38 Quotes Tagged: Death

Sometimes to live again, we have to let ourselves die completely. We have to let ourselves become completely, utterly new. When grief rings, surrender. There is nothing else to do. The delivery is utter transformation.

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.

Life is profligate, blind at this level unconcerned with notions of justice. It can afford to waste multitudes.

We might have thought that the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust were enough to innoculate us against the toxins there revealed and unleashed. But our resistance quickly fades. A new generation gladly abandons its critical and skeptical faculties.

If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.

Death is a state of mind — -many people on Earth spend their entire lives dead.

As a robot I could have lived forever. But I tell you all today I would rather die a man, than live for all eternity as a machine.

The worn tired stars say
you shall die early and die dirty.
The clean cold stars say
you shall die late and die clean.

The runaway stars say
you shall never die at all,
never at all.

It was odd how that last deed caught the imagination of the world. All that Andrew had done before had not swayed them. But he had finally accepted even death to be human, and the sacrifice was too great to be rejected.

We live in a fix-it society with the technology to repair many broken things at our fingertips. We forget that we've all been deliberately designed to "end" one day. When that ending happens, there's nothing to fix. . . This is not giving up, or giving in. It's acceptance.

Did God get out of bed one morning and draw back the curtains (Reggie's imaginary God led a very domesticated life) and think, 'A drowning in a hotel swimming pool, I fancy. We haven't had that one in a while.

Individual asexual organisms die by mistake - when the run out of something, or when they experience a lethal accident. Sexual organisms are designed to die, preprogrammed to do so. Death serves as a poignant reminder of our limitations and frailties - and of the bond with our ancestors who, in a way, died that we might live.

The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.

Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.

All say, “How hard it is that we have to die”—a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live