death
Quotations
Quotations on the topic of ‘death’ from all listed authors (click on the ‘click to view listing’ links to view each quote in full).
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“If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need, then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear.” -J. B. Priestley
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“Coming to terms with the fear of death is conducive to healing, positive personality transformation, and consciousness evolution.” -Stanislav Grof
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“Death is feared as birth is forgotten.” -Douglas Horton
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“Should I perchance still feel after my death, I would no longer have any doubt, but I would most certainly give the lie to anyone asserting before me that I was dead.” -Giacomo Casanova
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“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
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“Most of us harbour a significant amount of subconscious fear about death, and act out of this fear in our daily lives.” -Christy Turlington
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“War is not the only arena where peace is done to death.” -Aung San Suu Kyi
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“The need to understand prescription information can literally be a matter of life and death.” -Andrew Cuomo
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“Movies like that aren’t about the visual effects and explosions. They’re human stories about family, about life, about death.” -Orlando Bloom
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“When death has you by the throat, you don’t mince words.” -Friedrich Durrenmatt
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“If death is in the room, it’s pretty interesting. But I would also say that I’m interested in getting myself to believe that it’s going to happen to me. I’m interested in it, because if you’re not, you’re nuts. It’s really de facto what we’re here to find out about.” -George Saunders
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“A man whose life has been dishonourable is not entitled to escape disgrace in death.” -Lucius Accius
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“My father I liked, but it was only after his death that I got to know him by writing the play.” -Hugh Leonard
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“Before I pitch any game, from spring training to Game 7 of the World Series, I’m scared to death.” -Curt Schilling
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“In Seattle, I soon found that my radical ideas and aesthetic explorations – ideas and explorations that in Richmond, Virginia, might have gotten me stoned to death with hush puppies – were not only accepted but occasionally applauded.” -Tom Robbins
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“Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.” -Isaiah Berlin
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“I think one thing that kids who grow up on farms really have going for them is they have exposure to death and birth in a totally different way. I think it takes away a little bit of the mystery and a little bit of the fear, and I do wish I had that. And…
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“The death of anti-gay hate speech is no doubt being hastened by the head-spinning speed with which gays as a group – to say nothing of gay marriage – are becoming an unremarkable and even quite traditional parts of American life.” -Jeffrey Kluger
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“To a billion people around the world surviving on just a dollar a day, the question of what to eat tonight is more about life and death than about recipes. The struggle of poor people around the globe weighs heavily on me, especially now that I am a mother, which is why I work with…
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“I just finished my homework fast, I was bored to death. There wasn’t 500 channels so there was a thing for a librarian to teach a kid like me about reading. I started reading early and I read all the time, because I love it.” -Harvey Weinstein
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“I think Prince should open up a little more to other artists. Just because we love Prince. Especially the old stuff – we love him to death. But if he opened up he would be something to deal with. Imagine Kanye West producing a Prince track? It would be banoodles!” -Jamie Foxx
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“We march and fight, to death or on to victory. Our might is right, no traitors shall prevail. Our hearts are steeled against the fiery gates of hell. No shot or shell, can still our mighty song.” -George Lincoln Rockwell
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“Fear was absolutely necessary. Without it, I would have been scared to death.” -Floyd Patterson
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“Everybody thinks I’m at death’s door, but I’m not. There’s nothing seriously wrong with me, and my heart is in 100 percent working order. Anything else you may hear is a damn lie!” -Bobby Darin
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“Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.” -Paul Theroux
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“I mean, Sting is one of my great buddies and I love him to death.” -Elton John
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“But the issue is not only life and death but our existence before God and our being judged by him. All of us were sinners before him and worthy of condemnation.” -Hans Urs von Balthasar
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“A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I’ve seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I’ve never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That’s amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that’s being taken…
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“So we mustn’t lower our guard in any sense because of what has happened in terms of the death of Osama Bin Laden and we are certainly not doing that. The terror threat level here in the U.K. remains at severe and we’re very conscious of the need to continue that.” -Theresa May
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“Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.” -Ray Kurzweil
