Death Quotes

“My original inspiration was my mom: a few years after the death of my dad, she started dating one my teachers!”

“As one of the first editors at 'Outside' magazine in 1975, it was my contention that most American writing going back to James Fennimore Cooper and then through Twain up to Hemingway had been outdoor writing. At that time, adventure writing meant stuff like 'Saga' or 'Argosy.' 'Death Race with the Jungle Leper Army!' That kind of thing.”

“Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and it has power," Tuek said. "You might find the line between life and death among the Fremen to be too sharp and quick.”

“Themes of descent often turn on the struggle between the titanic and the demonic within the same person or group. In Moby Dick, Ahab’s quest for the whale may be mad and “monomaniacal,” as it is frequently called, or even evil so far as he sacrifices his crew and ship to it, but evil or revenge are not the point of the quest. The whale itself may be only a “dumb brute,” as the mate says, and even if it were malignantly determined to kill Ahab, such an attitude, in a whale hunted to the death, would certainly be understandable if it were there. What obsesses Ahab is in a dimension of reality much further down than any whale, in an amoral and alienating world that nothing normal in the human psyche can directly confront.The professed quest is to kill Moby Dick, but as the portents of disaster pile up it becomes clear that a will to identify with (not adjust to) what Conrad calls the destructive element is what is really driving Ahab. Ahab has, Melville says, become a “Prometheus” with a vulture feeding on him. The axis image appears in the maelstrom or descending spiral (“vortex”) of the last few pages, and perhaps in a remark by one of Ahab’s crew: “The skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world.” But the descent is not purely demonic, or simply destructive: like other creative descents, it is partly a quest for wisdom, however fatal the attaining of such wisdom may be. A relation reminiscent of Lear and the fool develops at the end between Ahab and the little black cabin boy Pip, who has been left so long to swim in the sea that he has gone insane. Of him it is said that he has been “carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro . . . and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps.”Moby Dick is as profound a treatment as modern literature affords of the leviathan symbolism of the Bible, the titanic-demonic force that raises Egypt and Babylon to greatness and then hurls them into nothingness; that is both an enemy of God outside the creation, and, as notably in Job, a creature within it of whom God is rather proud. The leviathan is revealed to Job as the ultimate mystery of God’s ways, the “king over all the children of pride” (41:34), of whom Satan himself is merely an instrument. What this power looks like depends on how it is approached. Approached by Conrad’s Kurtz through his Antichrist psychosis, it is an unimaginable horror: but it may also be a source of energy that man can put to his own use. There are naturally considerable risks in trying to do so: risks that Rimbaud spoke of in his celebrated lettre du voyant as a “dérèglement de tous les sens.” The phrase indicates the close connection between the titanic and the demonic that Verlaine expressed in his phrase poète maudit, the attitude of poets who feel, like Ahab, that the right worship of the powers they invoke is defiance.”

“Every hour you sit at work increases your mortality 11 percent. Think about that.”

“The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.”

“For all his secrecy and fear of being seen, he was touched that we had observed him so closely, and with such love. He loved that we knew him. This is one reason people need to believe in God -- because we want someone to know us, truly, all the way through, even the worst of us.”

“The scene is dull. Tell him to put more life into his dying.”

“I know that throughout my life I have struggled to forgive my father. Now, as I get older, I wish most of all that he had been able to find a way to forgive himself.”

“There may be a theology without the Scriptures — a theology of nature, gathered by painful, and slow, and sometimes doubtful processes from what man sees around him in external nature and the course of history, and what he sees within him of nature and of grace. In like manner there may be and has been an astronomy of nature, gathered by man in his natural state without help from aught but his naked eyes, as he watched in the fields by night. But what is this astronomy of nature to the astronomy that has become possible through the wonderful appliances of our observatories? The Word of God is to theology as, but vastly more than, these instruments are to astronomy. It is the instrument which so far increases the possibilities of the science as to revolutionize it and to place it upon a height from which it can never more descend. What would be thought of the deluded man, who, discarding the new methods of research, should insist on acquiring all the astronomy which he would admit, from the unaided observation of his own myopic and astigmatic eyes? Much more deluded is he who, neglecting the instrument of God’s Word written, would confine his admissions of theological truth to what he could discover from the broken lights that play upon external nature, and the faint gleams of a dying or even a slowly reviving light, which arise in his own sinful soul. Ah, no! The telescope first made a real science of astronomy possible: and the Scriptures form the only sufficing source of theology.”

“I can wax boringly about the role of comedy in mitigating pain. For so many comedians, comedy comes out of personal despair. I'm not a very despairing person myself, but I do fear despair and the death of loved ones.”

“Whenever Christ calls us, his call leads us to death.”

“Admit it. You can't have everything. You can't do everything. You can't be everywhere. You are not omnipotent, you are mortal.”

“While a number of people have pointed out the various costs and drawbacks of sentience, few if any have taken the next step and wondered out loud if the whole damn thing isn't more trouble than it's worth. Of course it is, people assume; otherwise natural selection would have weeded it out long ago. And they're probably right. I hope they are. "Blindsight" is a thought experiment, a game of "Just suppose" and "What if". Nothing more.On the other hand, the dodos and the Steller sea cows could have used exactly the same argument to prove their own superioirity, a thousand years ago: "if we're so unfit, why haven't we gone extinct?" Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The biggest boys on the block at any given time aren't necessarily the fittest, or the most efficient, and the game isn't over. The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death. And so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven't yet lost.”

“...Wrapped in the overcoat, he dropped on the seat and faced the eternal verities of sky and sea. No land was intruding. It was the bowl of the sky closing down; the smooth wash of the sea rolling in; and away in the distance a faint red glow marked the spot where the sun threw its light on a world that was steadily turning from it.There Jamie did some more thinking. He was having plenty of mental exercise in those days. He still thought Death, but at least he had a manlier thought in facing it. And when he thought Life he did not think of himself, or upbraid his government, or pity other wounded men. He thought merely of that one thing he might possibly do and what it might possibly be that would give him some justification, when he faced his Maker, for the spending of his latter days.”

“When she came to her senses again she cut off all contact with him. It had not been easy, but she had steeled herself. The last time she saw him she was standing on a platform in the tunnelbana at Gamla Stan and he was sitting in the train on his way downtown. She had stared at him for a whole minute and decided that she did not have a grain of feeling left, because it would have been the same as bleeding to death. Fuck you.”

“So, is there an afterlife, and if so, what will it be like? I don't have a clue. But I am confident that the one who has buoyed us up in life will also buoy us up through death. We die into God. What more that means, I do not know. But that is all I need to know.”

“When my mother passed away several years ago—well, wait a minute. Actually, she didn’t ‘pass away.’ She died. Something about that verb, ‘to pass away’ always sounds to me as if someone just drifted through the wallpaper. No, my mother did not pass away. She definitely died.”

“As I thought of these things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many dreams.”

“In the matter of war, ask this question to yourself and to your own fellow country men: Have you ever seen any politician in your country without legs, without arms, without eyes after war? No! You can’t see such a thing because honourless politicians always stay in the safe ports while they send others to the zone of death!”