Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

I'm not dying until I do.

But death doesn't scare me. To know exactly when I might expect it, up close and in my face, would actually be a comfort. Because to tell the truth, most of the time dying seems pretty much like my only means of escape.

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

We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.

Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.

Right before 'Brian's Song' there was a period when I was very despondent, broke, depressed; my first marriage was on the rocks. The role of Gale Sayers had been cast with Lou Gossett, and then he hurt himself playing basketball. I was called in to read for the role. I was their last choice, and I knew it.

I wasn't gonna make it. I had come to terms that I was gonna die, and I was very sure of that.

I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death; I am not on his pay-roll.

Life and hope must cease together.

Please don't set me free Death means a lot me

We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.

You didn't want to die. Most mortals don't, even if they find themselves in as desolate and soul-destroying a spot as you. Almost all of those who take their own lives wish at the last moment that they hadn't. They see at the end how much they've given up, how precious life is, even when it's treated them like dirt and crushed their dreams. Many think they've passed beyond hope, but they never really have, not until they pass beyond life itself. Alas, that knowledge comes too late for most would-be-suicides and they die with regret. Very few are offered the chance that you have been handed.

I have hope for you, if only because you're the only one left to hope for.

There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible.

Do it. Before they send those mutts back or something. I don't want to die like Cato," he says. “Then you shoot me," I say furiously, shoving the weapons back at him. "You shoot me and go home and live with it!" And as I say it, I know death right here, right now would be the easier of the two.

Is this what it means to go back to square one? Most likely. He had nothing left to lose, other than his life.

Never fear Death for you will feel aroused by his sleep. Never cheat death or he will slap you with a sentence of misery for the defeat.

Though I can’t help feeling a sudden death cheats you of something. Death is an experience of life. You only get one death. I would like to be aware it was happening, even if that did mean enduring pain and fear.

He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live.

I want nothing but death.

Death grows friendlier as we grow older.

The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbor. It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender.

I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.

Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead