Paul Celan Quotes

That's the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything's dark and you can't see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive.

I have not seen much dignity in the process by which we die. The quest to achieve true dignity fails when our bodies fail.

How does a man know when he's taking the last steps of his life?

There's a cliff at the end point of a person's life; most us of peer over the edge of it, hanging on. That's why, when someone chooses to let go, it's so dramatically visible. The body will seem almost transparent. The eys will be looking at something the rest of us can't see.

Everyone sounded the same when they died.

I think you die the way you live.

There's a strange sort of quiet when you're dying. It's as if you're in a glass room, and the walls keep getting thicker and thicker.

A death-bed's a detector of the heart.

The final hour when we cease to exist does not itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way.

I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.

I don't think I've ever been particularly scared of death - but scared of dying, the process. It doesn't seem to be a good way of doing it.

Life cannot be cut off quickly. One cannot be dead until the things he changed are dead. His effect is the only evidence of his life. While there remains even a plaintive memory, a person cannot be cut off, dead. And he thought, “It’s a long slow process for a human to die. We kill a cow, and it is dead as soon as the meat is eaten, but a man’s life dies as a commotion in a still pool dies, in little waves, spreading and growing back toward stillness.

The tongues of dying men enforce attention like deep harmony.

Death's long anabasis.

I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.

I was going to die and it was taking forever.

'Tis the maddest trick a man can ever play in his whole life, to let his breath sneak out of his body without any more ado, and without so much as a rap o'er the pate, or a kick of the guts; to go out like the snuff of a farthing candle, and die merely of the mulligrubs, or the sullens.

These are the pale deaths which men miscall their lives.

A dying man can do nothing easy.

Then with no throbs of fiery pain, No cold gradations of decay, Death broke at once the vital chain, And freed his soul the nearest way.

Death, lonely death, Beneath the withered leaves.

The end of a life is always vivifying.

think of it this way," he said "It took nine months to get you born, so doesn't it figure it would take nine months to get you dead?

A person's last moments are an important thing. You can't choose how you're born but you can choose how you die.