To take, for example, my own death: what I consider most likely to be true is that death will be the complete and utter end of my existence, with no successor existence of any kind that can be related to me as I now am. And if that is not the case, the next most likely scenario, it seems to me, is something along the lines indicated by Schopenhauer. But neither of these is what I most want. What I want to be true is that I have an individual, innermost self, a soul, which is the real me and which survives my death. That too could be true. But alas, I do not believe it.

Come, my child," I said, trying to lead her away. "Wish good-bye to the poor hare, and come and look for blackberries.""Good-bye, poor hare!" Sylvie obediently repeated, looking over her shoulder at it as we turned away. And then, all in a moment, her self-command gave way. Pulling her hand out of mine, she ran back to where the dead hare was lying, and flung herself down at its side in such an agony of grief as I could hardly have believed possible in so young a child."Oh, my darling, my darling!" she moaned, over and over again. "And God meant your life to be so beautiful!

ut as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certain fatal cliffside fall—falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else's degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves.

A sematary," I say. "A what?" Viola says, looking round at all the square stones marking out their graves. Must be a hundred, maybe two, in orderly rows and well-kept grass. Settler life is hard and it's short and lotsa New World people have lost the battle."It's a place for burying dead folk," I say.Her eyes widen. "A place for doing what?""Don't people die in space?" I ask."Yeah," she says. "But we burn them. We don't put them in holes." She crosses her arms around herself, mouth and forehead frowning, peering around at the graves. "How can this be sanitary?

If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there. We become like mushrooms, living in the dark, with poop up to our chins. If you want to know only what you already know, you're dying. You're saying: Leave me alone; I don't mind this little rathole. It's warm and dry. Really, it's fine.When nothing new can get in, that's death. When oxygen can't find a way in, you die. But new is scary, and new can be disappointing, and confusing - we had this all figured out, and now we don't.New is life.

Rings and magazines; keychains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random... and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel.

Since the dawn of existence, you mortals have feared dying, feared the unknown and the pain of it, and yet, pain is a part of life, not death. And I—I am the first moment after pain ceases,” he [Death] pronounced. “It is life that fights and struggles and rages; life, that tears at you in its last agonizing throes to hold on, even if but for one futile instant longer... Whereas I, I come softly when it is all done. Pain and death are an ordered sequence, not a parallel pair. So easy to confuse the correlations, not realizing that one does not bring the other.

Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind your gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth's wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death.How would that be? Just how would that be?

When you die, you want to die a beautiful death. But what makes for a beautiful death is not always clear. To die without suffering, to die without causing trouble to others, to die leaving behind a beautiful corpse, to die looking good -- it's not clear what is meant by a beautiful death. Does a beautiful death refer to the way you die or the condition of your corpse after death? This distinction is not clear. And when you start to stretch the image of death to the method of how to dispose of your corpse as befitting your image of death, everything grows completely out of hand.

But you're dead," said Harry."Oh yes," said Dumbledore matter-of-factly."Then...I'm dead too?""Ah," said Dumbledore, smiling still more broadly. "That is the question, isn't it? On the whole, dear boy, I think not.”They looked at each other, the old man still beaming."Not?" repeated Harry."Not," said Dumbledore."But…" Harry raised his hand instinctively toward the lightning scar. It did not seem to be there. "But I should have died—I didn't defend myself! I meant to let him kill me!""And that," said Dumbledore, "will, I think, have made all the difference.

But as in the degrees of sickness thou art to submit to God, so in the kind of it (supposing equal degrees) thou art to be altogether indifferent whether God call thee by a consumption or an asthma, by a dropsy or palsy, by a fever in thy humours, or a fever in your spirits; because all such nicety of choice is nothing but a colour to a legitimate impatience, and to make an excuse to murmur privately, and for circumstances, when in the sum of affairs we durst not own impatience.”Jeremy Taylor’s “Holy Dying”, extract from chapter IV.I (The Practice of Patience) para 5.

The Sunlight on the GardenThe sunlight on the gardenHardens and grows cold,We cannot cage the minuteWithin its nets of gold,When all is toldWe cannot beg for pardon.Our freedom as free lancesAdvances towards its end;The earth compels, upon itSonnets and birds descend;And soon, my friend,We shall have no time for dances.The sky was good for flyingDefying the church bellsAnd every evil ironSiren and what it tells:The earth compels,We are dying, Egypt, dyingAnd not expecting pardon,Hardened in heart anew,But glad to have sat underThunder and rain with you,And grateful tooFor sunlight on the garden.

His own true hidden reality that he had desired to know grew palpable, recognizable. It seemed to him just this: a great, glad, abounding hope that he had saved his brother; too expansive to be contained by the limited form of a sole man, it yearned for a new embodiment infinite as the stars.What did it matter to that true reality that the man's brain shrank, shrank, till it was nothing; that the man's body could not retain the huge pain of his heart, and heaved it out through the red exit riven at the neck: that hurtling blackness blotted out forever the man's sight, hearing, sense?

Let my heiress have full rights,Live in my house, sing songs that I composed.Yet how slowly my strength ebbs,How the tortured breast craves air.The love of my friends, my enemies' rancorAnd the yellow roses in my bushy garden,And a lover's burning tenderness—all thisI bestow upon you, messenger of dawn.Also the glory for which I was born,For which my star, like some whirlwind, soaredAnd now falls. Look, its fallingProphesies your power, love and inspiration.Preserving my generous bequest,You will live long and worthily.Thus it will be. You see, I am content,Be happy, but remember me.

The harassed look is that of a desperately tired swimmer or runner; yet there is no question of stopping. The creature we are watching will struggle on and on until it drops. Not because it is heroic. It can imagine no alternative.Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face - the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young-man - all present still, preserved as fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us - we have died -what is there to be afraid of?It answers them: But it happened so gradually, so easily. I am afraid of being rushed.