#or

Look, I know this is the last thing you want to talk about, but I wanted to ask you . . . .” He trailed off, looking strangely uneasy. “Ask me . . . ?” Ask me to dinner? Ask me out for drinks? Ask me if I wanted to see what he looked like under that uniform? Yow, where’d that last one come from? ↗

— Diana Rowland

#death

Where is an intimate friend who’ll hear the secret from me straight out– of what human beings have been from the moment they began? They are born of toil and molded from the clay of sorrow. They wander the world for a time, then set off. ↗

— Omar Khayyám

#death #humans #life #sorrow #death

I was the apprentice of Robert James Bakker. I'm sure you've heard of him. I am a sorcerer. I was there when Bakker died. We... made it happen. I too have met death, and did not have to peel the bones away from my chest to survive the encounter. I am also, and incidentally, the Midnight Mayor, the blue electric angels, the fire in the wire, the song in the telephones, and we are having a bad week. Be smart; fear us. ↗

— Kate Griffin

#matthew-swift #the-midnight-mayor #the-neon-court #death

There are many accounts, uniformly incomplete, of what it is like to die slowly. But there is no information at all about what it is like to die suddenly and violently. We are being gentle when we describe such deaths as instant. 'The passengers died instantly.' Did they? It may be that some people can do it, can die instantly. The very old, because the vital powers are weak; the very young, because there is no great accretion of experience needing to be scattered. Muhammad Atta was 33. As for him (and perhaps this is true even in cases of vaporisation; perhaps this was true even for the wall-shadows of Japan), it took much longer than an instant. By the time the last second arrived, the first second seemed as far away as childhood...Even as his flesh fried and his blood boiled, there was life, kissing its fingertips. Then it echoed out, and ended. ↗

— Martin Amis

#death

...stories break silence and nourish those who work, feel, and dream. From Costa Rica: A Traveler's Literary Companion ↗

— Carmen Naranjo

#stories #dreams

I miss your face. That big bright smile. You always had it, in any weather. It's hard for me to find one these days. These cold November days. Except when I think of you. ↗

— Kellie Elmore

#dying #grief #grieving #loss #love

You're too damn beautiful for your own good.Hell,you're too damn beautiful for my own good ↗

— Caisey Quinn

#love-story #musicians #beauty

One of life's great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred pound Coke machine, one need worry about little else. ↗

— Stephen King

#death #truth #worry #death

Even doctors — or perhaps especially doctors — need to be touched by something personally to understand the suffering of others. We’ve been taught about the enormous power over life and death that is invested in us; we can be deluded into thinking we are almighty. Almost instinctively we view death, incurable disease and disability as challenging our power. We forget that this is all part of life. I guess that we have to defend ourselves against the human suffering that confronts us every day, otherwise we’d quickly go under. Medical jargon helps keep us remote, yet seeing colleagues suffer is hard. If we think too much, we realise that we – and our loved ones – are just as vulnerable as the rest of humanity. ↗

— Jane Wilson-Howarth

#medical-jargon #death

SEE THE MAN NEXT TO HIM? WITH THE LITTLE MOUSTACHE AND THE GRIN LIKE A LIZARD? Death pointed with his scythe. 'Yes?' HIS COUSIN, THE DUKE OF STO HELIT. NOT THE NICEST OF PEOPLE, said Death. A HANDY MAN WITH A BOTTLE OF POISON. FIFTH IN LINE TO THE THRONE LAST YEAR, NOW SECOND IN LINE. BIT OF A SOCIAL CLIMBER, YOU MIGHT SAY. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#mort #death