#age

Growing up in my family meant ambushes on your birthday, crossbows for Christmas, and games of dodge ball where the balls were occasionally rigged to explode. It also meant learning how to work your way out of a wide variety of death traps. Failure to get loose on your own could lead to missing dinner, or worse, being forced to admit that you missed dinner because your baby sister had tied you to the couch. Again. ↗

— Seanan McGuire

#escape #family #humor #death

When your family dies, that’s a bummer, but that’s life. When my family dies, it’s a tragedy and the world is unbalanced and biased.
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#biased #death #life #tragedy #unbalanced

I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#english-language #french #time #death

Summaries without background or study will lead to discussions without understanding. ↗

— Reid A. Ashbaucher

#made-in-the-image-of-god #philosophy-of-religion #reid-ashbaucher #religion

Maude regards the ones who don't make it as her own personal failures. "I guess I didn't put enough emphasis on 'until death do you part,'" she says sourly, whenever she hears about the latest divorce. "Sad to say, but some are in it just for the good times. Married folks, they gotta be like that cat's claw acacia I've got growin' in my yard. Gotta grab hard and hold on tight when the going gets rough. Only way to get through the bad times. Grab hard, hold on, and ride. No matter what. ↗

— Susan Wittig Albert

#cat-s-claw #divorce #marriage #death

It was the first time in a half century that they had been so close and had enough time to look at each other with some serenity and they had seen each other for what they were: two old people, ambushed by death, who had nothing in common except the mercy of an ephemeral past that was no longer theirs but belonged to two young people who had vanished and who could have been their grandchildren. ↗

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

#growing-old #death

A man must be prepared to face life, as well as death, there's no escape from either. ↗

— Ellis Peters

#courage #death #life #responsibility #courage

The wedding was in Monterey, a sombre boding ceremony in a little Protestant chapel. The church had so often seen two ripe bodies die by the process of marriage that it seemed to celebrate a mystic double death with its ritual. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#death

We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.... We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. (1970 English translation) ↗

— Stanisław Lem

#imperialism #jingoism #new-worlds #racism #science-fiction

And it was as if fate had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends. ↗

— Stephen Crane

#courage