Anniversary Of Death Quotes

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I cannot tell you how you will survive without me. I cannot tell you how to mourn me.  I cannot convince you to not feel guilty if you forget the anniversary of my death, or if you realize days or weeks or months have gone by without thinking about me. I just want you to live.
Adam Silvera (They Both Die at the End (Death-Cast, #1))
The anniversary date of a loved one's death is particularly significant. You will have done something you thought was impossible a few months earlier. You will have survived an entire year without someone who was as important to you as life itself.
Bob Diets
You ever think about this? Every year you live, you pass the anniversary of your death. Now you don't know what day it is, of course.
Billie Letts (Where the Heart Is)
Death is Peaceful, Life is Harder
Stephanie Meyer (Twilight Tenth Anniversary/Life and Death Dual Edition (Chinese Edition))
She does not want to feel even the faintest temptation to call his mobile number, as she had done obsessively for the first year after his death so she could hear his voice on the answering service. Most days now his loss is a part of her, an awkward weight she carries around, invisible to everyone else, subtly altering the way she moves through the day. But today, the Anniversary of the day he died, is a day when all bets are off.
Jojo Moyes (The Girl You Left Behind)
I received a voicemail from my grandmother that said "I'm coming to visit, dear. Don't bother locking the doors." Today is the second anniversary of her death.
Victorius Kingston
I wondered if there would ever be a day when I didn't think about Alaska, wondered whether I should hope for a time when she would be a distant memory - recalled only on the anniversary of her death, or maybe a couple of weeks after, remembering only after having forgotten.
John Green (Looking for Alaska)
Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can and bow low to the earth to crouch in that small space above the dirt where the wind will not reach. We honor anniversaries of deaths by cleaning graves and sitting next to them before fires, sharing food with those who will not eat again. We raise children and tell them other things about who they can be and what they are worth: to us, everything. We love each other fiercely, while we live and after we die. We survive; we are savages.
Jesmyn Ward (Men We Reaped: A Memoir)
Every Good Friday, this anchored but ever-changing anniversary of my accident, I go to the little creek that saved my life and light one more candle. I offer thanks for two facts: that I am one year older, and that I am one year closer to death.
Andrew Davidson (The Gargoyle)
My New Year's Eve is always 2 July, the night before my birthday. That's the night I make my resolutions. And this year scares the life out of me, because no matter how successful, how good things appear, there is always a deep core of failure within me, although I am trying to deal with it. My biggest fear, this coming year, is that I will be waking up alone. It makes me wonder how many bodies will be fished out of the Thames, how many decaying corpses will be found in one-room flats. I'm just being realistic.
Tracey Emin (Strangeland)
When a person you love dies, the calendar becomes a minefield. Anyone who has lost someone knows this. There is the loved one’s birthday. One’s own Birthday. Various national and religious holidays, if one is religious. All of these days are difficult in their own ways. But the anniversary is different. On the anniversary of the loved one’s death, you slip backward through time to this same day, one, five, ten years ago. You live it all over again, minute by minute.
Alexis Schaitkin (Saint X)
Suddenly it was fall, the season of death, the anniversary of things-going-to-hell.
Meghan O'Rourke
The sky looks comfortingly mundane compared to the garish kaleidoscope of the stained glass. It makes Rose yearn to be reliving any one of a thousand ordinary days spent with her ordinary older sister, who has now done this extraordinary thing and died.
Liane Moriarty (The Last Anniversary)
What must a text be if it can, by itself in a way, turn itself in order to shine again, after an eclipse, with a different light, in a time that is no longer that of its productive source (and was it ever contemporaneous with it?), and then again repeat this resurgence after several deaths, counting, among several others, those of the author, and the simulacrum of a multiple extinction?
Jacques Derrida (Margins of Philosophy)
Marlena's body was found on November 19, and so I consider that the anniversary of her death, though she almost certainly died on the eighteenth. Because for me, that day, she was still fully, hugely, annoyingly alive--deliberately ignoring my phone calls, up to something she'd no doubt tell me all about soon. Twelve days after November 19, I turned sixteen. Every year, it happens the same way: Marlena dies, I get older.
Julie Buntin (Marlena)
We need more than anniversary sentimentalism and holiday piety and patriotism. Where necessary, we must confront and challenge the conventional wisdom. It is time to learn from those who fell here. Our challenge is to reconcile, not after the carnage and the mass murder, but instead of the carnage and mass murder. It is time to fly into one another's arms. It is time to act.
Carl Sagan (Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium)
It has taken me four years to figure this out. If we live long enough, we all will experience this. Don’t ever predetermine how you think that you should feel on an anniversary of a tragic event in your life, such as a death of a loved one, or on a holiday after such an event. Each year starts out with 365 days, and I will be damned if I am giving up even one of them to misery.
