Per Petterson Quotes

It's a weird feeling when you know you're going to die.

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

He felt his heart pounding fiercely in his chest. How strange that in his dread of death, it pumped all the harder, valiantly keeping him alive. But it would have to stop, and soon. Its beats were numbered. How many would there be time for, as he rose and walked through the castle for the last time, out into the grounds and into the forest?

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

Just like the poles of a magnet, some people are drawn to death and others are repulsed by it, but we all have to deal with it.

I think about death most of the day, every day. We can't escape death, and choosing to ignore it only makes it more scary.

There's not a higher stake than someone having to face their own death.

I'd rather be dead than dying.

Death is the easiest of all things after it, and the hardest of all things before it.

I think that when we wrestle with death... we start fearing life, because then we come to terms with something that is inevitable.

People start to act very unusually when they find out that they're dying, that they don't have that many years left.

The only thing that scares me is dying.

Oncoming death is terrible enough, but worse still is oncoming death with time to spare, time in which all the happiness that was yours and all the happiness that might have been yours becomes clear to you. You see with utter lucidity all that you are losing.

Oh, it is not death that frightens me, but the impossibility of imparting some meaning to my past.

Peter Van Houten was the only person I’d ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it’s like to be dying, and (b) not have died.

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

Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.

He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.

It is when we are faced with death that we turn most bookish.

Oh, god,” I said. “Sorry, sorry. Do I die now?” --Sadie to Zia

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.

Does it hurt?" The childish question had escaped Harry's lips before he could stop it. "Dying? Not at all," said Sirius. "Quicker and easier than falling asleep.

Death has but one terror, that it has no tomorrow.

I was sitting at home and had a profound experience. I experienced, in all of my Being, that someday I was going to die, and it wouldn't be like it had been happening, almost dying but somehow staying alive, but I would just die! And two things would happen right before I died: I would regret my entire life; I would want to live it over again. This terrified me. The thought that I would live my entire life, look at it and realize I blew it forced me to do something with my life.

It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.