#ali

Tess was my first experience of a woman who had inhabited her weirdness, moved into the areas of herself that made her distinct from those around her, and learned how to display them proudly. ↗

— Alice Sebold

#individuality #experience

I could have done even better, miss, and I'd know a lot more, if it wasn't for my destiny ever since childhood. I'd have killed a man in a duel with a pistol for calling me low-born, because I came from Stinking Lizaveta without a father, and they were shoving that in my face in Moscow. It spread there thanks to Grigory Vasilievich. Grigory Vasilievich reproaches me for rebelling against my nativity: 'You opened her matrix,' he says. I don't know about her matrix, but I'd have let them kill me in the womb, so as not to come out into the world at all, miss. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#class #death #life #death

The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said, When Allah loves a people, He tries them. ↗

— Leila Aboulela

#islam #spirituality #faith

But if you're gonna dine with them cannibals Sooner or later, darling, you're gonna get eaten . . . ↗

— Nick Cave

#cannibals #company #dining #eating #food

I am not an angel,' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#empowerment #flaws #freedom #gender #ideal-woman

Don’t let yourself forget how many doctors have died, furrowing their brows over how many deathbeds. How many astrologers, after pompous forecasts about others’ ends. How many philosophers, after endless disquisitions on death and immortality. How many warriors, after inflicting thousands of casualties themselves. How many tyrants, after abusing the power of life and death atrociously, as if they were themselves immortal. How many whole cities have met their end: Helike, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and countless others. And all the ones you know yourself, one after another. One who laid out another for burial, and was buried himself, and then the man who buried him - all in the same short space of time. In short, know this: Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash. To pass through this brief life as nature demands. To give it up without complaint. Like an olive that ripens and falls. Praising its mother, thanking the tree it grew on. ↗

— Marcus Aurelius

#spirituality #death

Tombstones covered the dale, the smooth marble surfaces bright. She had spent days here as a teenager, though not out of any awareness of mortality. Like every adolescent, she intended to live forever. ↗

— Thomm Quackenbush

#cemetery #death #immortality #teenager #death

If there were no life beyond this earth-life, some people I have known would gain immortality by the nobility of our memory of them. With every friend I love who has been taken into the brown bosom of the earth a part of me has been buried there; but their contribution of happiness, strength, and understanding to my being remains to sustain me in an altered world. ↗

— Helen Keller

#grief #hope #immortality #loss #death

Death wasn't a movie where the pretty star faded away with a touch of pale makeup and every hair in place. ↗

— Soheir Khashoggi

#death-of-a-loved-one #faces-of-death #reality-of-death #death

No, I don't die. When I set in your sky, I rise in another. Just because you can't see me, it doesn't mean I'm not there. ↗

— Rachel Rivett

#death