Best 741 quotes in «death and dying quotes» category

The afterlife is mostly a dream state where you confront the good and evil within you. The text repeatedly explains that the images the deceased sees and the sounds one hears are hallucinations created by one's own thoughts.

The amazing feeling of being alive beautifully conquers the fear of death

The best gift your true friends will ever give you is carry your casket with respect. So be good to those you consider exceptional.

The biggest magic of the world is DEATH.

The casket was lined with lovely velvet, which must have felt lovely even to the dead, but the glowing man continued to rip up the casket.

The central question of any execution: do you want the hood on or off? Would you rather see it coming? Or would you rather simply drift away, cocooned in warm darkness, stinking of nothing but yourself? A kind, familiar place to hide in, just before the snap, the crackle? Or the pop?

The child's heart beat: but she was growing in the wrong place inside her extraordinary mother, south of safe...she and her mother were rushed to the hospital, where her mother was operated on by a brisk cheerful diminutive surgeon who told me after the surgery that my wife had been perhaps an hour from death from the pressure of the child growing outside the womb, the mother from the child growing, and the child from growing awry; and so my wife did not die, but our mysterious child did...Not uncommon, an ectopic pregnancy, said the surgeon...Sometimes, continued the surgeon, sometimes people who lose children before they are born continue to imagine the child who has died, and talk about her or him, it's such an utterly human thing to do, it helps deal with the pain, it's healthy within reason, and yes, people say to their other children that they actually do, in a sense, have a sister or brother, or did have a sister or brother, and she or he is elsewhere, has gone ahead, whatever the language of your belief or faith tradition. You could do that. People do that, yes. I have patients who do that, yes... One summer morning, as I wandered by a river, I remembered an Irish word I learned long ago, and now whenever I think of the daughter I have to wait to meet, I find that word in my mouth: dunnog, little dark one, the shyest and quietest and tiniest of sparrows, the one you never see but sometimes you sense, a flash in the corner of your eye, a sweet sharp note already fading by the time it catches your ear.

The courage to continue before the face of despair is the recognition in those eyes of darkness we find our own night vision. Women blessed with death-eyes are fearless.

‎"The days are hot and the dead lie unburied. We cannot fetch them all in, if we did we should not know what to do with them. The shells will bury them...

The dead only knows their world.

The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die.

The death of a lesser man is the death of all those who believe themselves to be greater.

The dying need only a hand to hold and a quiet in which to make their departure.

The erruption of feelings & emotions that follows a near-death exerience, or any event that causes us to stop & look deeply at the reality of our lives, is ripe with the potential for insight & clarity.

The earth is expertly designed to take back what it has created. Bodies left for carrion in enclosed, regulated spaces could be the answer to the environmental problems of burial and cremation. There is no limit to where our engagement with death can take us.

The ending shouldn't determine the meaning of anything, a story or a life. Logically, I don't think it can--didn't Heidegger say something to that effect? That the meaning of all our moments cannot be contingent upon an end-point over which we have no control? That if we are happy right now, that means something, even if we die tomorrow? Narrative integrity is overrated. I don't need to know that the story of my life has a happy ending to enjoy it. A good thing, too, because I hear all the characters die in the end.

The essence of death is discovered in the gap between one moment ceasing and another one beginning. That essence is the wakefulness that is our true nature.

The feeling of death is not as peaceful as they make it sound in movies and books. It was frightening and empty...I never want to feel it again.

The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m.

The greatest loss is the loss of life.

The greatest loss is the lost of life.

The living have to live with it. You don’t. Theirs is the grief or the gladness of your death, theirs is the loss or gain of it. Theirs is the pain and the pleasure of memory.

The little queen’s mother and father had said that she would live on, for a long time, and that her tears would magnify the life around her forever more, but they had not explained how she should go about going on.

The moment you will be most stiff is when you die - you never get stiffer than that. So you've got to sleep well, eat well and keep moving.

The loss of a loved one is like the loss of a part of oneself; an arm or a leg. At first, the pain is so physical that it is hard to ignore. The trauma is so intense that the mind finds it hard to cope with the loss. With time the pain eases, the body recovers and the brain figures out new ways to go on.

The man consummatig his life dies his death triumphantly,surrounded by men filled with hope and making solmn vows, thus one should learn to die. Friedrich Nietzsche - thus spoke zarathustra.

The mind is a useful tool but not a very good friend.

The man died inside cannot live outside. ‪

The moment of orgasm is like the first dramatic moment of birth when you draw breath and scream out that you are alive. It is hard to imagine the moment when you fade back into the vacuum and draw your last breath.

The music echoes in the emptiness. It reminds us where we came from and where we’re bound.

the only way to get over a death is by seeing it as a life completed, instead of a life interrupted.