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“If we can’t face death, we’ll never overcome it. You have to look it straight in the eye. Then you can turn around and walk back out into the light.” -Maya Lin
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“Marriage can be viewed as the waiting room for death.” -Mike Myers
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“I’ve always had bronchitis. I’ve been administered the Sacrament of Death three times for it.” -Mercedes McCambridge
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“To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.” -Pearl S. Buck
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“The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.” -Thomas Mann
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“The disembodied spirit is immortal there is nothing of it that can grow old or die. But the embodied spirit sees death on the horizon as soon as its day dawns.” -Thomas Hobbes
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“Even when you’re making a movie about life, death is a presence, and I guess it’s part of my dramatic viewpoint. I’m not sure why exactly.” -Gus Van Sant
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“Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.” -Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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“Pay mind to your own life, your own health, and wholeness. A bleeding heart is of no help to anyone if it bleeds to death.” -Frederick Buechner
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“I get scared to death when I see people who say they’ve found Jesus Christ, and they’re out there, and I wonder, who’s teaching them? Who’s mentoring them?” -Willie Aames
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“To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It is easy to say no, even if saying no means death.” -Jean Anouilh
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“Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.” -Walter Benjamin
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“I’m not afraid of death. It’s the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.” -Jean Giraudoux
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“Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John.” -Boris Pasternak
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“Long hair is an unpardonable offence which should be punishable by death.” -Steven Patrick Morrissey
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“Men should be bewailed at their birth, and not at their death.” -Charles de Montesquieu
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“We are now operating a school system in America that’s more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.” -Jonathan Kozol
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“In my solitude I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death.” -Alfred Russel Wallace
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“I was extended secret service protection during my presidential run in 1984, when I received the most death threats ever made toward a candidate.” -Jesse Jackson
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“We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.” -Angela Davis
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“When sudden death takes a president, opportunities for new beginnings flourish among the ambitious and the tensions among such people can be dramatic, as they were when President Kennedy was killed.” -Russell Baker
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“To appear on the stage drunk, to have them leave there and remember me making drunken mistakes, that was death.” -Sammy Davis, Jr.
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“We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.” -Umberto Eco
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“A face to lose youth for, to occupy age With the dream of, meet death with.” -Robert Browning
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“I think the amazing thing about gospel music is that not only does it lift up the death and resurrection of our Lord, which is consistent with the Gospel, but it is uniquely communicated depending upon the generation.” -T. D. Jakes
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“There are certain people that are marked for death. I have my little list of those that treated me unfairly.” -Jennifer Lopez
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“We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind.” -Thornton Wilder
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“But there is a difference here: When Jewish children are murdered, Arabs celebrate the deed. The death of an Arab child is no cause for celebration in Israel.” -Theodore Bikel
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“I’m in awe of people out there who deal with Alzheimer’s, because they have to deal with death 10 times over, year after year.” -Marcia Wallace
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“I think the way we talk about cancer has really evolved. I remember the way my grandmother used to talk about it, like a death sentence, no-one would even mention the word.” -Laura Linney
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“I really enjoy theater. I just went to see ‘Death of a Salesman,’ and it knocked me on my ass.” -Jason Reitman
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“My mother was the sweetest lady who ever lived on this planet, but if you tried to tell her that Jesus wasn’t a Christian, she would stomp you to death.” -Dick Gregory
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“Life can’t defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death.” -Edna Ferber
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“When applied to politics and taken to its extreme, kitsch is the mask of death. Fascism was all aesthetics. There was no core principle to it. There was no truth to it.” -John Cusack
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“For three days after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off.” -Johnny Carson
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“Life isn’t fair. It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.” -William Goldman
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“I feel like I don’t watch that many shows with death.” -Lena Dunham
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“Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can’t help but cry. I mean I’d love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff.” -Mariah Carey
