Living And Dying Quotes

“Because the difference between seeing and not seeing can be the difference between living and dying.”
― Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three

“You start to live when you commit your life to cause higher than yourself. You must learn to depend on divine power for the fulfillment of a higher calling.”
― Lailah GiftyAkita

“It's the living who struggle to accept death.”
― Hiromi Goto, Shadow Life

“Life is neither a glorious highlight reel nor a monstrous tragedy. Every day is a good day to live and a good day to die. Every day is also an apt time to learn and express joy and love for the entire natural world. Each day is an apt time to make contact with other people and express empathy for the entire world. Each day is perfect to accept with indifference all aspects of being.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Life begins like a dream, becomes a little real, and ends like a dream.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Oneironaut’s Diary

“We were once the ones who were living, and then we were the ones who were dying. We sewed ourselves, a thread's width, into your history.”
― David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing

“Death is the destiny of every man.
Why do people fight over power and material wealth.
We brought nothing into the world, certainly, we will take nothing out of the world.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, The Alphabets of Success: Passion Driven Life

“College students’ bizarre actions are incomprehensible until scrutinized under the lens that they are simply defying their mortality. A person learns how to live by contemplating death, because when a person faces death, it strips everything superfluous away, revealing the sterling qualities of life. University students newly freed from parental restraints desire to ascertain the essence of their life, but they lack the maturity and life experiences meaningfully to contemplate the weighty subjects of life and death. Realizing their immaturity and resultant angst, collegiate students act recklessly in order to loudly proclaim that they do not care if fate demands that they die will, when in fact they are terrified of both living and dying.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The black hole of the galaxy swallows the boiling energy of human fury. Soon my waning fume will be obscured forevermore, all insignia of my ionized essence tucked into the anonymous pleat of the universe’s billowing skirt. Until the coarse earth’s rank mustiness calls for me, can I take comfort living purposefully in the rhythms of an ordinarily life? Can I unabashedly absorb the scintillating jewels in the daily milieu? Can I savor an array of pleasantries with my tongue, ears, nose, eyes, lips, and fingertips? Can I take solace in the tenderness of the nights by singing out songs of love and heartache? Can I devote the dazzle of daylight and the vastness of the night’s starriness to investigate life, make a concerted effort to reduce imbedded ignorance, and penetrate layers of obdurate obliviousness? Can I conduct a rigorous search for wisdom irrespective of wherever this journey takes me? Can I make use of the burly pack of prior personal experiences to increase self-awareness? Can I aspire to go forward in good spirits and cheerfully accept all challenges as they come? Can I skim along the delicate surface of life with a light heart until greeting an endless sleep with a begrudging grin in the coolness of the ebbing light?”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Life is a little like getting on a bus with loads of passengers who are already on when you get on. A bus to nowhere but going with absolute certainty to nowhere or so it seems to you. And, you somehow secure a seat and think as long as you sit quietly, you might be allowed to stay till the destination, whatever it may be. You wonder if you could buy a more secure seat if you become the life and soul of the bus, since then nobody will want you to get off. So, you try.

There are people you like on the bus, some you cannot bear to be around with. People keep getting on. The bus is overcrowded. You watch some who gracefully get down, some who literally jump off the running bus and others who are abruptly forced off the bus. You feel sorry for those who have been forced off, happy you are still there. You must be special then for that privilege.

You sit there thinking if you are quiet and decent, and minding your business or counting your beads, you should be ok, not realising that you could be the next. There is deep down a fear that you could be, but you hope that all what you had done since you got on would guarantee a longer passage to nowhere. Maybe, to a better destination?

Where could the bus be going? Who will be getting off next? Will it be you? What is this strange journey with passengers you cannot choose, stops you cannot decide and destination unknown. Suddenly you cannot bear this torture anymore. This meaningless journey with atrocious company to nowhere.

And, you sit there in this tumbling, roller coaster ride, hanging onto dear life and swear to yourself that you will enjoy the journey while it lasts. Amidst it all, the question arises... who am I who is sitting here on the bus on a ride to nowhere?

And, you sit there... waiting, pretending, dreaming, smiling, laughing... living a little, dying a little, hoping your stop is not the next and wondering what if it is.”
― Srividya Srinivasan

“As we age, we become more aware of the rarity and exquisiteness of beauty, and come to admire the flowers blooming amongst rubble. With each advancing decade, nature’s beauty and the magnificence of life increasingly amazes me. Maturation allows a person to appreciate the springtime frolic of youth and to inventory the knowledge garnered from a rigorous summer reflecting upon adulthood’s long pull. Ageing allows people to free themselves from the strife and strivings of their younger self. Reflective contemplation nurtures the cherished milk of wisdom. I shall rejoice in the commonplace acts of being. Today is an apt time to embrace learning at all stages of life. It is also an apt time to commence exercising the principles of good husbandry by beginning to making preparation for the inevitable freeze of winter.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“An enlightened person knows what idea is worthy of living and dying for.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“My hands would touch the weathered rock behind me: rugged but smooth on the edges it would feel and I would be wondering how long it would be until the elements would succeed in grinding it down, in wearing it off so the sea would finally get to take it away. Millions of years, I’d be thinking, with my fingers in the brittle cracks that the continuously freezing and melting water had left on its surface and thinking this, I would have to remind myself that I would still be there to see it. I would still be there, once everything around me would be gone. There, in a dead and invariable wasteland and these would be the moments when it would hit me like rockfall: the futility of eternity”
― Sima B. Moussavian, Tomorrow death died out: What if the future were past?

“If you have few months to live, what will you do?”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!

“There's no right and wrong anymore. Just living and dying.”
― Molly Looby, ZA

“Pastor Smith did not have the religious constitution needed to provide salvation for any of us who’d had a hand in this tragic event. We had put on the armour of God, and there was no undoing what we had done. My faith, my belief in myself as a good citizen, everything I had thought was truth was scattered to the wind, and no one on this earth could put that to rights. Things weren’t as simple as living and dying. I understood that now.”
― Cheryl R Cowtan, Girl Desecrated: Vampires, Asylums and Highlanders 1984

“The Awakening Land" p615
What was the world coming to and what hearty pleasures folks today missed out of life! One bag of meal her pap said, used to make a whole family rejoice. Now folks came ungrateful from the store, grumbling they had to carry such a heavy market basket. Was that the way this great new country of hers was going to go? The easier they made life, the weaker and sicker the race had to get? Once a majority of the men got weak and soft, what weak, harmful ways would they vote the country into then? Well, her pap's generation could get down on their knees and thank the Almighty they lived and died when they did. How would they ever have come and settled this wild country if they said to each other, "Ain't you afeard?" How would her pappy have fetched them the long way out here on foot if he'd kept asking all the time, "Are you all right! How do ye feel? Do ye reckon ye kin make it?" No, those old time folks she knew were scared of nothing, or if they were, they didn't say so. They knew they ran bad risks moving into Indian country, but they had to die some time. They might as well live as they pleased and let others bury them when the time came. Now Libby's generation, it seemed, lived mostly to study and fret about ailing and dying.”
― Conrad Richter

“All beings of the world are in a constant state of either coming into being or going out of being. Resignation of the soul is the final act in a one-character play. Given our genetic defect of mortality, it is impossible not to question the why and wherefore of our existence. It is understandable why each of us must ask what life is all about, and for that matter, constantly inquire what is next. Where does the headwater of our existence spring from and where will the divergent stream of life take us? Do the still waters that gently slide by compose the tranquil waters relished by lentic lakeside creatures? What lies ahead in the burbling headwaters of tomorrow? Does nourishing brain food wait for lotic inhabitants to feast upon in the turbulent rapids and airy froth of the future? Vagueness, doubt, and insecurity shroud the future. The only thing certain is that the effervescence culled from our dynamic immersion in the firth of today will expose our material composition.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“It is over the second we are born. The very second we are born we start dying and to decay… by choosing to live we also choose to die one day…”
― Ryan Gelpke, We Tragic Few

“Our lives, reduced to mere hours, minutes, seconds, how cruel.”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Nights

“What remains of the world at the end?” She asked him.
“The noise of machines, newspapers, bombs, the craziness in the big cities, all of this will be forgotten tomorrow. And then, what remains? What remains, my dear, will never be the world, but only the gods.”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Nights

“For the first time in my life, I had begun to feel that kind of slow desolation that rises, little by little, slowly, slowly every day, that one hardly knows it is there. Until that one day when all those small deaths accrue into a kind of leaden weight one feels in the legs and the arms. One cannot move from all that pain that manifests itself as an all-encompassing lack of feeling. That is how strong the pain really is. It cannot admit its own hurt to itself. For once, I would have gladly died in that bed smelling of shit, my hair shaved, my heart no longer a muscle but a kind of extraneous organ not part of myself but beating in spite of myself. It was then that I knew that spite was not a thing to take against a captor, but that spite was a thing to hold against one's self. For I did not want to be alive. Life, and my daily affirmation of it, was not something I wanted, as time went by.”
― Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, Assembling Alice

“The problem with being alive, I can tell you now, is that it happens so fast, we don't have the time to make sense of it in the same way that you can once you're dead.”
― Xóchitl González, Anita de Monte Laughs Last

“It is not about how long you have been around. It is about how helpful your existence has been.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, These Words Burn Like Fire