#Dying

"At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel."

"It's inspirational to see someone who is dying smile."

"I am not afraid of dying. I have lived longer than most people in the world. What scares me is to have a body that works but a brain that is waving goodbye. If that happens, I hope I die quickly."

"Any time you are with anyone or think of anyone you must say to yourself: I am dying and this person too is dying, attempting the while to experience the truth of the words you are saying. If every one of you agrees to practice this, bitterness will die out, harmony will arise."

"The question of how to spend my life, of what my life is for, is a question posed only to me, and I can no more delegate the responsibility for answering it than I can delegate the task of dying."

"It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it."

"NOT UNTIL I MET YOUNot until I felt your sunshine,Did I realize that I had been in the shade.Not until I saw all your colors,Did I realize that mine had faded.Not until I heard your dreams,Did I realize that I was still sleeping.And not until I experienced my life with you,Did I realize that I was barelyBreathing."

"Girls are always saying things like, “I’m so unhappy that I’m going to overdose on aspirin,” but they’d be awfully surprised if they succeeded. They have no intention of dying. At the first sight of blood, they panic."

"I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped."

"The heaviness of loss in her heart hadn't eased, but there was room there for humour, too."

"People rarely bring flowers to a suicide."

"Nobody wants to believe that existence carries on without at least taking a stumble from their departure of this world."

"Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. A legacy is etched into the minds of others and the stories they share about you."

"I breathe in. The water will wash my wounds clean. I breathe out. My mother submerged me in water when I was a baby, to give me to God. It has been a long time since I thought about God, but I think about him now. It is only natural. I am glad, suddenly, that I shot Eric in the foot instead of the head."

"But she wasn’t around, and that’s the thing when your parents die, you feel like instead of going in to every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone."

"With my last breath, I’ll exhale my love for you. I hope it’s a cold day, so you can see what you meant to me."

"Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born-never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything."

"Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying."

"Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways."

"Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit, every minute of every day. Do it! I say. Whatever you want to do, do it now! There are only so many tomorrows."