Best 9776 quotes in «death quotes» category

She could almost feel him prodding her; urging her to go on. As the wails of pain and torment assulted her ears, she knew that's exactly what she would do until the war was over and she could crawl into a quiet, dark corner and mourn for the part of her that had died with him.

She could stand to think that life’s experiences, good and bad, died with the body, but she couldn’t bear to believe that the dreams vanished too, those exquisite flights of reverie that never actually happened. All those experiences you can have for free. How could they burn and turn to ash? She would disappear one day, too, both her flesh and the woman she dreamed herself to be.

She did not know how to grieve in the context of her life.

She died in my arms, saying, "I don't want to die." That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.

She did not have time to wonder about his being late. He died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood out in front of the hardware store... He had not even had time to get into the store...

She died in my arms saying, “I don’t want to die.” That is what death is like. It doesn’t matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn’t matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we could never have war anymore.

She’d sworn she wouldn’t end up like her little brother, but loneliness didn’t arrive with flashing bulbs and a warning label. The descent was as simple and complex as a faked smile, white lies about being “okay,” and the nod and acceptance as her own peers didn’t delve deeper, shutting the coffin lid for her.

She didn’t want to die. She couldn’t imagine wanting to die…Death was for—for other people.

She did not move. Nor did she scream or faint; her only actions were to draw back the hem of her dress from where it brushed the shiny dome of his skull and to breathe deeply, several times, with her eyes shut. Her father had taught her this as a remedy for panic. He had taught her well; it worked.

She didn't struggle and so she didn't grow

She fed him scraps from her ragbag because words were all that were left now. Perhaps he could use them to pay the ferryman. Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. Full fathom five thy father lies. Little lamb, who made thee? Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie. On that best portion of a good man's life, his little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love. Farther and farther, all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. The air rippled and shimmered. Time narrowed to a pinpoint. It was about to happen. Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

She gave a little sob deep in her throat. 'Call it a prophecy, call it a prediction, call it fate - call it what you will. I fought against it hard enough, God knows. But the evidence of my own eyes, my own ears, my own senses, is too much for me. And the time's too short now. I'm afraid to take a chance. I haven't got the nerve to bluff it out, to sit pat. You don't gamble with a human life. Today's the 13th, isn't it? It's too close to the 14th; there isn't time-margin enough left now to be skeptical, to keep it to myself any longer. Day by day I've watched him cross off the date on his desk-calendar, drawing nearer to death. There are only two leaves left now, and I want help! Because on the 14th - at the exact stroke of midnight, as the 15th is beginning -' She covered her face with both arms and shook silently. 'Yes?' urged McManus. 'Yes?' 'He's become convinced - oh, and almost I have too - that at exactly midnight on the 14th he's to die. Not just die but meet his death in full vigor and health, a death rushing down to him from the stars he was born under - rushing down even before he existed at all. A death inexorable, inescapable. A death horrid and violent, inconceivable here in this part of the world where we live.' She took a deep, shuddering breath, whispered the rest of it. 'Death at the jaws of a lion.' ("Speak To Me Of Death")

She gave herself a hard twist and fell into a sitting position, staring at me with those maggot-filled doll’s eyes.

She glanced around at the tombstones. “You’re surrounded by death here. Way too depressing. You really might want to think about getting another job.” “You see death and sadness in these sunken patches of dirt, I see lives lived fully and the good deeds of past generations influencing the future ones.

She got on a plane to see a client in California and somewhere over Colorado, the pilot somehow missed the sky.

She felt a little better about Leonard out here in the country. It was just being close to nature, she supposed. In the country you felt as you never could in town the return of spring after winter. You felt a sort of pulse in the earth which proved that nothing dies, that everything comes back in beauty. Leonard was coming back... in some place beautiful enough to pay him for leaving the world. God knew all about his music, too. He would use that music someplace.

She had replied, "You're a survivor, too, Willard." "Well," he had said, " I used to think I was one, Mrs. Kaplan. Now I'm not so sure. I guess everybody who isn't dead yet is a survivor." "Now, now," she had said, "let's talk about something pleasant. Let's talk about Baltra." But the blood supply to his brain must have been momentarily dependable then, because *Wait had continued to follow this line of reasoning. He'd even given a dry little laugh. He'd said, "There are all these people bragging about how they're survivors, as though that's something very special. But the only kind of person who can't say that is a corpse." "There, there," she'd said.

She had dispersed. She was the garden at Prem Nivas (soon to be entered into the annual Flower Show), she was Veena's love of music, Pran's asthma, Maan's generosity, the survival of some refugees four years ago, the neem leaves that would preserve quilts stored in the great zinc trunks of Prem Nivas, the moulting feather of some pond-heron, a small unrung brass bell, the memory of decency in an indecent time, the temperament of Bhaskar's great-grandchildren. Indeed, for all the Minsisster of Revenue's impatience with her, she was his regret. And it was right that she should continue to be so, for he should have treated her better while she lived, the poor, ignorant, grieving fool.

She had been born with a different name, to a woman with laughing eyes and warmly whispered words of love who’d died degraded and afraid on a misty Irish morning.

She had thought he was dead, or at least not totally alive, and you could not still be dating someone you believe had an autopsy, so it was not really cheating.

She had to save herself from every last one of them. All of them, the people at the orphanage, the foster care system, the middle school, they were all outsiders and strangers and a possible threat.....The counselor couldn't prove otherwise.

She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking.

She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking.

She held the woman's hand but the hand was now simply weight. She listened as the men returned north toward the gate from which they'd first entered. They passed close to her tent. It seemed an endless procession, thousands strong. She imagined them not as men, not even as human, but as a dark, daylong season: a primal winter.

