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Afterlife Quotes

Browse 792 quotes about Afterlife.

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Afterlife Quotes

“Like perhaps most people whose loved ones have died, I wish that I had some guarantees about the afterlife. I wish I were absolutely certain that my father and uncle are now together in some tranquil and restful place, sharing endless walks and talks beyond what their too-few and too-short visits allowed. I wish I knew that they were offering enough comfort to one another to allow them both not to remember their distressing, even excruciating, last hours and days. I wish I could fully make sense of the fact that they’re now sharing a gravesite and a tombstone in Queens, New York,after living apart for more than thirty years.In any case, every now and then I try to imagine them on a walk through the mountains of Beauséjour. It’s dawn, a dazzling morning over the green hills. The sun is slowly rising, burning through the fog. They’re peacefully making their way down the zigzag trail that joins the villages to the rest of the world below. And in my imagining, whenever they lose track of one another, one or the other calls out in a voice that echoes throughout the hills, “Kote w ye frè m?” Brother, where are you? And the other one quickly answers, “Mwen la. Right here, brother. I’mright here.”

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Book:Brother, I'm Dying
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“And afterward, I stopped at Red Cloud's grave to pay my respects to the old chief. Some Oglalas had left him tobacco ties, little sacred bundles in all the colors of the four directions. I asked him to take care of my woman out there, where she was new and maybe lost. I asked him to take her into his lodge and protect her until I could come for her. That's all I remember.”

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Book:Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction
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“People whose religions commit them to the existence of the afterlife feel the terror of death just as anyone else does, nor are they spared the wrenching pain of loss. They do not respond to their loved one's death as though the loved one has moved to a place where they can't contact them for a while but expect to later rejoin them. They might say that is how they see the situation, but their profound sorrow and their mourning practices point in a different direction.”

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Book:Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life
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“I see so many women here,” she says, “and they are holding, all of them. Holding on to their sons or their lovers or their husbands, or their fathers, just as surely as they are holding on to the photographs that they keep or the fragments of childhood they bring with them and out on the table here.” She gestures with her hand. “They’re all different but all the same. All of them are afraid to let them go. And I’d we feel guilt, we find it even harder to release the dead. We keep them close to us; we guard them jealously. They were OURS. We want them to remain ours.” There’s a silence. “But they’re not ours,” she says. “And I’m a sense, they never were. They belong to themselves, only. Just as we belong to ourselves. And this is terrible in some ways, and I’m others...it might set us free.”

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Book:Wake
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“For Homer, glory was the only thing that was truly imperishable. Only the glorious live on after death, in the memories and stories of humanity. Glory is the only meaningful form of immortality. The abject creature that lives on in the underworld holds no appeal. In fact, Homer’s theology demands a dismal afterlife. That way, the heroes are fully motivated to achieve glory here and now. What else is there to aim for? The grim persistence of the soul after death is in every way unappealing. Do you want a mediocre life and an even more mediocre death?”

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Book:Homo Roboticus: The Inner Human Robot Revealed By Sleepwalking and Hypnosis
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“I have done it," she says. At first I do not understand. But then I see the tomb, and the marks she has made on the stone. A C H I L L E S, it reads. And beside it, P A T R O C L U S. "Go," she says. "He waits for you." In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”

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Book:The Song of Achilles
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“He Is Not Dead I cannot say, and I will not say That he is dead. He is just away. With a cheery smile, and a wave of the hand, He has wandered into an unknown land And left us dreaming how very fair It needs must be, since he lingers there. And you—oh you, who the wildest yearn For an old-time step, and the glad return, Think of him faring on, as dear In the love of There as the love of Here. Think of him still as the same. I say, He is not dead—he is just away.”

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Author:James Whitcomb Riley
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“A lot of people think death is nothingness, that somehow they'll stop existing. They're pretty surprised to find themselves still aware, thinking, seeing. Feeling emotions. Things they associate with life. So they're often confused. Other people have so much fear built up around the idea of death that it's too scary to contemplate, even after they've passed on." "What, they just ignore the evidence?" "You'd be surprised what people can make themselves believe.”

