dying

Death belongs only to God. What right have men to lay hands on a thing so unknown?

Don't risk your life for those that doesn't love your life, lest you end up in regrets if not death.

He was cold and tired, but he ignored the cold. Around him stars shone. Some bright, some dim, the most constant things in life. Segundo smiled up at them, happy at least to be dying among friends.

The day you are born is the day you start dying

My ghost is the only soul who ever comes to cry on my grave... Only the skies cried sincerely on my funeral.

I can__ look people in the eye and tell them that they__e going to die anymore.

It's different when the person you love dies. There's an awful finality to death. But it is final. The end. And there's the funeral, family gatherings, grieving, all of those necessary rituals. And they help, believe me. When the object of your love just disappears, there's no way to deal with the grief and pain.

I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into my belly. (p. 52)

oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)

...gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)

blue-gold sky, fresh cloud, emerald-black mountain, trees on rocky ledges, on the summit, the tiny pin of a telephone tower-all brilliantly clear, in shadow and out. and on and through everything everywhere the sun shines without reservation (p. 97)

Reading Aloud to My Father I chose the book haphazardfrom the shelf, but with Nabokov's firstsentence I knew it wasn't the thingto read to a dying man:The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began,and common sense tells us that our existenceis but a brief crack of lightbetween two eternities of darkness.The words disturbed both of us immediately,and I stopped. With music it was the same --Chopin's Piano Concerto _ he asked meto turn it off. He ceased eating, and dranklittle, while the tumors briskly appropriatedwhat was left of him.But to return to the cradle rocking. I thinkNabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss.That's why babies howl at birth,and why the dying so often reachfor something only they can apprehend.At the end they don't want their handsto be under the covers, and if you should putyour hand on theirs in a tentative gestureof solidarity, they'll pull the hand free;and you must honor that desire,and let them pull it free.

The train blows, just when I was forgetting. Forgetting that I am here alone. And I wonder if those cars got held up by its passing, just as I have yours.

Their's not to make reply,Their's not to reason why,Their's but to do and die.

Grief does not change you. It reveals you.

Dying is a very solitary thing. The only thing we can do it be there when she wants us there.

I__e seen a lot of stuff_ maybe I__e seen too much. I see most humans in a bad light because I__e seen what they can do, how evil they can be_ I__e seen the Holocaust and I__e seen Jonestown, I__e seen the Vietnam War and I__e seen Hiroshima_ I__e seen the Chernobyl disaster_ I__e seen the World Trade Center attack_ I__e been alive too long, over a hundred years is a long time to be alive,_ Alecto sighed, staring at the cigarette he was holding.

As long as they talk about you, you're not really dead, as long as they speak your name, you continue. A legend doesn't die, just because the man dies.