Quotes by Journalists - Page 235

Losing a mate to death is devastating but it's not a personal attack like divorce. When somebody you love stops loving you and walks away, it's an insult beyond comparison.
Sue Merrell
She had storms all her life, but she died peacefully.
Janet Flanner
Sometimes I hear the world discussed as the realm of men. This is not my experience. I have watched men fall to the ground like leaves. They were swept up as memories, and burned. History owns them. These men were petrified in both senses of the word: paralyzed and turned to stone. Their refusal to express feeling killed them. Anachronistic men. Those poor, poor boys.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.
Mitch Albom
And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten—since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn't as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder!
Albert Camus
Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome. your life?
Christopher Hitchens
Well, as to that, all I'll say is, you can't take out a fellow's heart before he's ready to give it up.
Louis Bayard
So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
George Orwell
Nobody is ready for death. If you ask Joe Blow on the street, he aint gonna tell you he thinks he'll live forever. But when the end is near you'll realize you've been believing that all along. It's like getting caught with your pants down. That's why you gotta live, little one. Yeah stop and smell them roses.
Cristina García
That was it. Shogo stopped breathing. The dim yellow light falling from the ceiling of the pilothouse shone on his pale face. He seemed at ease."Shogo!" Shuya yelled. He still had more to say. "You'll see Keiko! You'll be happy with her! You're--"It was too late. Shogo couldn't hear anything anymore. But his face just looked so damned peaceful."Damn it." Shuya's lips trembled along with his words. "Damn it."Holding Shogo's hands, Noriko was crying.Shuya also put his hand on Shogo's thick hand. A thought occured to him. He searched through Shogo's pockets and found the red bird call. He pressed it into Shogo's right hand and closed his hands over it so he could hold it. Shuya then finally burst into tears.
Koushun Takami
Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people
Heinrich Heine
a man was on his way to the gallows when he met another, who asked him: where are you going, my friend? and the condemned man replied: i'm not going anywhere. they're taking me by force.
José Saramago
We are graced with a godlike ability to transcend time and space in our minds but are chained to death.
Russell Shorto
Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.
Frank Herbert
There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being.
Aleksandar Hemon
The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.
Gabriel García Márquez
Instead, he would make death his final project, the center point of his days. Since everyone was going to die, he could be of great value, right? He could be research. A human textbook. Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me.
Mitch Albom
the meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture - it begins in the dignity with which we treat the dead
Frank Herbert
And now -- now it only remains for me to light a cigarette and go home. Dear God, only now am I remembering that people die. Does that include me?Don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.
Clarice Lispector
Not since North Korean media declared Kim Jong-il to be the reincarnation of Kim Il Sung has there been such a blatant attempt to create a necrocracy, or perhaps mausolocracy, in which a living claimant assumes the fleshly mantle of the departed.
Christopher Hitchens
At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. I hope this isn't too melodramatic or self-centred a way of saying that I attempt to write as if I did not care what reviewers said, what peers thought, or what prevailing opinions may be.
Christopher Hitchens
What is life? It departs covertly. Like a thief Death took him.
John Gunther
Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe.
Clifford D. Simak
poor boy! I never knew you, Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you
Walt Whitman
That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.
Lev Grossman
You people have a religion of death that fills you with the joy and courage to confront it...I do not. I believe the only essential thing is to be alive.- Abrenucio
Gabriel García Márquez
I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.
Christopher Hitchens
There is only one true wealth in all the universe--living time.
Frank Herbert
Shinji slowly fell forward onto his face. Debris bounced up on impact. It took less than thirty seconds for the rest of his body to die. The memento of his beloved uncle--the earring worn by the woman he loved--was now stained with the blood running down Shinji's left ear, reflecting the glow from the red flames of the farm building.And so the boy known as the Third Man, Shinji Mimura, was dead.
Koushun Takami
Love doesn't go anywhere when you die, you know. The person passes on, the body withers, but love, it survives.
Sarah Strohmeyer
But you said so yourself,the poor lass will die of it...Do you really want her to die?'Yes, I'd rather she died than have a bad life.
Émile Zola
They were people whose lives were slow, who did not see themselves growing old, or falling sick, or dying, but who disappeared little by little in their own time, turning into memories, mists from other days, until they were absorbed into oblivion.
Gabriel García Márquez
He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.
Jack London
In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.
Ernest Hemingway
Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live.
Albert Camus
I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.
Clarice Lispector
There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.
José Saramago
Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.
Gabriel García Márquez
Life is a temporary condition, Henry. And it's uncertain. That's why you have to seize chances when you find them. Pursue what you want. Take risks. Live, love...all of it. Every last one of us is going to die, but if we don't live as we truly want, if we're not with the one we want to be with, we're dead already.
Martha Brockenbrough
To you, death does not simply end life. It steals away the sunsets you'll never see, the children you'll never hold, the wife you'll never love. It's frightening to almost lose your future, and it's heartbreaking to witness death snuff out other people's tomorrows.
Robert Liparulo
Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death.
Albert Camus
But after I got them to leave and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.
Ernest Hemingway
Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
Katherine Anne Porter
Survival is the celebration of choosing life over death. We know we're going to die. We all die. But survival is saying: perhaps not today. In that sense, survivors don't defeat death, they come to terms with it.
Laurence Gonzales
Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists...but it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.
Lafcadio Hearn
Copulation is no more foul to me than death is.
Walt Whitman
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps, And here you are the mothers' laps. This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, Darker than the colorless beards of old men, Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing. ...What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas'd the moment life appear'd. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Walt Whitman
But that's the thing with death. The whisper of it descent travels fast and wide, and people must've know I'd become a corpse because nobody even came to view the body.
Gayle Forman
Do not mourn the dead. They know what they are doing.
Clarice Lispector
The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started. I shook off the sweat and the sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.
Albert Camus
DisciplineI am old and I have hadmore than my share of good and bad.I've had love and sorrow, seen sudden deathand been left alone and of love bereft.I thought I would never love againand I thought my life was grief and pain.The edge between life and death was thin, but then I discovered discipline.I learned to smile when I felt sad, I learned to take the good and the bad, I learned to care a great deal morefor the world about me than before.I began to forget the "Me" and "I"and joined in life as it rolled by: this may not mean sheer ecstasybut is better by far than "I" and "Me.
Meryl Gordon
Death was an inverse Big Bang; an impossible magic trick where everything had become nothing in the very same instant, where one state had been replaced so completely by another that no evidence of the first could be detected, and where the catalyst had been vaporized by the sheer shock of the new.
Belinda Bauer
Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.
Anna Quindlen
Do I fear death? No, I am not afraid of being dead because there's nothing to be afraid of, I won't know it. I fear dying, of dying I feel a sense of waste about it and I fear a sordid death, where I am incapacitated or imbecilic at the end which isn't something to be afraid of, it's something to be terrified of.
Christopher Hitchens
It's okay if you want to go. Everyone wants you to stay. I want you to stay more than I've ever wanted anything in my life. But that's what I want and I could see why it might not be what you want. So I just wanted to tell you that I understand if you go. It's okay if you have to leave us. It's okay if you want to stop fighting.
Gayle Forman
Pentru mine, moartea este doar hotarul unde încetează să mai existe "mâine". Numai până acolo poți să iubești, să visezi, să regreți. Brusc, tot ce n-ai făcut va rămâne pentru totdeauna nefăcut.
Octavian Paler
Surplus meant unnecessary. Not required.You couldn’t be a Surplus if you were needed by someone else. You couldn’t be a Surplus if you were loved.
Gemma Malley
and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality.
Gabriel García Márquez
He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!
Albert Camus
The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation's problems would be another 100 Year War.
Hunter S. Thompson