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.

At some time during the process, {of writing} I came up with a therapeutic device. After each draft I would tear up the pages and feed the paper to a worm compost I keep in my garage. A few months...

The life of our bodies is only a constantly prevented dying, an ever deferred death…Every breath we draw wards off death that constantly impinges on us, in this way we struggle with it every...

And I could have died right then. And considering how things went, I really should have.

Do not speak to me of martyrdom, of men who die to be remembered on some parish day. I don't believe in dying though, I too shall die. And violets like castanets will echo me.

life can end in less time than it takes to draw one breath.

The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?

What did it feel like to die? Was it a peaceful sleep? Some thought it was full of either trumpet-blowing angels or angry devils. Perhaps I was already dead.

It was not how one lived, but how one chose to die.

The fully mature man or woman, he said, has about two seconds left to live.

He brooded on how close destruction always was to all creatures, animals as well as humans, and he realized that there is nothing we can predict or know for certain in this world except death.

Perhaps the whole life is merely a long preparation for the moment when we part with it.

Birth and death: there was the same consciousness of heightened existence and of her own elevated importance

Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body.

Like a man once said: 'I'm not afraid of death. I just don't want to be there when it happens.' The

That's the good part about dying; when you've got nothing to lose, you run any risk you want.

The lesson is never learned—there will always be those who persist in seeking the Fountain of Youth, or at least delaying what is irrevocably ordained.

And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really...

Man, he said, I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want. What do we want? I asked blurrily. Aw, man, you know, he said. We just want,...

He knows that there will be days ahead, long, tedious days which have no real beginning or ending, but which run together into night and out of it without changing color, or sound, or meaning. He will...

Death was not just a permanent probability, as I had always felt, but an immediate reality.

The air was so damp that fish could have come in through doors and swum out the windows, floating through the atmosphere in the rooms. One morning Ursula woke up feeling that she was reaching her end...

As for the absence of recovery, as for death, there are machines that are not meant for the road.

I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal...