life-and-death

If your life was complete, you'd be dead.

Jumping out of a perfectly good air plane is like driving through life without a good set of brakes.

Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man's cottage door and at the palaces of kings.

If you wish to live, you must first attend your own funeral.

He's extremely dehydrated and we'll need to get fluids into him as soon as possible if he's to have a hope of surviving

If I was drowning you would part the seaAnd risk your own life to rescue me . . .

It was all written. When life is going to be breathed into you, and when it's going to be taken away. Each person's mission on earth is pre-planned.

Thinking, Garraty thought. That__ the day__ business. Thinking. Thinking and isolation, because it doesn__ matter if you pass the time of day with someone or not; in the end, you__e alone.

Then there are also the quiet deaths. How about the day you realized you weren't going to be an astronaut or the queen of Sheba? Feel the silent distance between yourself and how you felt as a child, between yourself and those feelings of wonder and splendor and trust. Feel the mature fondness for who you once were, and your current need to protect innocence wherever you make might find it. The silence that surrounds the loss of innocence is a most serious death, and yet it is necessary for the onset of maturity.What about the day we began working not for ourselves, but rather with the hope that our kids have a better life? Or the day we realize that, on the whole, adult life is deeply repetitive? As our lives roll into the ordinary, when our ideals sputter and dissipate, as we wash the dishes after yet another meal, we are integrating death, a little part of us is dying so that another part can live.

Mr. Edwards and the Spider"I saw the spiders marching through the air,Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed dayIn latter August when the hayCame creaking to the barn. But whereThe wind is westerly,Where gnarled November makes the spiders flyInto the apparitions of the sky,They purpose nothing but their ease and dieUrgently beating east to sunrise and the sea;What are we in the hands of the great God?It was in vain you set up thorn and briarIn battle array against the fireAnd treason crackling in your blood;For the wild thorns grow tameAnd will do nothing to oppose the flame;Your lacerations tell the losing gameYou play against a sickness past your cure.How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure?A very little thing, a little worm,Or hourglass-blazoned spider, it is said,Can kill a tiger. Will the deadHold up his mirror and affirmTo the four winds the smellAnd flash of his authority? It__ wellIf God who holds you to the pit of hell,Much as one holds a spider, will destroy,Baffle and dissipate your soul. As a small boyOn Windsor Marsh, I saw the spider dieWhen thrown into the bowels of fierce fire:There__ no long struggle, no desireTo get up on its feet and flyIt stretches out its feetAnd dies. This is the sinner__ last retreat;Yes, and no strength exerted on the heatThen sinews the abolished will, when sickAnd full of burning, it will whistle on a brick.But who can plumb the sinking of that soul?Josiah Hawley, picture yourself castInto a brick-kiln where the blastFans your quick vitals to a coal__f measured by a glass,How long would it seem burning! Let there passA minute, ten, ten trillion; but the blazeIs infinite, eternal: this is death,To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death.

I am Josephine Darly, and I intend to live forever.

In The Land of Poetry and Fighting, Efficiency rules the throne. I try to live here, so I shave my head because hair is dead and dead is inefficient.

It's like that, I guess, when the past come to collect what you owe.

I'll never leave this Earth without a fight or at least pretend to for all of those in sight.

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

Who would endure life if it were not for the hope of death?

The cicadas buzzing, I can hear them through the window. Buzzing louder and louder. Just like the night I sat by the window in the dark, gasping for air, feeling the riddle wriggling in my chest, hearing the monster's heavy footsteps in my ears. And suddenly I know. What they do all those years living in the ground. The nymphs who are to become cicadas. Maybe they don__ know it themselves, but they are writing their song. Collecting the notes in the dark earth. The song rising to the sky, this is how it is, this is how it always is. The song floating toward the sky comes from the underworld.

Our life is a series of moments. Let them all go. Moments. All gathering towards this one.