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Book:The Holiday Spirit
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“I told you before, Jem, that you would not leave me," Will said, his bloody hand on the hilt of the dagger. " And you are still with me. When I breath, I will think of you, for without you I would have been dead years ago. When I wake up and when I sleep, when I lift up my hands to defend myself or when I lie down to die, you will be with me. You say we are born again. I say there is a river that divides the dead and the living. What I do know is that if we are born again, I will meet you in another life, if there is a river, you will wait on the shores for me to come to you, so we can cross together." Will took a deep breath and let go of the knife. He drew his hand back. The cut on his palm was already healing- the result of the half dozen iratzes on his skin. " You hear that, James Carstairs? We are bound, you and I, over the divide of death, down through whatever generations may come. Forever." He rose to his feet and looked down at the knife. The knife was Jem's, the blood was his. This spot of ground, whether he could ever find it again, whether he lived to try, would be theirs. He turned around to walk to Balios, towards Wales and Tessa. He did not look back.”

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Book:Clockwork Princess
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“When he finally fell asleep, his dreams contained no stories at all, but only the hard stones of thoughts: the unimaginably unlikely coincidence of being alive at the same time as the love of your life, the frequency with which a person was expected to bear the body and the burden of someone else, the idiocy of thinking that kindness can protect the person who is kind, and worst of all, the bottomless pit of a truth that he had suddenly, sickeningly seen: that the world to come that his parents had always talked about was not an afterlife at all, but simply this world, to come--the future world, your own future, that you were creating for yourself with every choice you made in it.”

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Book:The World to Come
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“As a rule, theologians know nothing of this world, and far less of the next; but they have the power of stating the most absurd propositions with faces solemn as stupidity touched by fear. It is a part of their business to malign and vilify the Voltaires, Humes, Paines, Humboldts, Tyndalls, Haeckels, Darwins, Spencers, and Drapers, and to bow with uncovered heads before the murderers, adulterers, and persecutors of the world. They are, for the most part, engaged in poisoning the minds of the young, prejudicing children against science, teaching the astronomy and geology of the bible, and inducing all to desert the sublime standard of reason.”

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Book:Some Mistakes of Moses
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“Animals are not supposed to have the power to reason and therefore don't care whether there is life after death. But imagine animals trying to cheer themselves up in the same way that our own ancestors did when faced with death, by believing that there is life after death. How would they resolve the problem that in the afterlife they might once more be eaten by man?”

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Book:The Mute's Soliloquy: A Memoir
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“The human mind is so limited it can only build an arbitrary heaven — and usually the physical comforts they endow it with are naively the kind that can be perceived as we humans perceive — nothing more. No: perhaps I will awake to find myself burning in hell. I think not. I think I will be snuffed out. Black is sleep; black is a fainting spell; and black is death, with no light, no waking.”

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Book:The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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“Who was the Ghost?" "Her cousin Freddy, He'd hung himself in the summer. He was fifteen. They were really close Freddy & Sheryll." "What did he want?" 'He said there was pictures in his family's barn of guys in their underwear. He told us right where to find them, hidden under a floorboard. He said he didn't want his parents to know he was gay and be anymore upset than they were. He said that's why he killed himself, because he didn't want to be gay anymore. Then he said, 'souls aren't boys and aren't girls. They're only souls. He said there is no gay and he had made is mama sorrowful for nothin'. I remember that exactly. That he used the word sorrowful.”

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Book:Heart-Shaped Box
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“You think the final act of love is setting them free to Rainbow Bridge? That is not the final act of love. The final act of love is releasing them from your leash of grief so they can be free in the heaven on the other side of the Bridge. Until you resolve your grief, you bind them to you in the land between Heaven and Earth while they wait, suspended between the worlds, for you to heal. When you are free of your grief, they are free of your grief.”

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Book:JACK McAFGHAN: Reflections on Life with my Master
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“You wonder why you can’t see me, Sense me, feel me…? When you are outpouring your emotion, it is like me trying to climb up a waterfall To get to you. But if you are calm and have faith in me, I can sail right over to you On the still waters of your soul.”

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Book:Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge: A Dog's Afterlife Story of Loss, Love and Renewal
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“She's had a long life. Now she's going to the Lord." "Frankly it creeps me out a little when you say things like that," Simon said. "It shouldn't. If you don't like 'Lord,' pick another word. She's going home. She's going back to the party. Whatever you like." "I suppose you have some definite ideas about an afterlife." "Sure. We get reabsorbed into the earthly and celestial mechanism." "No heaven?" "That's heaven." "What about realms of glory? What about walking around in golden slippers?" "We abandon consciousness as if we were waking from a bad dream. We throw it off like clothes that never fit us right. It's an ecstatic release we're physically unable to apprehend while we're in our bodies. Orgasm is our best hint, but it's crude and minor by comparison.”

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Book:Specimen Days
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