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“I love this pedal to death. The only way you could keep me from playing one is by chopping off my legs!” -Kirk Hammett
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“Once a disease has entered the body, all parts which are healthy must fight it: not one alone, but all. Because a disease might mean their common death. Nature knows this and Nature attacks the disease with whatever help she can muster.” -Paracelsus
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“People can undergo a sudden change of thinking and loyalties under threat of death or intense social pressure and isolation from friends and family.” -Keith Henson
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“It’s not the normal way to look at things but I experienced death at a really young age and because of that it’s been part of my mental landscape that death is really very possible.” -Cate Blanchett
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“I made a supreme effort not to do that thing that parents do, which is to bore people without children to death by going on and on about how funny their children are, so there’s none of that hopefully.” -Jo Brand
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“Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you’re scared to death.” -Earl Wilson
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“I believe that people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.” -Nancy Reagan
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“So for twelve miles I rode with Sherman, and we became fast friends. He asked me all manner of questions on the way, and I found that he knew my father well, and remembered his tragic death in Salt Creek Valley.” -Buffalo Bill
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“Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death’s perfect punctuation mark is a smile.” -Julie Burchill
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“Disease, insanity, and death were the angels that attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life.” -Edvard Munch
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“There is no harm in patience, and no profit in lamentation. Death is easier to bear (than) that which precedes it, and more severe than that which comes after it. Remember the death of the Apostle of God, and your sorrow will be lessened.” -Abu Bakr
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“Sleep is lovely, death is better still, not to have been born is of course the miracle.” -Heinrich Heine
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“Sinful and forbidden pleasures are like poisoned bread they may satisfy appetite for the moment, but there is death in them at the end.” -Tryon Edwards
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“Yes, people pull the trigger – but guns are the instrument of death. Gun control is necessary, and delay means more death and horror.” -Eliot Spitzer
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“At a certain age, death becomes familiar to you-or a loss becomes familiar-the tragedies that are more commonplace in life.” -Jessica Lange
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“Policemen so cherish their status as keepers of the peace and protectors of the public that they have occasionally been known to beat to death those citizens or groups who question that status.” -David Mamet
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“Loved. You can’t use it in the past tense. Death does not stop that love at all.” -Ken Kesey
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“You can cry about death and very properly so, your own as well as anybody else’s. But it’s inevitable, so you’d better grapple with it and cope and be aware that not only is it inevitable, but it has always been inevitable, if you see what I mean.” -David Attenborough
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“I’m very comfortable with the nature of life and death, and that we come to an end. What’s most difficult to imagine is that those dreams and early yearnings and desires of childhood and adolescence will also disappear. But who knows? Maybe you become part of the eternal whatever.” -Hugh Hefner
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“If you make every game a life and death proposition, you’re going to have problems. For one thing, you’ll be dead a lot.” -Dean Smith
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“It’s an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous.” -Gloria Steinem
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“People always say that pregnant women have a glow. And I say it’s because you’re sweating to death.” -Jessica Simpson
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“The end of the animal trade would leave more time to trap or beat to death pop star wannabes.” -Simon Cowell
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“We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.” -Robert Falcon Scott
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“The sole equality on earth is death.” -Philip James Bailey
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“Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.” -Lewis Mumford
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“I intend to leave after my death a large fund for the promotion of the peace idea, but I am skeptical as to its results.” -Alfred Nobel
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“I know I’m drinking myself to a slow death, but then I’m in no hurry.” -Robert Benchley
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“Knowing how to die is knowing how to live. What is death anyway? It’s the outcome of life.” -Jeanne Moreau
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“Monarchs ought to put to death the authors and instigators of war, as their sworn enemies and as dangers to their states.” -Elizabeth I
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“As a kid, all I thought about was death.” -Maurice Sendak
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“I believe that his death and resurrection transformed humanity’s relationship with God.” -Timothy Radcliffe
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“Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death.” -Karen Armstrong
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“Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines. And in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them.” -Abbie Hoffman