JohnA Passaro
There are questions I can’t answer. I cannot tell you how you will survive without me. I cannot tell you how to mourn me. I cannot convince you to not feel guilty if you forget the anniversary of my death, or if you realise days or weeks or months have gone by without thinking about me. I just want you to live
Adam Silvera (They Both Die at the End (Death-Cast, #1))
I hate the calendar, which is both a circle and a straight line, a wheel and an arrow, grinding each anniversary, each day a reminder of my failures, my lost plans, unfulfilled objectives and wishes, the days aren't taken off the calendar, subtracted one by one, but added, another small stone accumulated, another foot moved ahead, the arrow flying forward instead of falling back to earth, when all I want is a complete stop.
Gregory Galloway (The 39 Deaths of Adam Strand)
Are you ok? they'll say. Tomorrow is one-year anniversary Of my dad's death, and since he's still Dead, I am not okay.
Lola St. Vil (Girls Like Me)
Pudge/Colonel: "I am sorry that I have not talked to you before. I am not staying for graduation. I leave for Japan tomorrow morning. For a long time, I was mad at you. The way you cut me out of everything hurt me, and so I kept what I knew to myself. But then even after I wasn't mad anymore, I still didn't say anything, and I don't even really know why. Pudge had that kiss, I guess. And I had this secret. You've mostly figured this out, but the truth is that I saw her that night, I'd stayed up late with Lara and some people, and then I was falling asleep and I heard her crying outside my back window. It was like 3:15 that morning, maybe, amd I walked out there and saw her walking through the soccer field. I tried to talk to her, but she was in a hurry. She told me that her mother was dead eight years that day, and that she always put flowers on her mother's grave on the anniversary but she forgot that year. She was out there looking for flowers, but it was too early-too wintry. That's how I knew about January 10. I still have no idea whether it was suicide. She was so sad, and I didn't know what to say or do. I think she counted on me to be the one person who would always say and do the right things to help her, but I couldn"t. I just thought she was looking for flowers. I didn't know she was going to go. She was drunk just trashed drunk, and I really didn't think she would drive or anything. I thought she would just cry herself to sleep and then drive to visit her mom the next day or something. She walked away, and then I heard a car start. I don't know what I was thinking. So I let her go too. And I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to." Takumi
John Green (Looking for Alaska)
My parents died years ago. I was very close to them. I still miss them terribly. I know I always will. I long to believe that their essence, their personalities, what I loved so much about them, are - really and truly - still in existence somewhere. I wouldn't ask very much, just five or ten minutes a year, say, to tell them about their grandchildren, to catch them up on the latest news, to remind them that I love them. There's a part of me - no matter how childish it sounds - that wonders how they are. "Is everything all right?" I want to ask. The last words I found myself saying to my father, at the moment of his death, were "Take care." Sometimes I dream that I'm talking to my parents, and suddenly - still immersed in the dreamwork - I'm seized by the overpowering realization that they didn't really die, that it's all been some kind of horrible mistake. Why, here they are, alive and well, my father making wry jokes, my mother earnestly advising me to wear a muffler because the weather is chilly. When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there's something within me that's ready to believe in life after death. And it's not the least bit interested in whether there's any sober evidence for it. So I don't guffaw at the woman who visits her husband's grave and chats him up every now and then, maybe on the anniversary of his death. It's not hard to understand. And if I have difficulties with the ontological status of who she's talking to, that's all right. That's not what this is about. This is about humans being human.
Carl Sagan
New Rule: Stop pretending your drugs are morally superior to my drugs because you get yours at a store. This week, they released the autopsy report on Anna Nicole Smith, and the cause of death was what I always thought it was: mad cow. No, it turns out she had nine different prescription drugs in her—which, in the medical field, is known as the “full Limbaugh.” They opened her up, and a Walgreens jumped out. Antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills, sleeping pills, sedatives, Valium, methadone—this woman was killed by her doctor, who is a glorified bartender. I’m not going to say his name, but only because (a) I don’t want to get sued, and (b) my back is killing me. This month marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of a famous government report. I was sixteen in 1972, and I remember how excited we were when Nixon’s much ballyhooed National Commission on Drug Abuse came out and said pot should be legalized. It was a moment of great hope for common sense—and then, just like Bush did with the Iraq Study Group, Nixon took the report and threw it in the garbage, and from there the ’70s went right into disco and colored underpants. This week in American Scientist, a magazine George Bush wouldn’t read if he got food poisoning in Mexico and it was the only thing he could reach from the toilet, described a study done in England that measured the lethality of various drugs, and found tobacco and alcohol far worse than pot, LSD, or Ecstasy—which pretty much mirrors my own experiments in this same area. The Beatles took LSD and wrote Sgt. Pepper—Anna Nicole Smith took legal drugs and couldn’t remember the number for nine-one-one. I wish I had more time to go into the fact that the drug war has always been about keeping black men from voting by finding out what they’re addicted to and making it illegal—it’s a miracle our government hasn’t outlawed fat white women yet—but I leave with one request: Would someone please just make a bumper sticker that says, “I’m a stoner, and I vote.
