Up: [[Death]] Created: 2022-02-08 Updated: 2026-02-12 > [!Orbit] [[John O’Donohue]] in *Anam Cara: A book of Celtic wisdom* > Death is the great wound in the universe, the root of all fear and negativity. Friendship with our death enables us to celebrate the eternity of the soul, which death cannot touch. > [!Orbit] Ram Dass > We’re all just walking each other home. > [!Orbit] [[John O’Donohue]] in *Anam Cara: A book of Celtic wisdom* > Sometimes people are very worried about dying. There is no need to be afraid. When the moment of your dying comes, you will be given everything that you need to make that journey in a graceful, elegant, and trusting way. > [!Orbit] [[Michel de Montaigne]] > If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it. > [!Orbit] [[Anne Lamott]] in *Plan B: Further thoughts on faith* > My life has been much better since she died, and it was liberating to be angry, after having been such a good and loyal girl. (p. 48) > [!Orbit] Phyllis Theroux in *The Journal Keeper* > …keen awareness of death, which tends to put everything short of death in perspective. (p. 46) > [!Orbit] Steve Jobs > Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. > [!Orbit] [[John O’Donohue]] in *Anam Cara: A book of Celtic wisdom* > For the Celts, the eternal world was so close to the natural world that death was not seen as a terribly destructive or threatening event. When you enter the eternal world, you are going home to where no shadow, pain, or darkness can ever touch you again. (p. 206) > [!Orbit] Unknown > Death ends a life, not a relationship. > [!Orbit] Phyllis Theroux in *The Journal Keeper* > I wonder if the death of those we love prepares us for our own. The pull of those who have gone before us gives us reason to welcome the end of our life as the prelude to a reunion. (p. 174) > [!Orbit] Zora Neale Hurston > (death)… the meanest moment of eternity. > [!Orbit] Kabir >What we call salvation belongs to the time before death. If you don’t break your ropes while you are alive do you think ghosts will do it for you afterward?… What is found now is found then. > [!Orbit] [[Michel de Montaigne]] > Death is only a few bad moments at the end of life…it is not worth wasting any anxiety over. > [!Orbit] [[C. G. Jung]] > Death is as of much psychological importance as birth. > [!Orbit] On Facebook, [[2022-06-15]] > Health nuts are going to feel stupid some day, lying in the hospital dying of nothing. > [!Orbit] George Santayana > There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity. > [!Orbit] [[C. G. Jung]] after the death of his wife > It cost me a great deal to regain my footing. Now I am free to become who I truly am. > [!orbit] [[Anne Truitt]] in *Turn* > I do not wish to come to death without having understood my life in as wide and deep a scope as possible. > [!Orbit] Roland Barthes in *Mourning Diary* > The truth about mourning is quite simple: now that maman is dead, I am faced with death (nothing any longer separates me from it except time). May 28, 1978 > [!Orbit] Lionel Corbett > Death is a part of life, not a separate meaningless event. When the ship is leaving, there’s no holding on to the dock. > [!Orbit] Doris Grumbach in *Fifty Days of Solitude* > I realized that at my age it (death) had become part of the very texture of my thinking. Everything was related to its imminence: my reading, the music I heard, my sense of time and place, my plans, my prayers, my very appetite for thought, for work, for sleep. Perhaps in this sense I not so much *thought* about death as lived with it, like a mortal illness or the loss of a leg. It was not indifference, quite the contrary. It was interest so profound I could not for a moment escape its occupation of my life. (p. 49) > [!Orbit] Emily Dickinson writing to a friend > I notice where Death has been introduced, he frequently calls. This is the idea that so often when you hear of one person dying, you hear of others soon after. > [!Orbit] Donal Ryan in *Heart Be at Peace* > You have to reimagine the world when someone dies…. You can’t just go about your business as before when some you love departs: the dead take something of the world with them, something of your being, because they were part of your being. (p, 192) > [!Orbit] [[C. G. Jung]] in *Memories, Dreams, Reflections* > Perhaps one has to be close to death to acquire the necessary freedom to talk about it. (p. 330) > [!Orbit] [[C. G. Jung]] in *Memories, Dreams, Reflections* > It (death) is brutal not only as a physical event, but far more so psychically: a human being is torn away from us, and what remains is the icy stillness of death. There no longer exists any hope of a relationship, for all the bridges are smashed at one blow. This is a cruel reality which we have no right to sidestep. (p. 346) > [!Orbit] Mark Twain > I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest bit inconvenience from it. > [!Orbit] Roland Barthes in *Mourning Diary* > Now that maman is no more, I no longer have that impression of freedom I had on my trips (when I would leave her for short periods of time). April 18, 1978. Marrakesh > [!Orbit] Viktor Frankl in *Yes to Life* > The fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so. Therefore, death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility.