Die Quotes (page 83)
He said when he went to sell a man a flue, he asked first about that man's wife's health and how his children were. He said he had a book that he kept thenames of his customers' families and what was wrong with them. A man's wife had cancer, he put her name down in the book and wrote 'cancer' after it and inquired about her every time he went to that man's hardware store until she died; then he scratched out the word 'cancer' and wrote 'dead' there. "And I say thank God when they're dead,"...
Flannery O'Connor
A lover asked his beloved,
Do you love yourself more than you love me?
Beloved replied, I have died to myself and I live for you.
I've disappeared from myself and my attributes,
I am present only for you.
I've forgotten all my learnings,
but from knowing you I've become a scholar.
I've lost all my strength, but from your power I am able.
I love myself...I love you.
I love you...I love myself.
Rumi
I don't think you will ever be able to understand what it is like - the utter loneliness, the feeling of desperation - to be abandoned in a deep well in the middle of the desert at the edge of the world, overcome by intense pain in total darkness. I went so far as to regret that the Mongolian noncom had not simply shot me and got it over with. If I had been killed that way, at least they would have been aware of my death. If I died here, however, it would be truly a lonely death, a death of...
Haruki Murakami
Any clear thing that blinds us with surprise, your wandering silences and bright trouvailles, dolphin let loose to catch the flashing fish... saying too little, then too much. Poets die adolescents, their beat embalms them, the archetypal voices sing offkey; the old actor cannot read his friends, and nevertheless he reads himself aloud, genuis hums the auditorium dead. The line must terminate. Yet my heart rises, I know I've gladdened a lifetimeknotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope; the...
Robert Lowell