Bill Maher (The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass)
There’s a difference between jumping off a cliff and having fun. Once you jump off a cliff, there’s no undoing it, there’s no stopping mid-air. But having the kind of fun that seems daring and embarrassing in front of strangers requires a special bravery.’ “What am I going to do without you?” ‘This loaded question is the reason I didn’t want anyone to know I was dying. There are questions I can’t answer. I cannot tell you how you will survive without me. I cannot tell you how to mourn me. I cannot convince you to not feel guilty if you forget the anniversary of my death, or if you realise days or weeks or months have gone by without thinking about me. I just want you to live.
Adam Silvera (They Both Die at the End (Death-Cast, #1))
The year 1992 should have been remembered as the 700th anniversary of the death of a man who changed the world. Yet the occasion passed without note. Few know of the remarkable achievements of someone who, more than any other, can be said to have invented science.
Brian Clegg (Roger Bacon: The First Scientist)
The day of resurrection is determined in this manner. The first Sunday after the full moon in Aries is celebrated as Easter. Aries begins on the 21st day of March and ends approximately on the 19th day of April. The sun’s entry into Aries marks the beginning of Spring The moon in its monthly transit around the earth will form sometime between March 21st and April 25th an opposition to the sun, which opposition is called a full moon, The first Sunday after this phenomenon of the heavens occurs Is celebrated as Easter; the Friday preceding this day is observed as Good Friday. This movable date should tell the observant one to look for some interpretation other than the one commonly accepted. These days do not mark the anniversaries of the death and resurrection of an individual who lived on earth.
Neville Goddard (Your Faith is Your Fortune)
Late-night TV and snoring side by side into the millennium. Till death us do part. Anniversary darling? What’s wrong with that?
Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body)
To ban joviality on the anniversary of someone's death is as absurd as banning smiling at another person as you pass them on the street.
Anthony T. Hincks
[Ginger said,] "Today's the anniversary of my mam's death." . . . Doc leaned over and took Ginger's wrist. "Happy birthday," she whispered.
Marc J. Lipman (Astral Chariot)
The Black Death (bubonic plague) killed one-quarter of Europe’s population between 1346 and 1352, with death tolls ranging up to 70 percent in some cities.
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
another billion deaths in the months that followed from mass starvation—from a mere 1.5-megaton regional nuclear war.
Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition)
Unhappy Anniversary Memories fly, tears descend, when death's anniversary impinges upon the present. Light a candle in the wind, reminisce upon a kiss; Loss's torment reigns eternal, long after all our tears are spent. Neither motions of joy, nor effervescence of bliss can't throw us off the scent of lingering lament. Death, is death, is death, with or without our frail consent.
Beryl Dov
His death took place on the same day, at the same time of the same month as Katie’s: Monday 12th November at 4am in the morning, on her tenth year anniversary. The old radio suddenly came live and the song Immortality by Celine Dion played. Emma proved you can love the man and hate the disease. She was relieved Ronan’s suffering had ended and that he had gone before her as he was so ill
Annette J. Dunlea
This loaded question is the reason I didn’t want anyone to know I was dying. There are questions I can’t answer. I cannot tell you how you will survive without me. I cannot tell you how to mourn me. I cannot convince you to not feel guilty if you forget the anniversary of my death, or if you realize days or weeks or months have gone by without thinking about me. I just want you to live.
Adam Silvera (They Both Die at the End (They Both Die at the End Series Book 1))
But the death machine had only sampled a vast new source of raw material: the civilians behind the lines. It had not yet evolved equipment efficient to process them, only big guns and clumsy biplane bombers. It had not yet evolved the necessary rationale that old people and women and children are combatants equally with armed and uniformed young men. That is why, despite its sickening squalor and brutality, the Great War looks so innocent to modern eyes.
Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition)
A spectre is an entity that can think—though often primitively—and react to changes to their surroundings. They may move from room to room and usually have some kind of impetus keeping them on earth. They’re the closest to the pop culture concept of ghosts. Imprints, on the other hand, are a small amount of energy left behind at the point of death. They’re not conscious. Most commonly, they replay their death, often at the same time each day or on the anniversary of when they died.
Darcy Coates (The Carrow Haunt)
Plainly, there's something within me that's ready to believe in life after death. And it's not the least bit interested in whether there's any sober evidence for it. So I don't guffaw at the woman who visits her husband's grave and chats him up every now and then, maybe on the anniversary of his death. It's not hard to understand. And if I have difficulties with the ontological status of who she's talking to, that's all right. That's not what this is about. This is about humans being human.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
I cannot tell you how you will survive without me. I cannot tell you how to mourn me. I cannot convince you to not feel guilty if you forget the anniversary of my death, or if you realize days or weeks or months have gone by without thinking about me.
