#t

This was the greatest gift that he had, the talent that fitted him for war; that ability not to ignore but to despise whatever bad ending there could be. This quality was destroyed by too much responsibility for others or the necessity of undertaking something ill planned or badly conceived. For in such things the bad ending, failure, could not be ignored. It was not simply a possibility of harm to one's self, which could be ignored. He knew he himself was nothing, and he knew death was nothing. He knew that truly, as truly as he knew anything. In the last few days he had learned that he himself, with another person, could be everything. But inside himself he knew that this was the exception. That we have had, he thought. In that I have been most fortunate. That was given to me, perhaps, because I never asked for it. That cannot be taken away nor lost. But that is over and done with now on this morning and what there is to do now is our work. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#ernest-hemingway #for-whom-the-bell-tolls #war #death

Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn't seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#news #papers #suicide #world #death

Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us. ↗

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

#among #comes #conventional #kind #literacy

But Bear said I shouldn’t talk to strangers because they would be scared of me. I always thought I was supposed to be afraid of them, but Bear said I would just end up talking them to death and that any nefarious purpose they might have had would become moot. When Bear McKenna accuses you of talking too much, you know you have a problem ↗

— T.J. Klune

#death

I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death! ↗

— Patrick Henry

#death

Whilst the wolflets bayed, A grave was made, And then with the strokes of a silver spade, It was filled to make a mound. And for two cold days and three long nights, The father tended that holy plot; And stayed by where his wife was laid, In the grave within the ground. ↗

— Roman Payne

#burial #death #father-and-wife #grave #payne

The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger that man may bleed to death through the truth that he realises. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#death

Death is a bored clerk, with too many orders to fill. There is no reckoning. No profound moment. It creeps up on us from behind, and snatches us away while we shit. ↗

— Joe Abercrombie

#death-and-dying #death

You're still alive. That means you're winning. ↗

— Rachel Cotterill

#life-and-death #death

The tent in which she first met him had smelled of blood, of the death she did not understand, and still she had thought of it all as a game. She had promised him the world. His flesh in the flesh of his enemies. And much too late had she realized what he had sown in her. Love. Worst of all poisons. ↗

— Cornelia Funke

#death