing through some abstract notion of death 5.7 mill...
Maybe the conference was an inversion layer of another kind, bringing me face-to-face with old friends and old places. With cancer and the Gap and the Old Man, railing about newfangled players and spicy food. Bringing me face-to-face early with death...
The acrid odor of overloaded circuitry permeated the air, the horrid smell witness that at least one of his senses was working as sights and sounds became one with the unknown. Eventually he collapsed to the floor, wondering if he'd wake up in mortal...
Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you. What are you afraid of? Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret?
