By Category: Death

“They can rule the world while they can persuade us
our pain belongs in some order.
Is death by famine worse than death by suicide,
than a life of famine and suicide ...?”

-Power. Hunger., Adrienne Rich

~

“And when He did die it was sad - such a young man, so full of promise, and His mother wept and His friends could not believe the loss, and the story spread everywhere and the mourning would not be comforted, until He was so sharply lacked and so powerfully remembered that his friends felt Him beside them as they walked along the road, and saw someone cooking fish on the shore and knew it to be Him, and sat down to supper with Him, all wounded as He was. There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.”

-Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson

~

“War going on inside my head. I can't get to sleep. I'd rather be dead. Don't try to tell me, I can't hear your words. I'm not long for this world.”

-Henry Rollins

Recommended by Tricia.

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“To the well-organised mind, death is but the next great adventure.”

-Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling

~

“Boy, when you are dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddamn cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you are dead? Nobody.”

-The Catcher In The Rye, J.D. Salinger

~

“Only, this time I thought I was dying. I really did. I thought I was drowning or something. The trouble was, I could hardly breathe.”

-The Catcher In The Rye, J.D. Salinger

~

“Twenty-seven men with faces blackened and shiny - with hatchets in their belts, bombs in pockets, knobkerries - waiting in a dug-out in the reserve line. At 10.30 they trudge up to Battalion H.Q. splashing through the mire and water in a chalk trench, while the rain comes steadily down. Then up to the front-line. In a few minutes they have gone over and disappeared into the rain and darkness.

I am sitting on the parapet listening for something to happen - five, ten, nearly fifteen minutes - not a sound - nor a shot fired - and only the usual flare-lights. Then one of the men comes crawling back; I follow him to our trench and he tells me that they can't get through. They are all going to throw a bomb and retire.

A minute or two later a rifle-shot rings out and almost simultaneously several bombs are thrown by both sides; there are blinding flashes and explosions, rifle-shots, the scurry of feet, curses and groans, and stumbling figures loom up and scramble over the parapet - some wounded. When I've counted sixteen in, I go forward to see how things are going. Other wounded men crawl in; I find one hit in the leg; he says O'Brien is somewhere down the crater badly wounded. They are still throwing bombs and firing at us: the sinister sound of clicking bolts seem to be very near; perhaps they have crawled out of their trench and are firing from behind the advanced wire.

At last I find O'Brien down a deep (about twenty-five feet) and precipitous crater. He is moaning and his right arm is either broken or almost shot off: he is also hit in the right leg. Another man is with him; he is hit in the right arm. I leave them there and get back to the trench for help, shortly afterwards Lance-Corporal Stubbs is brought in (he has had his foot blown off). I get a rope and two more men and go back to O'Brien, who is unconscious now. With great difficulty we get him half-way up the face of the crater; it is now after one o'clock and the sky is beginning to get lighter. I make one more journey to our trench for another strong man and to see to a stretcher being ready. We get him in, and it is found that he has died, as I had feared.”

-describing in his diary details of a patrol into No Man's Land that took place on May 25, 1916, Siegfried Sasson

~

“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to annihilation. For in the books they write, they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”

-The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield

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“Any writer, any artist, I'm sure is obsessed with death, a prerequisite for life.”

-Anne Sexton

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“We talked of death, and this was life to us.”

-describing friendship with Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton

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“Thief --
how did you crawl into,
crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long.”

-Sylvia's Death, Anne Sexton

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“And oh they bring to mind the grave,
so humble, so willing to be beat upon
with its awful lettering and
the body lying underneath
without an umbrella.”

-The Fury of Rain Storms, Anne Sexton

~

“don't feel bad for me
I want you to know
deep in my heart I will be
so glad to go.”

-Asleep, The Smiths

~

“Better to die, and sleep
The never-waking sleep, than linger on
And dare to live when the soul's life is gone.”

-Sophocles

~

“Fade in, start the scene
Enter beautiful girl
But things are not what they seem
As we stand at the edge of the world

"Excuse me, sir,
But I have plans to die tonight
Oh, and you are directly in my way
And I bet you're gonna say it's not right"
My reply:
"Excuse me, miss
But do you have the slightest clue
Of exactly what you just said to me
And exactly who you're talking to?"

She said, "I don't care, you don't even know me"
I said, "I know but I'd like to change that soon, hopefully"
Yeah, we all flirt with the tiniest notion
Of self conclusion in one simplified motion
You see the trick is that you're never supposed to act on it
No matter how unbearable this misery gets

"You make it sound so easy to be alive
But tell me, how am I supposed to seize this day
When everything inside me has died?"
My reply:
"Trust me, girl
I know your legs are pleading to leap
But I offer you this easy choice-
Instead of dying, living with me"

She said, "Are you crazy? You don't even know me."
I said, "I know, but I'd like to change that soon hopefully"
Yeah, we all flirt with the tiniest notion
Of self conclusion in one simplified motion
You see the trick is that you're never supposed to act on it
No matter how unbearable this misery gets

I would be lying if I said that things would never get rough
And all this cliche motivation, it could never be enough
I could stand here all night trying to convince you
But what good would that do?
My offer stands, and you must choose

"All right, you win, but I only give you one night
To prove yourself to be better than my attempt at flight
I swear to god if you hurt me I will leap
I will toss myself from these very cliffs
And you'll never see it coming"
"Settle, precious, I know what you're going through
Just ten minutes before you got here I was gonna jump too"

Yeah we all flirt with the tiniest notion
Of self conclusion in one simplified motion
You see the trick is that you're never supposed act on it
No matter how unbearable this misery gets”

-Self-Conclusion, The Spill Canvas

Recommended by Ray.

~

“Light up this cigarette
Tonight I will sleep with a gun in my mouth.”

-Love To Hate, Hate To Me, Static Lullaby

Recommended by Sibyl.

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“You can't act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen--it's not gasps and blood and falling about--that isn't what makes it death. It's just a man failing to reappear, that's all--now you see him, now you don't, that's the only thing that's real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back--an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.”

-Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard

~

“And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had.”

-Mad World, Tears For Fears

~

“And I find it kinda funny
I find it kinda sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had
I find it hard to tell you
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It's a very, very mad world mad world.”

-Mad World, Tears For Fears

Recommended by ronan.

~

“When I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
Though you should lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.

I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough;
And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now.”

-I Shall Not Care, Sara Teasdale

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“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

-Do not go gentle into that good night, Dylan Thomas

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“i ran down the stairs and into the garden
put both my hands into the soil
in the spring
you will bloom
like her heart through the blouse in the back of the ambulance.”

-Steps Ascending, Thursday

~

“Here I sit and wait throughout my days
Waiting for something, for my spirit to ascend
It's not that I so badly want to die
But at these times I struggle for desire to live.”

-Under Saturns Shadow, Tiger Army

Recommended by Mal.

~

“Levin said what he had genuinely been thinking of late. He saw nothing but death or the advance toward death in everything. But his cherished scheme only engrossed him all the more. Life had to be got through somehow till death did come. Darkness had fallen, upon everything for him; but just because of this darkness he felt that the one guiding clue in the darkness was his work, and he clutched it and clung to it with all his strength.”

-Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

~

“La mort est secourable et la mort est tranquille.
Ah! contre les douleurs il n'ya a pas d'autre asile.

(Death is rescue and death is peace.
Ah! Against sorrow there is no other refuge.)”

-War And Peace, Leo Tolstoy

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