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Quote by Penelope Lively

“Don't think about it. However it was it is over now. However it was or whereever it was. He is not lying there any more. He is nowhere now. Nowhere at all. Don't think about it.”

Book:Moon Tiger

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Moon Tiger

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Penelope Lively

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“There are many cells in your body that are dying as you read these words. Fifty to seventy billion cells die each day in the average human adult. You are too busy to organise funerals for all of them! At the very same time, new cells are being born, and you don't have the time to sing Happy Birthday to them. If old cells don't die, there's no chance for new cells to be born. So death is a very good thing. It's very crucial for birth. You are undergoing birth and death in this very moment.”

Life Death Dying Birth Living Mortality

Book:No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

Source: No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“But someone I know is dying-- And though one might say glibly, "everyone is," The different pace makes the difference absolute.”

Death Poetry Loss Grief Dying Poem Mourning

Author:Robert Pinsky

“What I want you to do for me is this: I want to understand certain things and tell them to others. To do it, I have to get them right, so they are hard to resist. Stay with me until I can do this. Afterwards, you can go where you want.”

Death Poetry Dying Poem Illness Breathing Breath

Author:Kenneth Koch

“I've felt it for some time now, closing around me like the jaws of a gigantic flower. Isn't that a peculiar analogy? It feels that way, though. It has a certain vegetable inevitability. Think of the Venus flytrap. Think of kudzu choking a forest. It's a sort of juicy, green, thriving process. Toward, well, you know. The green silence. Isn't it funny that, even now, it's difficult to say the word 'death'?”

Death Dying Illness The Hours

Book:The Hours

Source: The Hours

“Your dying was a difficult enterprise. First, petty things took up your energies, The small but clustering duties of the sick, Irritant as the cough’s dry rhetoric. Those hours of waiting for pills, shot, X-ray Or test (while you read novels two a day) Already with a kind of clumsy stealth Distanced you from the habits of your health.”

Death Poetry Loss Grief Dying Poem Illness Mourning Medical Care

Author:Thom Gunn

“If we begin to die when we live, and long life be but a prolongation of death, our life is a sad composition; we live with death, and die not in a moment.”

Life Death Time Dying Sad Living

Book:Urne Burial

Source: Urne Burial

“Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth.”

Philosophy

Book:Essays and aphorisms

Source: Essays and aphorisms

“Thousands upon thousands of millions of minute and diverse individuals had come together and the product of their mutual dependence, their mutual hostility had been a human life. Their total colony, their living hive had been a man. The hive was dead. But in the lingering warmth many of the component individuals still faintly lived; soon they also would have perished. And meanwhile, from the air, the invisible hosts of saprophytics had already begun their unresisted invasion. They would live among the dead cells, they would grow, and prodigiously multiply and in their growing and procreation all the chemical building of the body would be undone, all the intricacies and complications of its matter would be resolved, till by the time their work was finished a few pounds of carbon, a few quarts of water, some lime, a little phosphorus and sulphur, a pinch of iron and silicon, a handful of mixed salts--all scattered and recombined with the surrounding world--would be all that remained of Everard Webley's ambition to rule and his love for Elinor, of his thoughts about politics and his recollections of childhood, of his fencing and good horsemanship, of that soft strong voice and that suddenly illuminating smile, of his admiration for Mantegna, his dislike of whiskey, his deliberately terrifying rages, his habit of stroking his chin, his belief in God, his incapacity to whistle a tune correctly, his unshakeable determinations and his knowledge of Russian.”

Death Dying Human Life

Book:point counter point

Source: point counter point

“Your presence in this house is almost as enormous and painful as your absence.”

Death Poetry Loss Grief Dying Poem

Author:Donald Hall

“When it comes to loving and living and dying, there is no such thing as being modern and fashionable. Some things will never change. For it isn't time that's passing by, my friend; it is you and I.”

Love Dying Loving Living Life

Author:Ruskin Bond

Quote by Penelope Lively

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