#at

My love for her burns within me like a flame; she is the child I carry within my heart. I am the lover of her soul; she will not be taken from me. I will be with Naomi, should the Lord tarry, until we lay down together and die. Even then, we will hold each other in death, breathless and asleep underneath the ice and snow and mud. We will hold each other and never be alone. ↗

— Amy Espeseth

#sisterhood #death

They dropped like flakes, they dropped like stars, Like petals from a rose, When suddenly across the lune A wind with fingers goes. They perished in the seamless grass, No eye could find the place; But God on his repealless list Can summon every face ↗

— Emily Dickinson

#love #war #death

By exiling human judgment in the last few decades, modern law changed role from useful tool to brainless tyrant. This legal regime will never be up to the job, any more than the Soviet system of central planning was, because ti can't think. The comedy of law's sterile logic--large POISON signs warning against common sand, spending twenty-two years on pesticide review and deciding next to nothing, allowing fifty-year-old white men to sue for discrimination--is all too reminiscent of the old jokes we used to hear about life in the Eastern bloc. Judgement is to law as water is to crops. It should not be surprising that law has become brittle, and society along with it. ↗

— Philip K. Howard

#bureaucrats #human-judgment #law #regulation #responsibility

We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? 'Be strong and of a good courage.' Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes.... If death ends all, we cannot meet death better. ↗

— Fitzjames Stephen

#existentialism #pragmatism #courage

We are ants on the carcass of the world, spawned out of nothing, going busily nowhere. One of us dies, the others crawl over us to the pickings. ↗

— Morris L. West

#giacomo-nerone #life #death

If they will only hold their hands until the season is over, he promises them a royal carnival, when all grudges can he settled and the survivors may toss the non-survivors overboard and arrange a story as to how the missing men were lost at sea. ↗

— Jack London

#fighting #murder #sailors #sea #death

Spiritually the jugs may be graduated thus: Just below the shoulder of the first bottle, serious and concentrated conversation. Two inches farther down, sweetly sad memory. Three inches more, thoughts of old and satisfactory loves. An inch, thoughts of old and bitter loves. Bottom of the first jug, general and undirected sadness. Shoulder of the second jug, black, unholy despondency. Two fingers down, a song of death or longing. A thumb, every other song each one knows. The graduation stops here, for the trail splits and there is no certainty. From this point on, anything can happen. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#death

Tell me yourself directly, I challenge you – reply: imagine that you yourself are erecting the edifice of human fortune with the goal of, at the finale, making people happy, of at last giving them peace and quiet, but that in order to do it would be necessary and unavoidable to torture to death only one little creature, that same little child that beat its little fist, and on its unavenged tears to found that edifice, would you agree to be the architect on those conditions, tell me and tell me truly? ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#death

By giving the name of progress to its own tendency to a fatal precision, the world is seeking to add to the benefits of life the advantages of death. ↗

— Paul Valéry

#death

Each of them, all unknowing, fairly gives its due to each chance of life, to each germ of death within itself. ↗

— Paul Valéry

#death