Adam Silvera (They Both Die at the End (They Both Die at the End Series Book 1))
You know, I think God allows those, who have passed, to visit loved ones for a short time.  I feel my mom with me at certain times of the year … my birthday, her birthday, the anniversary of her death.  Any moment in life that would have special meaning,
Kimberly McKay (Finding Kylie: An Overnight Heiress (The Forgiveness Series Book 1))
For a similar example in humans, we have only to consider the surprising evolution of syphilis. Today, our two immediate associations to syphilis are genital sores and a very slowly developing disease, leading to the death of many untreated victims only after many years. However, when syphilis was first definitely recorded in Europe in 1495, its pustules often covered the body from the head to the knees, caused flesh to fall off people’s faces, and led to death within a few months. By 1546, syphilis had evolved into the disease with the symptoms so well known to us today. Apparently, just as with myxomatosis, those syphilis spirochetes that evolved so as to keep their victims alive for longer were thereby able to transmit their spirochete offspring into more victims.
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe’s urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
I cannot tell you how you will survive without me. I cannot tell you how to mourn me. I cannot convince you to not fell guilty if you forget the anniversary of my death, or if you realize days or weeks or months have gone by without thinking about me. I just want you to live.
Adam Silvera (They Both Die at the End (Death-Cast, #1))
Grief is a winding, nasty road that has no predictable course, and the best thing you can do as a friend is to show up for the ride. You cannot rush grief. Read that again, and let it soak in as you either walk through it or alongside someone who is in the midst of it. One of the best things you can do for friends who are suffering through loss is to remind them of this over and over. Don’t mention how other people have “coped so well” with their losses or how “it seems like so-and-so has come out of this better than you have.” I have heard from people who have heard these exact sentences, and while I have a feeling their friends wanted to encourage them into a place of recovery, they weren’t helped by such remarks. It stings to feel like your grief isn’t normal or that you aren’t recovering the way you should be. There is no normal. There is the loss, and there is the Lord. That balance dictates the season, not the changing leaves or the anniversaries of death. I love the way Gregory Floyd explains the delicate balance of hope and pain, “Our faith gives us the sure hope of seeing him again, but the hope does not take away the pain.”1
Angie Smith (I Will Carry You: The Sacred Dance of Grief and Joy)
I cannot tell you how you will survive without me. I cannot tell you how to mourn me. I cannot convince you to not feel guilty if you forget the anniversary of my death, or if you realize days or weeks or months have gone by without thinking about me. I just want you to live. -Mateo Torrez
Adam Silvera (They Both Die at the End (Death-Cast, #1))
This is a man who has shown a complete disregard for human life, cynicism and hypocrisy, and a willingness to use war and the deaths of thousands of Russian soldiers and innocent civilians as a PR instrument in his election campaign. This is a man who raised a toast on the anniversary of Stalin’s birth, had the plaque commemorating former KGB head Yury Andropov restored to its place on the wall of the Lubyanka—Federal Security Service headquarters—and dreams of seeing the statue of butcher Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, stand once again in the center of Moscow.
Garry Kasparov (Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped)
There are questions I can't answer. I cannot tell you how you will survive without me. I cannot tell you how to mourn me. I cannot convince you to not feel guilty if you forget the anniversary of my death, or if you realize days or weeks or months have gone by without thinking about me. I just want you to live.
Adam Silvera (They Both Die at the End (Death-Cast, #1))
There are questions I can’t answer. I cannot tell you how you will survive without me. I cannot tell you how to mourn me. I cannot convince you to not feel guilty if you forget the anniversary of my death, or if you realize days or weeks or months have gone by without thinking about me. I just want you to live.
Adam Silvera (They Both Die at the End (Death-Cast, #1))
I have an awful feeling I’m supposed to know, and that this is some kind of treat. I don’t think it’s my birthday, but perhaps an anniversary. Patrick’s death? It would be just like Helen to remember and make it a “special occasion.” But I can see from the bare trees out on the street that it’s the wrong time of year. Patrick died in the spring.
Emma Healey (Elizabeth Is Missing)
I have a friend who each year on the anniversary of his wife's death, goes to her grave with some friends where they ritually pour Bombay gin on her grave because she liked martinis. As frivolous as that may seem, there is something in libation, a pouring out that symbolizes a pouring out of the soul, a pouring out of love, of remembrance. There is extravagance in my friend's ritual because gin, especially Bombay gin, is expensive; it's not something that one normally pours into the ground. In the annual ritual of spilling gin on the grave there is also the dimension of community. My friend goes with others who knew his wife, who laughed with her, who celebrated with her, who worshiped with her. They together make the pilgrimage. Therefore there is a further sense of community, of bonding among them as they make the annual pilgrimage, perhaps one member less through death, perhaps one member absent because he or she has moved to another place, or is ill. Still they go together, however many they are, to celebrate this person's life, to tell stories, to pour out gin, to pray.
Murray Bodo (The Road to Mount Subasio)
This was a Wednesday. Woody’s dad died on a Wednesday. Exactly 164 weeks had passed since his dad died. Woody began working on “The Son’s Revenge: Faithfully Compiled Evidence of Monstrous Evil” on the second anniversary of his father’s death, sixty weeks earlier, when his hacking skills were refined to the point at which no security system, no digital defense, could stand against him.