Then I looked out onto the horizon myself and realized that loss is the same wherever you go: overwhelming, inexorable, deafening. How resilient human beings are that we can learn slowly to carry on when we are left all alone, left to fill the void as best we can. Or disappear into it.

Then his fingers trembled on her ankle—tightened around her foot. His head shifted, turning toward her. With a growl, she crashed the poker down onto his head. His hand jerked. A gurgling noise arose, not from his throat but from his chest, from deep down, as if he were fighting for something. Struggling. His eyes shifted toward her. Joan raised the poker again. The gurgling stopped—not abruptly but in a final, lingering, prolonged, exhalation of breath. His lungs gradually expelled every last atom of oxygen.

The only thing that can break the unbreakable is the unthinkable. I knew the moment I saw them alone in the waiting room that my worst fears were confirmed. They were all dead. I turned around and walked out. I didn't want to be there. I had to go outside. I couldn't breathe. When I reached the grass across from the parking lot, I fell to my knees. I didn't cry. Instead, I became physically ill. Over and over, my stomach repelling the truth that I refused to believe. When there was nothing left in me, I fell backward onto the grass and stared up at the sky, the stars staring back at me. Millions of stars staring back at the whole world. A world where parents die and brothers die and nothing stops to respect that fact. The whole universe just goes and goes as if nothing has happened, even when one person's entire life is forced to a complete halt.

The palliative care nurses welcome him: he's a spot of brightness, they claim he keeps the patients interested in life. "We don't think of the clients here as dying," one of them said to him on his first visit. "After all everyone's dying, just some of us more slowly.

The perfect metaphor," he said, "looming up suddenly out of nowhere in the middle of your maiden voyage, unseen until it is nearly upon you, unavoidable even when you try to swerve, unexpected even though there have been warnings all along. [...]

The picture enclosed here is of a hibiscus that has been flowering in the parlor window one bloom at a time for what seems like a year or more. It’s getting to where I don’t remember when there wasn’t a bud or two and a flower either out or on the way. This morning there is a fresh new flower just like the one in the picture, but right next to it is the one that was new yesterday and is already spent. I don’t know whether to be happy for the beautiful one or sad for the one that is gone. I guess if I wait until tomorrow I can be sad for the one that is so beautiful now. But how can I anticipate being sad for something that is so pretty? It’s really a good thing that people can only “see” the present because we are on the same train as a hibiscus except that we are on a longer trip. I’ve told you before but it fits in here so I will say it again. Sometimes I get feeling so good that I get afraid to anticipate the loss. If life could be a series of beautiful scenes and beautiful music and pleasant visits with people we love, then life should just go on forever. I suppose that’s why people get old and feeble with wandering minds. What is can end without too much loss, and what was did not stop so will be forever. Right now and as far as I can see, I want to be this morning’s flower. I’ll be a hibiscus. You be a rose…

...the phone rang. When the phone rang so early in the morning, it oftentimes meant somebody was dead. An elderly person had passed in the night. A Friday night traffic fatality. The families of deceased would set about the task of notifying family and friends, and somewhere among the sad litany of phone calls, they dialed our number.

The poetry you could write about Rufus helping me out of my grave isn't lost on me.

The place smelled of commodes and playing cards, and before I was halfway to the end I had made a firm resolve never to begin to die. For me it would be all or nothing: no half measures, no lingering on the doorstep.

The rare opportunity to exist, no matter how brief, is worth the pain left in the wake of its disappearance.

The price of coming from a small town is that everyone knows your story. Your book has been read, shelved, dusted, and re-read by everybody.

there are songs about life, but fewer about death and that is some small consolation as there are many more on love than there are hate.

There are so many ways to exit towards the Light, but with my luck, I'd be the one electrocuted by Diwali lights. Or the one who cracks her head falling off a footstool. I'd still be a jester, leaving the audience with a stitch in their sides.

There are spiritual guardians at all the transitional places in our mysterious multidimensional Universes. The precious sacred souls of animals are created to beautifully traverse these regions when their bodies are no more upon the Earth.

There are moments in our lives that define the people we will become in the future, like a symptom before an ailment, or the catalyst before the cure.

There are no more surprises and shocks in life, so that I watch the flame without agitation. For me the greatest reality is this and nothing else... Nothing else will worry or interest me in life hereafter.

There are televisions and radios and the sounds of life, but too there is the sound of death, crying and oxygen tanks, and the squeaky wheels on wheelchairs. Like life and death are in a very close proximity to one another.

The reason dying is so easy is because death has no meaning... And the reason death has no meaning is because life has no meaning. All the same, have fun!

There came a moment in this journey when I freely realized that the lives most of lead are small. Important, but small. Our radius reaches family, clients, friends for whom we do selfless and amazing feats. But our sphere of influence is local.... So our illnesses/deaths are small, too. Not unimportant. Just local in nature... - 209