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Death Quotes

    “We have an irrational fear of acknowledging our own mortality. We avoid thinking about it because we think it will be depressing. In fact, reflecting on mortality often has the opposite effect—invigorating us more than saddening us. Why? Because it gives us clarity.”

    Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 361)

      “Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day… The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.”

      Seneca, Moral Letters, via The Daily Stoic (Page 349)

        “For the person facing death, mourning begins in the present tense, in a series of private, preemptive goodbyes that take place long before the body’s last breath.”

        Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 122)

          “We are all terminal patients on this earth—the mystery is not ‘if’ but ‘when’ death appears in the plotline.”

          Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 119)

            “Remember that when you leave this earth, you can take with you nothing that you have received—only what you have given: a full heart, enriched by honest service, love, sacrifice, and courage.”

            Francis of Assisi

            Between Two Kingdoms [Book]

              Book Overview: A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life—from the author of the Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.

              Post(s) Inspired by this Book:

                “But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here—the extraordinary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.”

                Annie Dillard, via Sunbeams (Page 126)

                  “The core of life is about losses and deaths both subtle and catastrophic, over and over again, and also about loving and rising again. The cancer, the car accident—these are extreme experiences of other trajectories we’re on—aging, the loss of love, the death of dreams, the child leaving home. Grief and gladness, sickness and health, are not separate passages. They’re entwined and grow from and through each other, planting us, if we’ll let them, more profoundly in our bodies in all their flaws and their grace.”

                  Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 68)

                    “Millions of persons long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy afternoon.”

                    Susan Ertz, via Sunbeams (Page 75)

                      “Every day matters.  The awareness of our mortality can help us pursue a goal.  We all have a limited amount of time on earth.  Those who live in active awareness of this reality are more likely to identify goals and make progress toward them.  Or to put it another way: Everyone dies, but not everyone truly lives.”

                      Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit (Page 268)

                        “The purpose is to identify not with the body which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from my myths. Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is the vehicle? If you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this thing go like an old car. There goes the fender, etc. But it’s expected; and then gradually the whole thing drops off and consciousness rejoins consciousness. I live with these myths—and they tell me to do this, to identify with the Christ or the Shiva in me. And that doesn’t die, it resurrects. It is an essential experience of any mystical realization that you die to your flesh and are born to your spirit. You identify with the consciousness in life—and that is the god.”

                        Joseph Campbell, via Sunbeams (Page 70)

                          “As much as it sounds trite to ‘live like you’re dying’ or ‘live every day as if it were your last,’ that’s exactly what many people obsessed with a quest do. This shift from an intellectual awareness that we will someday die to an emotional awareness can be a guiding light to discovering what really matters.”

                          Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit (Page 54)

                            “All of us will someday die. Yet not all of us live in a state of active awareness of this reality. In the words of a great Bob Dylan song, ‘He not busy being born is busy dying,’ and perhaps some of us are busier than others.”

                            Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit (Page 58)

                              “Death is a gift meant to wake up the living, to nudge us toward a life of purpose and intention.”

                              Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 106)

                                “Only at the moment of death do [people] recognize the fact that they have not lived. Life has simply passed as if a dream, and death has come. Now there is no more time to live—death is knocking on the door. And when there was time to live, you were doing a thousand and one foolish things, wasting your time rather than living it.”

                                Osho, Courage (Page 142)