Dean Koontz (Devoted)
Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us? I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today? What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour. At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour forth a stream, a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and the crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
Frederick Douglass (Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings)
No more bereavement food. I was sick of it. It’s funny how time is measured after you’ve lost someone. Everything relates back to that second your life swerved. The calendar isn’t measured by the names of the months or seasons anymore, but by those significant dates. The day we met. The first time we kissed. The first dinner with his family. The anniversary of his death. The date of his funeral.
Kristan Higgins (On Second Thought)
My theory is that Dad wanted to give Mom the only anniversary gift he hadn’t given her yet.” “You would take the romantic approach.” Zander had remained standing, one shoulder casually braced against the fireplace. “I think their anniversary reminded Garner that they’re getting older, and if they were ever going to be missionaries, it needed to be now.” Nora arched an eyebrow. “You would take the death-is-imminent approach.
Becky Wade (True to You (A Bradford Sisters Romance, #1))
Twenty years after Waksman’s death, the American Society for Microbiology made a somewhat belated attempt at amends by inviting Schatz to address the society on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of streptomycin’s discovery. In recognition of his achievements, and presumably without giving the matter a lot of thought, it bestowed on him its highest award: the Selman A. Waksman medal. Life sometimes really is very unfair.
Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
Although she never went to the synagogue...Grandma [Lausch], all the same, burned a candle on the anniversary of Mr. Lausch's death, threw a lump of dough on the coals when she was baking, a kind of offering, had incantations over baby teeth and stunts against the evil eye. It was kitchen religion and had nothing to do with the G-d of the Creation who turned back the waters and exploded Gomorrah, but it was on the side of religion at that.
Saul Bellow
One common response of ours to infection is to develop a fever. Again, we’re used to considering fever as a “symptom of disease,” as if it developed inevitably without serving any function. But regulation of body temperature is under our genetic control and doesn’t just happen by accident. A few microbes are more sensitive to heat than our own bodies are. By raising our body temperature, we in effect try to bake the germs to death before we get baked ourselves.
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
Celaena’s bedroom door was open wide enough to reveal that the bed was empty and already made. “Where is she?” Nehemia’s eyes softened, and she picked up a note that was lying among the books. “She has taken today off,” she said, reading from the note before setting it down. “If I were to guess, I’d say that she is as far away from the city as she can get in half a day’s ride.” “Why?” Nehemia smiled sadly. “Because today is the tenth anniversary of her parents’ death.
Sarah J. Maas (Crown of Midnight (Throne of Glass, #2))
In 2008, some of the scientists who modeled the original 1983 nuclear winter scenario investigated the likely result of a theoretical regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan, a war they postulated to involve only 100 Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapons, yielding a total of only 1.5 megatons—no more than the yield of some single warheads in the U.S. and Russian arsenals. They were shocked to discover that because such an exchange would inevitably be targeted on cities filled with combustible materials, the resulting firestorms would inject massive volumes of black smoke into the upper atmosphere which would spread around the world, cooling the earth long enough and sufficiently to produce worldwide agricultural collapse. Twenty million prompt deaths from blast, fire, and radiation, Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon projected, and another billion deaths in the months that followed from mass starvation—from a mere 1.5-megaton regional nuclear war.
Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition)
Speaking to a gathering of prominent black writers and thinkers on the twentieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1883, Frederick Douglass, the aging black leader of pre-Civil War years, lamented that despite the bloody sacrifice of black soldiers in the fight for liberation, "in all relations of life and death, we are met by the color line. It hunts us at midnight …denies us accommodation …excludes our children from schools …compels us to pursue only such labor as will bring us the least reward."12
Douglas A. Blackmon (Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II)
What a story it is. It is filled with suffering and hunger and cold and death. It is replete with accounts of freezing rivers that had to be waded through; of howling blizzards; of the long, slow climb up Rocky Ridge. with the passing of this anniversary year, it may become largely forgotten. But hopefully it will be told again and again to remind future generations of the suffering and the faith of those who came before. Their faith is our inheritance. Their faith is a reminder to us of the price they paid for the comforts we enjoy.
Gordon B. Hinckley
the end result of the complex organization that was the efficient software of the Great War was the manufacture of corpses. This essentially industrial operation was fantasized by the generals as a “strategy of attrition.” The British tried to kill Germans, the Germans tried to kill British and French and so on, a “strategy” so familiar by now that it almost sounds normal. It was not normal in Europe before 1914 and no one in authority expected it to evolve, despite the pioneering lessons of the American Civil War. Once the trenches were in place, the long grave already dug (John Masefield’s bitterly ironic phrase), then the war stalemated and death-making overwhelmed any rational response.379 “The war machine,” concludes Elliot, “rooted in law, organization, production, movement, science, technical ingenuity, with its product of six thousand deaths a day over a period of 1,500 days, was the permanent and realistic factor, impervious to fantasy, only slightly altered by human variation.”380 No human institution, Elliot stresses, was sufficiently strong to resist the death machine.381 A new mechanism, the tank, ended the stalemate.
Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition)
Today is the thirty-seventh anniversary of my mother's death. I have thought of her, longed for her, every day of those thirty-seven years, and my father has, I think, thought of her almost without stopping. If fervent memory could raise the dead, she would be our Eurydice, she would rise like Lady Lazarus from her stubborn death to solace us. But all of our laments could not add a single second to her life, not one additional beat of the heart, nor a breath. The only thing my need could do was bring me to her. What will Clare have when I am gone? How can I leave her?
Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler’s Wife)
With his reputation in tatters, his health ravaged by radiation absorbed at Chernobyl, his disillusionment with his country’s unwillingness to focus more on safety, and feeling the weight of so many dead on his shoulders, Valerii Legasov hanged himself on the disaster’s second anniversary - a day after his proposal for a reformed Soviet scientific community was rejected. During the hours preceding his death, he dictated his memoirs in the form of a lengthy voice recording, in which he concluded that the accident was the, “apotheosis of all that was wrong in the management of the national economy and had been so for many decades.”259
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
Of course, the cadavers, in life, donated themselves freely to this fate, and the language surrounding the bodies in front of us soon changed to reflect that fact. We were instructed to no longer call them “cadavers”; “donors” was the preferred term. And yes, the transgressive element of dissection had certainly decreased from the bad old days. (Students no longer had to bring their own bodies, for starters, as they did in the nineteenth century. And medical schools had discontinued their support of the practice of robbing graves to procure cadavers—that looting itself a vast improvement over murder, a means once common enough to warrant its own verb: burke, which the OED defines as “to kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or for the purpose of selling the victim’s body for dissection.”) Yet the best-informed people—doctors—almost never donated their bodies. How informed were the donors, then? As one anatomy professor put it to me, “You wouldn’t tell a patient the gory details of a surgery if that would make them not consent.” Even if donors were informed enough—and they might well have been, notwithstanding one anatomy professor’s hedging—it wasn’t so much the thought of being dissected that galled. It was the thought of your mother, your father, your grandparents being hacked to pieces by wisecracking twenty-two-year-old medical students. Every time I read the pre-lab and saw a term like “bone saw,” I wondered if this would be the session in which I finally vomited. Yet I was rarely troubled in lab, even when I found that the “bone saw” in question was nothing more than a common, rusty wood saw. The closest I ever came to vomiting was nowhere near the lab but on a visit to my grandmother’s grave in New York, on the twentieth anniversary of her death. I found myself doubled over, almost crying, and apologizing—not to my cadaver but to my cadaver’s grandchildren. In the midst of our lab, in fact, a son requested his mother’s half-dissected body back. Yes, she had consented, but he couldn’t live with that. I knew I’d do the same. (The remains were returned.) In
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
A few years after you disappeared, a postal worker named Ben Carver was sentenced to death for murdering six young men. (He is a homosexual, which, according to Huckleberry, means he is not attracted to murdering young women.) Rumors have it that Carver cannibalized some of his victims, but there was never a trial, so the more salacious details were not made public. I found Carver’s name in the sheriff’s file ten months ago, the fifth anniversary of your disappearance. The letter was written on Georgia Department of Corrections stationery and signed by the warden. He was informing the sheriff that Ben Carver, a death row inmate, had mentioned to one of the prison guards that he might have some information pertaining to your disappearance.
Karin Slaughter (Pretty Girls)
Dr. van der Kolk asked the man directly: “What happened to you on July 5 at 6:30 in the morning?” He responded immediately. While he was in Vietnam, the man’s platoon had been ambushed by the Viet Cong. Everyone had been killed except for himself and his friend, Jim. The date was July 4. Darkness fell and the helicopters were unable to evacuate them. They spent a terrifying night together huddled in a rice paddy surrounded by the Viet Cong. At about 3:30 in the morning, Jim was hit in the chest by a Viet Cong bullet. He died in his friend’s arms at 6:30 on the morning of July 5. After returning to the States, every July 5 (that he did not spend in jail), the man had re-enacted the anniversary of his friend’s death. In the therapy session with Dr. van der Kolk, the vet experienced grief over the loss ...
Peter A. Levine
These feelings don't just go away. They linger. Hover. They are with me always. Even at my most functioning...they are there, watching me. These emotions are my roommates now, bunking up beside me at night. They do not pay any rent...they are determinded to ruin me, and yet I can never fully evict them from my brain. I have tried -- really tried -- to chip away at my grief...But lately, I've just given up. I'm finally giving it permission to breathe and exist... Most days now, they lie dormant in me. Sometimes it gets so quiet in my brain I think they've finally packed up and left. But every year as the calendar rounds the corner to March and the anniversary of her death approaches, anger bubbles again...I rage over the smallest of things, screaming behind the steering wheel of my car when another driver forgets to use their blinker. At first I'm perplexed, and then I remember: it's here again. And I am still mad. So mad. I can starve it, avoid it, rationalize it, manage it, talk about it in therapy, and eat it up in neat little points value. No matter how much weight I lose, I will never lose this one simple truth: I want my mom. I am so f***ing mad that she's gone. And that feeling will never, ever die.
