#th

You're stressing too much about what might be. Do something to take your mind off thinking about what might never happen. ↗

— Simone Elkeles

#stress

...and yet the idea is hard to accept, it's so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what's been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it, if our own will is made in its semblance. It may be, rather, that nothing is ever unmixed and the thirst for totality is never quenched, perhaps because it is a false yearning. Nothing is whole or of a single piece, everything is fractured and evenomed, veins of peace run through the body of war and hatred insinuates itself into love and compassion, there is truce amid the quagmire of bullets and a bullet amid the revelries, nothing can bear to be unique or prevail or be dominant and everything needs fissures and cracks, needs it negation at the same time as its existence. And nothing is known with certainty and everything is told figuratively. ↗

— Javier Marías

#existential #narrative #writing #death

Not only to myself or before the mirror or at the hour of my death, which I hope will be long in coming, but in the presence of my children and my wife and in the face of the peaceful life I’m building, I must acknowledge: (1) That under Stalin I wouldn’t have wasted my youth in the gulag or ended up with a bullet in the back of my head. (2) That in the McCarthy era I wouldn’t have lost my job or had to pump gas at a gas station. (3) That under Hitler, however, I would have been one of those who chose the path of exile, and that under Franco I wouldn’t have composed sonnets to the caudillo or the Holy Virgin like so many lifelong democrats. One thing is as true as the other. My bravery has its limits, certainly, but so does what I’m willing to swallow. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragicomedy. ↗

— Roberto Bolaño

#limits #morality #death

strenght-faith-hope-love ↗

— Bruce Springsteen

#ashley-and-aaron-briggs #faith

There are those individuals who die for a cause, and we say they have made the ultimate sacrifice. We call them martyrs, and we never doubt their sincerity. Yet many others search their entire lives for something—or someone—worth dying for and this is very different. These are the lonely and the desperate, fearful that their lives have no meaning. They yearn for the bullet, if only someone else will pull the trigger. ↗

— Ilsa J. Bick

#life-lessons #suicide #death

I felt a wetness in my eyes and I blinked confused from the strange sensation. A small trickle of water ran down my cheek. I stared into the darkness as I held Pagan in my arms in amazement. Death had just shed a tear. ↗

— Abbi Glines

#death

Thy best of rest is sleep, And that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st Thy death, which is no more. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#fear #rest #sleep #death

In the end, we all die. This is not of question. Inarguable. No mystery lay here. The mystery dwells in two questions: How long will our story be, and of what will the pages read? ↗

— H.D. Gordon

#death

Fairness," he said," does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young ↗

— Mitch Albom

#life #death

It's one of the things that makes us different than they are, Harry. The blood on their hands does not make it right to bloody my own. My choices are measured against my own soul. Not against the stains on theirs. ↗

— Jim Butcher

#harry-dresden #michael-carpenter #death