Death, the real simile for disease – for when we are ill, do we not always feel like we are dying, even if it’s only a little? – remains, despite our secularism, the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all. – Will Self
When a crime is committed, only the victim and the victim’s close circle experience the event as pain, terror, death. To people hearing or reading about it, crime is a metaphor, a symbol of the ancient battles fought every day: evil versus good, chaos versus order. – S. J. Rozan
And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief, and the year smiles as it draws near its death. – William C. Bryant
Philosophy means nothing unless it is connected to birth, death, and the continuance of life. Anytime you are going to build a society that works, you have to begin from nature and the body. – Susan Griffin
It’s something I want to overcome. And my kids are scared to death to fly. I want them to witness me overcome it. – Travis Barker
When confronted with two alternatives, life and death, one is to choose death without hesitation. – Yamamoto Tsunetomo
The foundation of our religion is a basis of fact – the fact of the birth, ministry, miracles, death, resurrection by the Evangelists as having actually occurred, within their own personal knowledge. – Simon Greenleaf
I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. – Thomas Hobbes
‘Death with dignity’ is our society’s expression of the universal yearning to achieve a graceful triumph over the stark and often repugnant finality of life’s last sputterings. But the fact is, death is not a confrontation. It is simply an event in the sequence of nature’s ongoing rhythms. – Sherwin B. Nuland
The myth that theater isn’t for everybody is total nonsense. In the 18th and 19th centuries, everybody in America used to go to the theater all the time. The shows they went to see were big, crazy melodramas that had careening storylines and houses burning down and pretty girls in danger and comedy and death and destruction. – Theresa Rebeck
Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse. – William Hazlitt
Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one. – Vladimir Nabokov
The acceptance of death gives you more of a stake in life, in living life happily, as it should be lived. Living for the moment. – Sting
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied. – Susan Sontag
I think most of us who live into our 50s have had a few experiences with death. You know, we see people we know start to die. We realize it’s getting closer and closer for us. – William T. Vollmann
Part of the magic of a startup is the fear of death. You have only so much money in the bank, and if you don’t get to the right milestone before you run out, then the company goes under – it’s over. – Scott Weiss
A common defense among obituary-fanciers such as myself is that the obit is not about death at all. It is about life. This is true since an article about the condition of deadness would make for turgid reading at best. – Tom Rachman
I’ve been doing extremely dangerous activities for a long time, but I’ve been lucky enough to have survived so far. However, sooner or later we all die… and, if that’s the case, I want to die doing what I love to do the most. That’s how I view death. – Yuichiro Miura
Now, you might think of flu as just a really bad cold, but it can be a death sentence. Every year, 36,000 people in the United States die of seasonal flu. In the developing world, the data is much sketchier, but the death toll is almost certainly higher. – Seth Berkley
The study of consciousness that can extend beyond the body is extremely important for the issue of survival, since it is this part of human personality that would be likely to survive death. – Stanislav Grof
I now bid farewell to the country of my birth – of my passions – of my death; a country whose misfortunes have invoked my sympathies – whose factions I sought to quell – whose intelligence I prompted to a lofty aim – whose freedom has been my fatal dream. – Thomas Francis Meagher
As one of the first editors at ‘Outside’ magazine in 1975, it was my contention that most American writing going back to James Fennimore Cooper and then through Twain up to Hemingway had been outdoor writing. At that time, adventure writing meant stuff like ‘Saga’ or ‘Argosy.’ ‘Death Race with the Jungle Leper Army!’ That kind of thing. – Tim Cahill
There is no fundamental difference between the preparation for death and the practice of dying, and spiritual practice leading to enlightenment. – Stanislav Grof