Kate Spencer (The Dead Moms Club: A Memoir about Death, Grief, and Surviving the Mother of All Losses)
coming 14 april is a 4th death anniversary of good boy,they needed an angel, they took the best,rest in peace (F)...bro
sakhiabbas
no man prepar’d for it; no man consider’d it would come like a Thief in the night, exactly as it happens in the case of death.’74
Niall Ferguson (The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World: 10th Anniversary Edition)
During dessert Vikki finally managed to edge in one complaint. “It was our first anniversary last month,” she said, “and do you know what my newlywed besotted husband bought me? A food processor! Me—a food processor!” “It was a hint, Viktoria.” Vikki theatrically rolled her eyes. Richter just rolled his. Trying not to smile, Alexander glanced at Tania, who was loving on her death-by-chocolate cake and hardly paying attention. She embraced electric gadgets with all her heart. There was not an electric can opener, a blender, a coffee maker that did not get his wife wildly enthusiastic. She window shopped for these items every Saturday, read their manuals in the store and then at night regaled Alexander with their technical attributes, as if the manuals she was reciting were Pushkin’s poetry. “Tania, darling, my closest friend,” said Vikki, “please tell me you agree. Don’t you think a food processor is extremely unromantic?” After thinking carefully, her mouth full, Tatiana said, “What kind of food processor?” For Christmas, Alexander bought Tatiana a Kitchen-Aid food processor, top of the line, the best on the market. Inside it she found a gold necklace. Despite a very full house, and Anthony right outside on the couch, she made love to Alexander that Christmas night in candlelight wearing nothing but the necklace, perched and posted on top of him, her soft silken hair floating in a mane and her warm breasts swinging into his chest.
Paullina Simons (The Summer Garden (The Bronze Horseman, #3))
The masses long ago switched from stocks to investments having higher yields and more protection from inflation. Now the pension funds - the market’s last hope - have won permission to quit stocks and bonds for real estate, futures, gold, and even diamonds. The death of equities looks like an almost permanent condition.5
Niall Ferguson (The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World: 10th Anniversary Edition)
The odds of the average American being shot to death are 1 in 314. But he or she is even more likely to commit suicide (1 in 119); more likely still to die in a fatal road accident (1 in 78); and most likely of all to die of cancer (1 in 5).11
Niall Ferguson (The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World: 10th Anniversary Edition)
The attack on 9/11 was a localized event, affecting only a relatively small number of Americans. As indicated earlier, the general threat of terrorism, even factoring in the large death toll on that tragic day, produces a statistically insignificant threat to the average person’s life. People across the country, however, were gripped with fear. And because we are an object-oriented people, most felt the need to project that fear onto something. Some people stopped flying in airplanes, worried about a repeat attack—and for years afterward, air travel always dipped on the anniversary of 9/11.4 Of course, this was and is an irrational fear; it is safer to travel by plane than by car. According to the National Safety Council, in 2010 there were over 22,000 passenger deaths involving automobiles, while no one died in scheduled airline travel that year.5 Nevertheless, Congress responded by rushing through the USA PATRIOT Act six weeks after 9/11—a 240-plus page bill that was previously written, not available to the public prior to the vote, and barely available to the elected officials in Congress, none of whom read it through before casting their votes.6 Two weeks previous to the bill’s passage, President Bush had announced the establishment of the Office of Homeland Security to “develop and coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy to secure the United States from terrorist threats or attacks.” He explained that “[t]he Office will coordinate the executive branch’s efforts to detect, prepare for, prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from terrorist attacks within the United States.”7 The office’s efforts culminated in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) one year later as a result of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. This law consolidated executive branch organizations related to “homeland security” into a single Cabinet department; twenty-two total agencies became part of this new apparatus. The government, responding to the outcry from a fearful citizenry, was eager to “do something.” All of this (and much, much more), affecting all Americans, because of a localized event materially affecting only a few. But while the event directly impacted only a small percentage of the population, its impact was felt throughout the entire country.
