Christopher Isherwood 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.

Fear comes with middle age.

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.

There are dreadful moments when death comes very near those we love, even if for the time being it passes by. But life is a great adventure, and the worst of all fears is the fear of living.

Suddenly Yankel was overcome with a fear of dying, stronger than he felt when his parents passed of natural causes, stronger than when his only brother was killed in the flour mill or when his children died, stronger even than when he was a child and it first occurred to him that he must try to understand what it could mean not to be alive -- to be not in darkness, not in unfeeling -- to be not being, not to be.

Would it hurt to die? All those times he had thought it was about to happen and escaped, he had never really thought of the thing itself: his will to live had always been so much stronger than his fear of death.

The prospect of an early death sits differently upon each person. In some it gifts maturity far outweighing their age and experience: calm acceptance blossoms into a beautiful nature and soft countenance. In others, however, it leads to the formation of a tiny ice flint in their heart. Ice that, though at times concealed, never properly melts. Rose, though she would have liked to be one of the former, knew herself deep down to be one of the latter.

Getting old and dying alone is my worst fear.

nothing is so horrifying as the possibility of existing simply because we do not know how to die.

I have no fear of death whatsoever. I suspect that few people do, what they all fear is what might happen in the years or months before death.

And he isn't crying for her, not for his grandma, he's crying for himself: that he: too, is going to die one day. And before that his friends wil die, and the friends of his friends, and, as time passes, the children of his friends, and, if his fate is truly bitter, his own children. (58)

It's our mortality that terrifies us, because what we're really seeking is immortality - that is, after all, a fool's errand.

The biggest fear of my life is living. My second biggest fear is dying.

Those who fear death most are those who enjoy life least.

When you get older, then you feel death not at the end of the road, but death all around you, in everything. Life is saturated with death. I feel death everywhere.

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.

I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put if off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.

And yet still I worried. I like being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry is yet another side effect of dying.

The weariest and most loathed worldly life, that age, ache, penury and imprisonment can lay on nature is a paradise, to what we fear of death.

What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.

Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?- How else? Though not till I'm done reading.

L'ide e qu'on mourra est plus cruelle que mourir, mais moins que l'ide e qu'un autre est mort. The idea of dying is worse than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that another has died.

The greatest of all crosses is self. If we die in part every day, we shall have but little to do on the last. These little daily deaths will destroy the power of the final dying.

I am not in the least surprised that your impression of death becomes more lively, in proportion as age and infirmity bring it nearer. God makes use of this rough trial to undeceive us in respect to our courage, to make us feel our weakness, and to keep us in all humility in His hands.