Tove Jansson Quotes

I think that, with age, people come to realize that death is inevitable. And we need to learn to face it with serenity, wisdom and resignation. Death often frees us from a lot of senseless sufferings.

There is nothing ugly about death; but man, out of his fear, has made even the word, death ugly and unutterable. People don't like to talk about it. They won't even listen to the word death.

We usually say of ancient persons, that they have already one foot in the grave, and the rest of their life is nothing else but the bringing of these feet together.

Papa died when he was 77.

Retiring is just practicing up to be dead. That doesn't take any practice.

I turn to the 'Telegraph's' obituaries page with trepidation.

At my age flowers scare me.

I wait for death and journalists.

You know you're getting old when you go to more funerals than you do weddings.

Society has a fascination with death.

I am scared of death.

My father passed away at, like, 87.

I think people don't think or talk about death very much. I don't think we're very open about it, at least in my experience.

It seems like people are just dropping off the Earth. I suppose that happens when you get older. It's part of life. No one's getting out of it.

I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

I'm starting to get older, and began to think about mortality a little more. My mother died in 2003 and that was a big shock. When your parents start to die off, that's going to be a revelation. So for me, this album - although it might sound quite cheery - is really talking about death.

When you're 21 you think, "Old people sound like this. Old people think like this." I don't think my ideas about aging and about eternal life changed that much, but it became more poignant to me as I did get older and I could better imagine, as you sort of inch closer to death every day, why legacy, more than aging, becomes important to people.

In this society, we don't like to face the future and the dying process and all of it. Most of us really don't want to think about it, but it's facing me in the mirror every day.

Now he understood. This was death. Death was a silence that gave back no answer.

Death means that a form of life dissolves or that the imminent possibility of dissolution exists, whether through our own death or through illness or old age.

When you get to be my age there are more and more people you have known that you miss. Brion [Gysin], Antony Balch, Ian Summerville are ones I think of right away I was quite close to.

An old mans staffe is the rapper of deaths doore.

Right at this moment, I only want silence. I believe that the end of life is silence in the love people have for you. I've actually been running through what people have said about the end. Religion says that the end is one thing, because it serves their purpose. But great thinkers alike haven't always agreed. Shakespeare knew how to say it better than anyone else. Hamlet says 'The rest is silence.' And when you think of the noises of everyday life, you realize how particularly desirable that is. Silence.

Life is better than death. But death comes eventually to everyone. It is something which many in their prime may prefer not to think about. But at 89, I see no point in avoiding the question. What concerns me is: How do I go? Will the end comes swiftly, with a stroke in one of the coronary arteries? Or will it be a stroke in the mind that lays me out in bed for months, semi-comatose? Of the two, I prefer the quick one.

I'm going up to my room now, where I may die.