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“Does not the very word ‘creative’ mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act – rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life – not death.” -Berenice Abbott
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“When theater becomes a soothing middle-class thing, when it’s packaged as the Night Out, then that’s the death of it.” -Ralph Fiennes
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“Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It’s a palliative. The remedy is death.” -Nicolas Chamfort
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“Death is a delightful hiding place for weary men.” -Herodotus
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“The enemy fought with savage fury, and met death with all its horrors, without shrinking or complaining: not one asked to be spared, but fought as long as they could stand or sit.” -Davy Crockett
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“It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.” -Wendell Berry
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“I’ve always been scared to death of pain – afraid, even, to think of it.” -Loretta Young
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“When I’m lying in my bed I think about life and I think about death and neither one particularly appeals to me.” -Steven Morrissey
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“People think celebrities don’t have to worry about human things like sickness and death and rent. It’s like you’ve traveled to this Land of Celebrity, this other country.” -David Duchovny
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“She looks like a warrior. I mean, Bellatrix does mean warrior. And she’s also a bit of a fatale. She’s the right hand of Voldemort, and the only woman death eater.” -Helena Bonham Carter
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“I can’t turn on the television without seeing me, or open the newspaper without seeing me and, honestly, I’m sick to death of me.” -Elizabeth Edwards
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“Each instant of life is a step toward death.” -Pierre Corneille
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“You always think that 70 is the end of the road: ‘Somebody died when they were 73 good life’. You’re closer to death, and you better make sure you don’t waste too much of your time doing things you don’t want to do. No point in saying things you don’t believe in.” -Ian Mckellen
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“Science without conscience is the death of the soul.” -Francois Rabelais
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“So much of motion, is so much of life, and so much of joy, and to stand still, or get on but slowly, is death and the devil.” -Laurence Sterne
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“Death is the mother of Beauty hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.” -Wallace Stevens
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“In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep for we are dying the darkness and we know no death.” -Thomas Wolfe
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“If efforts to do social work are couched in selfish motives, then they will die a premature death. Why would my efforts get politicised? I have values I inherited from my father. He helped many. Anyone, even a postman knocking on our door would get a glass of water and some sweets.” -Sachin Tendulkar
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“But I have been in some very beautiful churches, then I’ve looked outside and seen people starving to death.” -Don Van Vliet
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“The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it’s just sort of a tired feeling.” -Paula Poundstone
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“Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.” -Alfred North Whitehead
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“I mean, I’m 48 years old and I’ve been through a lot in my life – you know, loss, whether it be death, illness, separation. I mean, the failed expectations… We all have dreams.” -Annie Lennox
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“Your body must become familiar with its death – in all its possible forms and degrees – as a self-evident, imminent, and emotionally neutral step on the way towards the goal you have found worthy of your life.” -Dag Hammarskjold
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“The earth is rocky and full of roots it’s clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you’ll never see it again – it’s death and clay and shrivel, and your…
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“I’m scared to death of being poor. It’s like a fat girl who loses 500 pounds but is always fat inside. I grew up poor and will always feel poor inside. It’s my pet paranoia.” -Cher
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“The death penalty is becoming a way of life in this country.” -Dennis Miller
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“Death comes not to the living soul, nor age to the loving heart.” -Phoebe Cary
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“At the New York Athletic Club they serve amazing food. People go there, get healthy, and then eat themselves to death – which is, I suppose, the right way to do it.” -Oliver Reed
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“Property is unstable, and youth perishes in a moment. Life itself is held in the grinning fangs of Death, Yet men delay to obtain release from the world. Alas, the conduct of mankind is surprising.” -Plautus
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“Well, there’s a remedy for all things but death, which will be sure to lay us flat one time or other.” -Miguel de Cervantes
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“Old age is always wakeful as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.” -Herman Melville
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“Life and death. They are somehow sweetly and beautifully mixed, but I don’t know how.” -Gloria Swanson
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“Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.” -Larry Wall
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“I’m sick to death of famous people standing up and using their celebrity to promote a cause. If I see a particular need, I do try to help. But there’s a lot that can be achieved by putting a check in the right place and shutting up about it.” -Russell Crowe
