#her

When we're alive, life consumes us. But when we die, all of the color and the motion is gone so quickly, it's as though it can no longer stand to be wasted on us. ↗

— Lauren DeStefano

#dying #life #sever #wither #death

Even then, she still held a secret passion for Mozart. When he died in 1791, her grief made her provoke the people into starting the French Revolution. Stepping up to the guillotine herself, she ordered the executioner to behead her, thereby committing assisted suicide. ↗

— Yasutaka Tsutsui

#men

Shut up, me,” Leo said aloud. “What?” Piper asked. “Nothing,” he said. “Long night. I think I’m hallucinating. It’s cool.” Sitting in front, Leo couldn’t see their faces, but he assumed from their silence that his friends were not pleased to have a sleepless, hallucinating dragon driver. “Just joking.” Leo decided it might be good to change the subject. ↗

— Rick Riordan

#leo #lost-hero #piper #change

The marriage of a Jewish son is a bittersweet prospect. There is relief, always, that he has navigated the tantalizing and plentiful assemblies of non-Jewish women to whom the children of the Diaspora are inevitably exposed: from the moment he enters secondary school there is the constant anxiety that a blue-eyed Christina or Mary will lure him away from the tribe. Jewish men are widely known to be uxorious in all the most advantageous ways. And so each mother fears that, whether he be short and myopic, boorish or stupid or prone to discuss his lactose intolerance with strangers, whether he be blessed with a beard rising almost to meet his hairline, he is still within the danger zone. Somewhere out there is a shiksa with designs on her son. Jewish men make good husbands. It is the Jewish woman's blessing as a wife, and her curse as a mother. ↗

— Francesca Segal

#humor #judaism #marriage #sons-and-mothers #design

Your life will not be flat and dull even though you know that your war will never be victorious. It is far flatter, Harry, to fight for something good and ideal and to know all the time that you are bound to attain it. Are ideals attainable? Do we live to abolish death? No--we live to fear it and then again to love it, and just for death's sake it is that our spark of life glows for an hour now and then so brightly. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#steppenwolf #death

Heroes do not dwell in a time of peace; heroes are hardened in a kiln against the sorrows. Their troubles sharpen the blade and make it gleaming. The glint becomes a brightness that is raised high on a hill, allowing women and men to see beyond themselves. For light swallows darkness. Truth buries death. Heroes are not born. They are filled by Music. ↗

— David Paul Kirkpatrick

#hill #love #sword #death

Sure as Life holds all parts together, Death holds all parts together. ↗

— Walt Whitman

#tom-mach #walt-whitman #death

Do you know, Mother, that Haj Salem was buried alive in his home? Does he tell you stories in heaven now? I wish I had had a chance to meet him. To see his toothless grin and touch his leathery skin. To beg him, as you did in your youth, for a story from our Palestine. He was over one hundred years old, Mother. To have lived so long, only to be crushed to death by a bulldozer. Is this what it means to be Palestinian? ↗

— Susan Abulhawa

#mother #palestine #palestinians #death

You've got nothing to worry about. The righteous do not always right, but their souls remain pure. -Lassiter the Angel ↗

— J.R. Ward

#vampire-romance #vampire-romance

She pondered the arrangements of the paintings on a wall like a writer pondered commas. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#mother #home