life-and-death

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?

The beautiful wooden board on a stand in my father__ study. The gleaming ivory pieces. The stern king. The haughty queen. The noble knight. The pious bishop. And the game itself, the way each piece contributed its individual power to the whole. It was simple. It was complex. It was savage; it was elegant. It was a dance; it was a war. It was finite and eternal. It was life.

Death or Samadhi, man's life leads only to the grave. Appreciate your life.

Loyalty never put blood back in a man's veins.

And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old__r so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.

Nothing matters when you are dead, and, you are dead when nothing matters.

Water is the most versatile of all elements. It isn't afraid to burn in fire or fade into the sky, it doesn't hesitate to shatter against sharp rocks in rainfall or drown into the dark shroud of the earth. It exists beyond all eginnings and ends. On the surface nothing will shift, but deep in underground silence, water will hide and with soft fingers coax a new channel for itself, until stone gives in and slowly settles around the secret space. Death is water's close companion, and neither of them can be separated from us, for we are made of the versatilitiy of water and the closeness of death. Water doesn't belong to us, be we belong to water: when it has passed through our fingers and pores and bodies, nothing separates us from earth.

There's this small flicker in time when you're looking down the barrel of a gun and instead of your life flashing before your eyes, it__ all the moments you missed out on.

I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darknness.

Say not: I live today, I shall die tomorrow. Divide not reality between life and death. Say: now I live and die.

When we are rich and famous and powerful, we do not want to die. On the other hand, if we are miserable and suffering, we want to die and leave it all. But can joy or misery last forever? There is a saying, "All celebrations must end sometime." Any wish to live forever or die immediately is often a whim of the moment. How do we know that, although we are happy now, we may not be sad the next day, or sad now but may be happy soon? Given that good and ill, fortune and misfortune come in their own way, we should not cling to life or embrace death. Life and death will come of their own. Why be greedy about life and afraid of death?

Half awake and almost dead. But yet we were breathing and yet we were waiting...Waiting for a miracle to happen.

I just want to be enough for you, but I never can be. This can never be enough for you. But this is all you get. You get me, and your family, and this world. This is your life. I'm sorry if it sucks. But you're not going to be the first man on Mars and you're not going to be an NBA star, and you're not going to hunt Nazis.

Though death might still the show, life would be the most critiqued act of our existence. Own your stage.

We all come and go. This universe is staying here with endless joy of welcoming and an infinite sadness of farewell.

Everything had life to me,_ he heard Enkidu murmur, __he sky, the storm, the earth, water, wandering, the moon and its three children, salt, even my hand had life. It__ gone. It__ gone.

There are moments when a rope's end, a pole, the branch of the tree, is life itself, and it is a frightful thing to see a living being lose his hold upon it, and fall like a ripe fruit.