#the

Not easy to state the change you made. If I'm alive now, I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#depression #sadness #sylvia-plath #the-bell-jar #change

But you, Achilles,/ There is not a man in the world more blest than you--/ There never has been, never will be one./ Time was, when you were alive, we Argives/ honored you as a god, and now down here, I see/ You Lord it over the dead in all your power./ So grieve no more at dying, great Achilles.’ I reassured the ghost, but he broke out protesting,/ ‘No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!/ By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man--/ Some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—than rule down here over all the breathless dead. ↗

— Homer

#the-odyssey #death

And like that, I said goodbye to my grandmother like we were two people who met in a coffee shop, shared a lifetime of stories and left wanting more, but knowing we’d meet there again. ↗

— Darnell Lamont Walker

#family #grandmother #sorrow #death

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

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

As Ramses did the same for his mother, he saw that her eyes were fixed on him. She had been unusually silent. She had not needed his father's tactless comment to understand the full implications of Farouk's death. As he met her unblinking gaze he was reminded of one of Nefret's more vivid descriptions. 'When she's angry, her eyes look like polished steel balls.' That's done it, he thought. She's made up her mind to get David and me out of this if she has to take on every German and Turkish agent in the Middle East. ↗

— Elizabeth Peters

#motherhood #ramses #ww #death

Me acordé de lo que me había dicho mi madre: "Allá me oirás mejor. Estaré más cerca de ti. Encontrarás más cercana la voz de mis recuerdos que la de mi muerte, si es que alguna vez la muerte ha tenido alguna voz." Mi madre... La viva. ↗

— Juan Rulfo

#mother #death

The only real death that ever occurs is when a dream we cherish dies ↗

— P.M.H. Atwater

#death

If there's any guy crazy enough to attack me, I'm going to show him the end of the world -- close up. I'm going to let him see the kingdom come with his own eyes. I'm going to send him straight to the southern hemisphere and let the ashes of death rain all over him and the kangaroos and the wallabies. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#ashes #attack #badass #confidence #death

Aware that his disappointment has its source in a defective education, he looks with anxiety on his other daughters, whose minds, like lovely buds, are beginning to open. Where shall he find a genial soil in which he may place them to expand? ↗

— Emma Willard

#aware #beginning #buds #daughters #defective