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“Life is a predicament which precedes death.” -Henry James
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“Death is inevitable, but Life – that’s the tricky bit where things happen.” -Simon Travaglia
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“Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death.” -Miguel de Unamuno
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“When I listen to music, I don’t want to hear about flowers. I like death and destruction.” -Jonathan Davis
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“The essence of the Hebrew Bible, transmitted by Christianity, is separation: between life and death, nature and God, good and evil, man and woman, and the holy and the profane.” -Dennis Prager
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“The compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” -William Lloyd Garrison
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“His death was the first time that Ed Wynn ever made anyone sad.” -Red Skelton
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“To be honest, I’m scared to death of rollercoaster rides.” -Liam Neeson
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“I was blessed with a birth and a death, and I guess I just want some say in between.” -Ani DiFranco
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“No one else can take risks for us, or face our losses on our behalf, or give us self-esteem. No one can spare us from life’s slings and arrows, and when death comes, we meet it alone.” -Martha Beck
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“The meaning of life is not to be discovered only after death in some hidden, mysterious realm on the contrary, it can be found by eating the succulent fruit of the Tree of Life and by living in the here and now as fully and creatively as we can.” -Paul Kurtz
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“Death is not more certainly a separation of our souls from our bodies than the Christian life is a separation of our souls from worldly tempers, vain indulgences, and unnecessary cares.” -William Law
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“The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat – to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in…
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“The death of Pope John Paul II led many of different faiths and of no faith to acknowledge their debt to the Roman Catholic Church for holding on to absolutes that the rest of us can measure ourselves against.” -Suzanne Fields
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“You don’t have people chanting ‘Death to America’ in Israel.” -Benjamin Netanyahu
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“Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.” -Jean Cocteau
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“If Shaw and Einstein couldn’t beat death, what chance have I got? Practically none.” -Mel Brooks
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“There are only three events in a man’s life birth, life, and death he is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.” -Jean de la Bruyere
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“Only in death will I relinquish my belts.” -Manny Pacquiao
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“Benjamin Franklin said there were only two things certain in life: death and taxes. But I’d like to add a third certainty: trash. And while some in this room might want to discuss reducing taxes, I want to talk about reducing trash.” -Ruth Ann Minner
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“When you break up, your whole identity is shattered. It’s like death.” -Dennis Quaid
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“Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.” -Jean Baudrillard
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“Nothing endears so much a friend as sorrow for his death. The pleasure of his company has not so powerful an influence.” -David Hume
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“I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness.” -George Fox
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“There is something about poverty that smells like death.” -Zora Neale Hurston
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“Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.” -Edith Wharton
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“People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it. It freezes you to death, and in this world you’ve got to keep your feet warm.” -Denis Diderot
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“See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil… I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse therefore choose life.” -Moses
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“Death in itself is nothing but we fear to be we know not what, we know not where.” -John Dryden
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“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
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“Death is with you all the time you get deeper in it as you move towards it, but it’s not unfamiliar to you. It’s always been there, so what becomes unfamiliar to you when you pass away from the moment is really life.” -Bell Hooks
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“I am not the born how can there be either birth or death for me?” -Guru Nanak
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“Andrew Wood’s death changed things for a few weeks. I probably got even heavier into drugs after that.” -Layne Staley
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“Buddhas move freely through birth and death, appearing and disappearing at will.” -Bodhidharma
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“Talk to people in their own language. If you do it well, they’ll say, ‘God, he said exactly what I was thinking.’ And when they begin to respect you, they’ll follow you to the death.” -Lee Iacocca
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“I was very sad to hear of the death of Ronnie Barker, who was such a warm, friendly and encouraging presence to have when I started in television. He was also a great comic actor to learn from.” -John Cleese
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“The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.” -Florence Nightingale
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