#r

As I would soon learn myself, cleaning up what a parent leaves behind stirs up dust, both literal and metaphorical. It dredges up memories. You feel like you’re a kid again, poking around in your parents’ closet, only this time there’s no chance of getting in trouble, so you don’t have to be so sure that everything gets put back exactly where it was before you did your poking around. Still, you hope to find something, or maybe you fear finding something, that will completely change your conception of the parent you thought you knew. ↗

— Roz Chast

#cleaning #death #mourning #parents #perception

I have neither talent or taste for kingship, cousin. I am a warrior, and to dwell always in one place and live at court would weary me to death! ↗

— Marion Zimmer Bradley

#gawaine #death

...every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. ↗

— George Orwell

#die #doom #failure #human #death

I have no use for your body, for within its youth lies a rotten wench already deceased. ↗

— Keisha Keenleyside

#death #fantasy #horror #my-next-novel-quote-one #sex

The only way to find out if you're immortal is to make it to the end of time and look around to see if you're still alive. Until you've done that, all you know is that you haven't died yet. ↗

— John Patrick Lowrie

#immortality #death

And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself. ↗

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

#truth #death

O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time... ↗

— William S. Burroughs

#drug-craze #transgression #death

And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept the unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe- and go on about our tasks ↗

— Tom Robbins

#existence #fairness #life #universe #death

No blinding light or tunnels to gates of white Just our hands clasped so tight waiting for the hint of a spark ↗

— Death Cab for Cutie

#death

Before I lost my father, I never understood the rituals surrounding funerals: the wake, the service itself, the reception afterward,the dinners prepared by well-meaning friends and delivered in plastic containers, even the popular habit of making poster boards filled with photos of the dear departed. But now I know why we do those things. It's busywork, all of it. I had so much to take care of, so many arrangements to make, so many people to inform, I didn't have a moment to be engulfed by the ocean of grief that was lapping at my heels. Instead, I waded through the shallows, performing task after task, grateful to have duties to propel me forward. ↗

— Wendy Webb

#condolence #death #grief #kindness #sympathy