She is here. And she comes to you, and she does not speak, and the others do not notice her, and she takes your hand, and you ready yourself to die, eyes open, aware this is all an illusion, a last aroma cast up by the chemical stew that is your brain, which will soon cease to function, ad there will be nothing, and you are ready, ready to die well, ready to die like a man, like a woman, like a human, for despite all else you have loved, you have loved your father and your mother and your brother and your sister and your son and, yes, your ex-wife and you have loved the pretty girl, you have been beyond yourself, and so you have courage, and you have dignity, and you have calmness in the face of terror, and awe, and the pretty girl holds your hand, and you contain her, and this book, and me writing it, and I too contain you, who may not even be born, you inside me inside you, though not in a creepy way, and so may you, may I, may we, so may all of us confront the end.

She is in the stars. She is the queen of night.

She is no longer a person in his life; instead, she is a person that other people will remind him of.

She is drawn to the river, and all its hideous, dead-eyed treasures: rot-bloated cats, and cold-meat corpses of unwanted infants, eels plucking at their tender fingers and toes.

She knew that the dead hid pieces of themselves in the world. They buried organs in the living. They stuffed memories into trees and clouds and other innocuous things.

She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory-you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he's all out of kilter.

…She kissed me on my thin lips and all my words were pushed back into my mouth. “I don’t want to die,” she whispered, “but I need to lose the shackles of this multitude of hearts.

She knew for a fact that she wasn't going to sit around and wait for some miracle to happen. She wasn't going to watch the storm in front of her and pretend like nothing had happened. Yes, Allah is expecting her to be patient and keep on marching forward

She knew that Evin thought she had chosen because of him. Because somewhere, deep down, she loved him. And maybe someday - if she did end up loving him - she would tell him the truth. That it hand't been about love. It had, in the end, been about death. About who needed it, and who was ashamed of it, and who celebrated it. About who might, someday, move past it.

She knew what he offered. He would kill her first, with the gun or the knife or his fists if he had to, and make certain she was never trapped in that cage again. From another man this might be terrifying, that he would so blithely consider murdering his companion. But she understood that from Hatcher this was tantamount to an offer of marriage. This was what he could do for her, how he showed he cared.

She lasted three months, then passed on a September day when everything seemed split open with sunlight.

She left, never to return. I planted a tree and a seed each time I thought of her. I grew a small forest and a large garden and had no one to give the orchids to.

She lit the candelabras which stood on the mantelpiece. Placed at the head of the bead, on a side-table, they looked like two burning bushes, their flames solemn and inextinguishable. But beneath that avalanche of light the dead man became hideous: the pale head displayed a whiteness more livid than the bedsheet, ghastly against the cambric of the pillow; pits of shadow were hollowed out under the eyes and his nose was villainously elongated, and even the mouth seemed wicked – his mouth, which was so very gentle!

She lay on the leaves Staring at the sky while her Bones decay and rot. 2-29-2016

She likes to write messages on balloons and send them to the sky. She takes out a black Magic Marker and she starts writing on the dozen or so balloons, one for each member of our family who died. She doesn't think she can write well and asks me not to read her notes. She likes to think they'll soar all the way to heaven. I think she knows they end up tangled in power lines or deflated in a pile of orange leaves in someone's backyard miles away, but I can never bring myself to say that to her. I've often wondered what they must think, those people who find our balloons. I've wondered if they read the messages and understand what they mean. I remember watching those balloons as a little boy, each fall, wondering if someday I, too, would be nothing but a balloon in the sky, soaring toward the sun until I began to fall slowly back to earth and into the hands of a stranger.

She leaves my side and heads deeper into the apartment singing, “—if the spirit tries to hide, its temple far away… a copper for those they ask, a diamond for those who stay.

She'll be waiting for me. Never before had he wanted immortality so badly.

She might do what the mortals did, and strain to convince herself that the death of her Boy and the loss of her husband had happened for some reason, that some restitution would be made for her, that she would be paid for her suffering with a truer and more tolerable understanding of the world, but she didn't think she had the muscles for it.

She nailed it to the wall with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence has always been written.

Shema Israel Adonai Ehohenu Adonai Echad.

She needs to wake up," said Boots. "Hazard is crying. When does she wake up?" Gregor could not find it within him to give his standard reply. To pretend that in a short time Thalia would be back with them, laughing and happy. And somehow it seemed wrong to try. Boots was getting older. Very soon, she would begin to realize the truth on her own, anyway. "She's not going wake up," he told her. "She's dead." "She doesn't wake up?" said Boots. "No, not this time," said Gregor. "This time, she had to go away." Boots looked around at all their faces, at Hazard crying. "Where did she go?" No one had an answer. "Where is Thalia when she doesn't wake up?" The question hung in the air for an eternity. Finally, it was Howard who spoke up. "Why, she's in your heart, Boots." "My heart?" said Boots, putting both hands on her chest. "Yes. That's where she lives now," said Howard. "She can fly away?" asked Boots, pressing her palms tightly against her heart as if to keep Thalia from escaping. "Oh, no, she will stay there forever," said Howard.

She prayed to the gods of love and the gods of destruction, for they are one and the same.

She played me with a bad hand, and I fell for it every time.

She pulls her hand away and Damian feels the sensation of falling, a somersault into a foreign abyss where a girl with eggplant hair and a hoop in her brow waits in the darkness.

She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had loved him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past. But she had to give in to the intransigence of death.

She’s a-going," he says. "Her mind is set on it." It’s a hard life on women, for a fact. Some women. I mind my mammy lived to be seventy or more. Worked every day, rain or shine; never a sick day since her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her and then she went and taken that lace-trimmed night-gown she had had forty-five years and never wore out of the chest and put it on and laid down on the bed and pulled the covers up and shut her eyes. "You all will have to look out for pa the best you can," she said. "I’m tired.