If you have ever felt slightly nauseous walking through an aged care facility, puckered your face against a smell, observed a grown woman clutching a dolly with desperation, felt a flood of melancholy...

Because in the end, we die. It's like Chekhov observed in so many of his plays: 'in two hundred years, no one will even know we were here.'

No empire lasts forever, no dynasty continues unbroken. Some day, you and I will be mere legends. All that matters is whether we did what we could with the life that was given to us.

One didn't understand, until one had seen a great many bodies, the unconscious effort that one must be making every minute simply to keep one's hands and face and clothes clean. The world's surfaces...

All things die, she told him. Such a truism, it was the trite utterance of any street-corner philosopher, but coming from Inaspe Raimm it sounded different. 'All things reach the end of their journey,...

The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.

You're the right colour for the Angel of Death, Mister Cale. But a little short.' 'I could cut your head off and stand on it. Then I'd be taller.

In the end, we all lose it. Remember that. In the end, we own nothing.

and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality.

The dead to the grave, the living to the loaf.

Death! Strange that there should be such a word, and such a thing, and we ever forget it; that one should be living, warm and beautiful, full of hopes, desires and wants, one day, and the next be...

Death, that reverse alchemy process, in which the gold of life is broken down into foul-smelling starting components.

A man rarely knows the day and hour when he will die. I could be killed any moment and there's not a blasted thing I can do about it.

The dead steps down from the guillotine, carrying under his arm his sacrificed head. Apple trees are in blossom. The dead makes his way to the village tavern, and everyone watches. There, he pulls a...

Would it hurt to die?

Do you not find me beautiful?" Very beautiful. Beautiful like people are beautiful who have little time left to live.

What's the point? was my attitude. We're all just going to die and then NOT be let on the boat.

... you know everybody has a turn, and you just try to find something interesting every day to make you glad it hasn't happened yet.

You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question:...

If they asked how I died tell them: Still angry.

Half a year - maybe. Something like that. Rita did not look away. Part of her job was to help people look at what was coming. Dying could be lonely. A nurse was often an easier person to talk to than...

Being dead's a drug', he says, 'you'll get hooked on it.

risk winding up pushing up grass in the Tinnicum Swamps out by the airport, if something went wrong.

Gentile or Jew, O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

There is the house whose people sit in darkness; dust is their food and clay is their meat. They are clothed like birds with wings for covering, they see no light, they sit in darkness. I entered the...

but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to...

When I prayed, I connected with my parents, with whom I otherwise would not be able to connect anymore, and I connected with the sensation that we are all children who have lost our parents,...

Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.

There were men and women who appeared as fluid as ghosts, they could have been attending a burial out of curiosity, merely to recall how it had been when they were buried.

In death, they all looked the same. This morning they spoke, they breathed, they kissed their loved ones good-bye. And now they lay dead. Gone forever.