“His beautiful silver hair had turned snow white over the course of just a few days following Chubb's death, and in a way this made him seem younger: made him seem to fit the white caliche landscape even better, and blend in.
His skin was turning whiter, too, even after he had been out in the sun,
It was beautiful, watching him get old-ancient-now that I had realized he too was going to die. This time I could understand it. It was like watching some graceful diver plunge in slow motion-the slowest-from the top of an improbably high cliff, down to the cool river below.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“I knew that I was losing him, and yet we all had the courage to draw closer, to weave tighter, even all the way into the end.
Fred worked in the study, under the glow of yellow light, like an angel-we could see him in there, through the glass doors-while the rest of us sat or lay on the patio under the sky and the stars. Sometimes Grandfather would reach down, searching for my hand, find it, and squeeze it. The last bloodline of my mother, I would think, holding his hand-my last, strongest blood-connection to her-and perhaps he was thinking the same, at those times.
Father and Omar intent upon the game. Grandfather and I intent upon eternity.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“I like to loosen the boundaries of my employment and remain longer than I’m needed. I can feel my necessity slipping away with every extra minute; it’s a rich, complicated sort of sensation, like napping, or dying.”
Source: Temporary
“Be absolute with death. Either death or life
Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep.”
Source: Measure for Measure
“I joy that Death is this Democrat; and hopeless of all other real and permanent democracies, still hug the thought, that though in life some heads are crowned with gold, and some bound round with thorns, yet chisel them how they will, head-stones are all alike.”
Source: Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities
“Jane has been dead for more than two decades. Earlier this year I grieved for her in a way I had never grieved before. At eighty-six, I was sick and thought I was dying. Twenty and twenty-one years ago, every day of her dying for eighteen months, I stayed by her side. It was miserable that Jane should die so young, and it was redemptive that I could be with her every hour of every day. Last February I grieved again, this time that she would not sit over me as I died.”
Source: A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety
“Now there was nothing left of her life, disease had consumed her, eaten up her body, leaving only shaking and fits. It was hard to believe when I saw her sitting there asleep with her mouth agape that her strong will, which couldn't even rule her body now, and her strict morality, which she was no longer able to express, could have left such a deep mark on her children. But it had.”
Source: Min kamp 5
“abyss, n.
There are times when I doubt everything. When I regret everything you've taken from me, everything I've given you, and the waste of all the time I've spent on us.”
Source: The Lover's Dictionary
“Latter-day capitalism. Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match. Like pulling on a Missoni sweater over Trussardi slacks and Pollini shoes, you can now enjoy hybrid styles of morality. It's the way of the world -- philosophy starting to look more and more like business administration.”
Source: Dance Dance Dance
“When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It’s better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers.”
Source: Essays After Eighty