To you, death does not simply end life. It steals away the sunsets you'll never see, the children you'll never hold, the wife you'll never love. It's frightening to almost lose your future, and it's heartbreaking to witness death snuff out other peop...
The music is happy; the laughter is happy. Everything feels ecstatic and desperate. Blurrily, I think of sex, and I think of death. I realize: Every moment of joyous celebration contains the seed of death.
In youth,' he said, speaking as if from a great distance, 'we believe, and the death of belief forces us to disavow all belief. But that disavowal, time softens, and if we do not believe, we hope. Belief is easier to kill, somehow, and its death easi...
The quotation falsely attributed to Stalin, 'One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,' gets the numbers wrong but captures a real fact about human psychology. (p. 220)
But something he'd come to realize on the roof, leaning out, thinking about what would happen if he leaned too far, was that a boy's life could still matter to himself.
The Indian criminal justice system was a market like garbage, Abdul now understood. Innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags.
You can't escape an assasin," He leaned forward, shadows swallowing his eyes. "Hangings, bumbling bureaucrats, dishonest crewman, jail - those you can talk your way out of, you try hard enough. But this kind of death is the is the only kind of death.
I believe that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.
But I was born in the image of God, a man, a creator, with power of life and death, a father, blessed with the gift of the seed of Adam, a sower of seed, to bring forth generations of new life. This I was, and envying a kettle.
Why did you laugh right before you lost consciousness.” “Death’s an adventure. I lived big. Rigor mortis makes your face stick. So, who knew how to thaw me?” “Death’s an insult.” “At least an affront,” I agree.
I believe in a benevolent God not because He created the Grand Canyon or Michelangelo, but because He gave us snacks.
You may die a hundred deaths without a break in the mental turmoil. Or, you may keep your body and die only in the mind. The death of the mind is the birth of wisdom.
Over time our tears will help heal the pain and soothe the hurt.
All this is always for nothing," he says. "Don't you understand that yet? Every death is a pointless death; every battle should have been avoided. But if Edward can defeat the queen, and imprison her along with her husband, then it will indeed be ove...
It came to Mary now that her mother had been right, after all; Mary had been born for this. In sixteen years she'd shot along the shortest route she could find between life and death, as the crow flew.
The trees are a thousand times taller than me, and hundreds of years older, and the rocks and leaves and plants and animals never do anything silly like kill each other or fall in love or grow up.
Wars are times of intense technological transformation, because societies invest – sometimes with extensive borrowing – when and where matters of life and death are at stake.
That's the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything's dark and you can't see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive.
It comes down to this: we're pieces of equipment To be counted and signed for. On occasion some of us break down, And those parts which can't be salvaged Are replaced with other GI parts, that's all.
A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.
There is a legitimate argument over whether the death penalty effectively deters violent crime, although my personal observation is that not one of the criminals who have been executed over the years has ever killed again.
