#m

Helen's Saigon had always been about selling - chickens, information, or lovely young women, it didn't matter. It had once been called the Pearl of the Orient, but by people who had not been there in a very long time. Saigon had never been Paris, but now it was a garrison town, unlovely, a stinking refugee shantyville filled with the angry, the betrayed, the dispossessed, but she had made it her home, and she couldn't bear that soon she would have to leave. ↗

— Tatjana Soli

#home

We would also have to say goodbye to the joy of watching this next generation soak up the massive quantities of love their grandmother would have given them, and seeing them learn that there was someone in the world who loved them as much as their parents did: a grandmother who was delighted by all their quirks and who thought they were the most amazing creatures on earth. ↗

— Will Schwalbe

#grandmother #death

If your last words are somehow meant to encapsulate your entire existence, Liz finds um strangely appropriate. Um means nothing. Um is what you say while you're thinking of what you'll really say. Um suggests someone interrupted before they'd begun. Um is a fifteen-year-old girl who gets hit by a taxicab in front of a mall on the way to help pick out a prom dress for a prom she isn't even going to, for God's sake. ↗

— Gabrielle Zevin

#interrupted #um #death

Our minds of infinite possibilities have been plowed, seeded and cultivated by every word, institution and sacred belief we hold dear, to produce a foul harvest of exclusion, apathy, brute domination and death. ↗

— Bryant McGill

#beliefs #infinite-possibilities #mindfulness #death

That's a demon for you. Wants me dead but wants to be sure that he is the one who does me in. ↗

— Daniel Xiao Wang

#demons #murder #death

There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what that means, simply take yourself - in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love - and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#wisdom #love

In fact, until the last moments of his life, until the last seconds as he gasped for breath, he never realised how much he wanted to live. But, at that point, death was inevitable and nothing that had happened could be changed. ↗

— Stephen Craig

#crime #murder-mystery #whodunit #change

With the minivan in the air, rolling counterclockwise, the engine racing, Laurie screaming -- a fraction of a second, that's all -- Jacob would have thought of me -- who had held him, my own baby, looked down into his eyes -- and he would have understood I loved him, no matter what, to the very end -- as he saw the concrete wall flying forward to meet him. ↗

— William Landay

#jacob #love #murder #suicide #tears

Take solace in that, regardless of the fact that the love you had in your mind was lost, it was fairer than any, and you can take that with you forever. ↗

— Taylor Nadeau

#edwin-hubble #fair #loss #love #death

Today we have made a fetish of choice; but a chosen death is forbidden. Perhaps what distinguishes humans from other animals is that humans have learnt to cling more abjectly to life. ↗

— John Gray

#dying-animals #humans #life #straw-dogs #suicide