#r

You can't tell that the coffin holds the body of a boy. He wasn't even sixteen but his coffin's the same size as a man's would be. It's not just that he was young, but because it was so sudden. No one should die the way he did; that's what the faces here say. I think about him, in there, with all that space, and I want to stop them. I want to open the box and climb in with him. To wrap him up in a duvet. I can't bear the thought of him being cold. And all the time the same question flails around my head, like a hawkmoth round a light-bulb: Is it possible to keep loving somebody when they kill someone you love? ↗

— C.J. Flood

#grief #love #death

ach, gebt mir meinen Tod, damit ich bleibe ↗

— Klaus Kinski

#sehnsucht-desire #tod #death

Oh dear. I do believe this is self-pity. I am imagining myself dramatically dead, tragically taken from you and even more lamentably forgotten. What dreadful clichés war and social strife reduces us to, and how powerful the effect must be, if even I am so infected. I think I must pull myself together. ↗

— Iain Banks

#self-pity #war #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

Schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme to return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements [of civilization]. Only birth can conquer death―the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. ↗

— Arnold Joseph Toynbee

#inspirational #social-evolution #death

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