#dying

It is a dreadful thing to wait and watch for the approach of death; to know that hope is gone, and recovery impossible; and to sit and count the dreary hours through long, long, nights - such nights as only watchers by the bed of sickness know. It chills the blood to hear the dearest secrets of the heart, the pent-up, hidden secrets of many years, poured forth by the unconscious helpless being before you; and to think how little the reserve, and cunning of a whole life will avail, when fever and delirium tear off the mask at last. Strange tales have been told in the wanderings of dying men; tales so full of guilt and crime, that those who stood by the sick person's couch have fled in horror and affright, lest they should be scared to madness by what they heard and saw; and many a wretch has died alone, raving of deeds, the very name of which, has driven the boldest man away. ("The Drunkard's Death") ↗

— Charles Dickens

#deathbed-confession #dying #dying-last-words #death

Reading Aloud to My Father I chose the book haphazard from the shelf, but with Nabokov's first sentence I knew it wasn't the thing to read to a dying man: The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. The words disturbed both of us immediately, and I stopped. With music it was the same -- Chopin's Piano Concerto — he asked me to turn it off. He ceased eating, and drank little, while the tumors briskly appropriated what was left of him. But to return to the cradle rocking. I think Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss. That's why babies howl at birth, and why the dying so often reach for something only they can apprehend. At the end they don't want their hands to be under the covers, and if you should put your hand on theirs in a tentative gesture of solidarity, they'll pull the hand free; and you must honor that desire, and let them pull it free. ↗

— Jane Kenyon

#daughters #dying #fathers #grief #music

We just did an awesome job of not dying. ↗

— John Green

#good-job #surviving #awesome

That's the good part of dying; when you've nothing to lose, you run any risk you want. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#risks #risk

This is how it feels to die: It starts from outside and works its way in. ↗

— Sarah Wylie

#first-sentence #first-sentence

This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. ↗

— Mitch Albom

#begins #dying #eddie #end #man

I think that curiosity happened on these reviews where I was just a guest of the reviewer, because it introduced me to new cuisines and to the idea of cooking as a mechanism for studying other cultures and understanding other parts of the world. ↗

— Ted Allen

#cooking #cuisines #cultures #curiosity #guest

Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death. ↗

— Karen Armstrong

#death #devastating #disgraceful #dying #helpless

The local music community here was dying for a place to record, so we started doing acoustic, folk and bluegrass and then did rock projects for other bands, as well as for my son Tal and my own work. ↗

— Randy Bachman

#bands #bluegrass #community #did #doing

It is very beautiful over there. (last words) ↗

— Thomas A. Edison

#beauty