#s

I certainly couldn't have survived my childhood without books. All that deprivation and pain--abuse, broken home, a runaway sister, a brother with cancer--the books allowed me to withstand. They sustained me. I read still, prolifically, with great passion, but never like I read in those days: in those days it was life and death. ~ Junot Diaz, author of 2008 Pulitizer Prize novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ↗

— Leah Price

#reading #surviving #death

I am young now and can look upon my body and soul with pride. But it will be mangled soon, and later it will begin to disintegrate, and then I shall die, and die conclusively. How can we face such a fact, and not live in fear? ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#beat #death-and-dying #early-stories-and-other-writings #fear-of-death #fleeting-life

The more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life - that Death would come and end everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and that there was no help for it, Yes it was terrible but true ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#death #leo-tolstoy #life #death

It is cold at six-forty in the morning on a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad. ↗

— Frederick Forsyth

#execution #first-line #first-lines #first-sentence #frederick-forsyth

She shrugged another plump shoulder. “I never listened to Porter when he got going.” Ah. At last. The secret to a successful marriage. ↗

— Josh Lanyon

#death

Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan. ↗

— Thornton Wilder

#existence #life #death

We’re beings toward death, we’re … two-legged, linguistically-conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. ↗

— Cornel West

#philosophy #philosophy-of-life #death

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#faith

Without the fear of God, men do not even observe justice and charity among themselves. ↗

— John Calvin

#men

Vaporized by the sun! Wasn't that what the universe had in store for all of us? There would come a day when the sun exploded like a red balloon, and everyone on earth would be reduced in less than a camera flash to carbon. Didn't Genesis say as much? For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. This was far more than dull old theology: It was precise scientific observation! Carbon was the Great Leveler--the Grim Reaper. Diamonds were nothing more than carbon, but carbon in a crystal lattice that made it the hardest known mineral in nature. That was the way we all were headed. I was sure of it. We were destined to be diamonds! ↗

— Alan Bradley

#death #diamonds #art