Connor Boyack (Feardom: How Politicians Exploit Your Emotions and What You Can Do to Stop Them)
ON THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF D-Day, I was broadcasting from the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach at Colleville-sur-Mer in Normandy, one of the bloodiest battlefields in American history. The cemetery is at once haunting and beautiful, with 9,386 white marble headstones in long, even lines across the manicured fields of dark green, each headstone marking the death of a brave young American. The anniversary was a somber and celebratory
Tom Brokaw (The Greatest Generation)
MS. WALKER,” YUKI said to her lovely looking witness, “do you know the defendant, Dr. Candace Martin?” “I’ve never met her. But of course I know who she is.” “Did you know her husband, Dennis Martin?” “Yes. I was seeing Dennis for a couple of years. Until about a month before his death.” Yuki tucked her hair behind her ears and said to Walker, “By ‘seeing’ Dennis Martin, do you mean you were having a sexual relationship
James Patterson (10th Anniversary (Women's Murder Club, #10))
In general, repression had been good to Luka. As he’d discovered through talking with the copy of Ellie he’d brought with him from the San Francisco, repression had enabled him to function in circumstances where others might have given up. But repression was only one tool, and Luka now knew that the structures one built were often defined—or at least profoundly influenced—by the tools one used to build them. Repression was like constantly building upward in order to avoid the work of building out a more stable foundation, but eventually the instability compounded to the point where your life had no choice but to topple. Another problem with the past was that every year, it came back around. The cycle of the Gregorian calendar was like the constant rotation of a cylinder with 365 chambers, and the longer you lived, the more rounds filled those holes. Except these bullets were never fully spent, and rather than proving lethal, the wounds they left were a gradual accumulation of debilitating injury. A much better calendrical system would have been one where days never repeated; where lives were marked with infinitely incrementing integers, constantly leaving the things everyone wanted to forget further and further behind; where every second of every day was a chance to completely reinvent oneself out of newly created time that had no inherent knowledge whatsoever of the past. In the one year since Luka and Ayla had been alone together aboard the Hawk, they had each experienced a lot of anniversaries: the days they’d left their home pod systems as children; the times each had lost people they loved; the moments they’d been forced right up to the very edge of death—in fact, well past the point of peace and acceptance—only to be unexpectedly pulled back into the worlds they thought they were finally leaving behind. And the day that was
Christian Cantrell (Equinox (Containment, #2))
The primary cause of death was listed as cryptococcal pneumonia, which was a consequence of his Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Those, however, were only the obvious diseases. The KS lesions, it turned out, covered not only his skin but also his lungs, bronchi, spleen, bladder, lymph nodes, mouth, and adrenal glands. His eyes were infected not only with cytomegalovirus but also with Cryptococcus and the Pneumocystis protozoa. It was the first time the pathologist could recall seeing the protozoa infect a person’s eye. Ken’s mother claimed his body from the hospital the day after he died. By the afternoon, Ken’s remains were cremated and tucked into a small urn. His Kaposi’s sarcoma had led to the discovery in San Francisco of the epidemic that would later be called Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. He had been the first KS case in the country reported to a disbelieving Centers for Disease Control just eight months before. Now, he was one of eighteen such stricken people in San Francisco and the fourth man in the city to die in the epidemic, the seventy-fourth to die in the United States. There would be many, many more.
Randy Shilts (And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition)
You okay, baby sis?” Joey asked. “I’m okay. I lost it last night.” She turned her head and looked up at her older sister. “Why didn’t I see that coming? You did.” “The anniversary of deaths has a reputation,” she said. “Even if you don’t remember the exact date—it’ll sneak up on you and knock the wind out of you.” “It sure did,” she said, laying her head back down on Joey’s shoulder. “I knew what day it was. I just didn’t expect such a dramatic event.” Joey stroked Mel’s hair. “You weren’t alone, at least.” “You just wouldn’t have believed it, even if you’d seen it. I was completely out of control, standing in the rain, screaming. I screamed for a long time. He just held me and let me. He kept telling me to let it out. Then he took care of me like you would a stroke victim. Undressed me, got me into dry clothes, gave me a brandy and put me to bed.” “I think Jack must be a very good man…” “Then
Robyn Carr (Virgin River (Virgin River, #1))
People would consider it excessive and rather Italian if you started wailing at the death of an elderly person. Instead, you say things like, ‘Well, he had a good innings, didn’t he!’ No
Liane Moriarty (The Last Anniversary)
Kids are supposed to relax on vacations, and enjoy themselves, not sitting in the back seat of a car making peace with death and gripping a rosary because Mom is playing chicken with oncoming cars in the mountains.
Joshua David Swift (The Coolness of Josh: Expanded 10th Anniversary Edition)
Every year on “Death to America Day”—yes, that’s an actual day—the Iranian government celebrates the anniversary of the hostage-taking at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Iran has also functioned as a leading state sponsor of terrorism, overseeing deadly attacks from Beirut to Buenos Aires. And even under severe economic sanctions that crippled the economy, the mullahs have been pursuing both nuclear weapons and the short- and long-range missiles to deliver them against such sworn enemies as Israel, which the Iranians have vowed to erase from the earth.
Ted Cruz (A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America)
Last November, for example, on the 34th anniversary of the day Americans were taken hostage in Iran—known as “Death to America Day” in Iran—Pastor Saeed was moved to the incredibly brutal Raja Shahr prison. It was a deliberate act of defiance to the United States. Nonetheless,
Ted Cruz (TED CRUZ: FOR GOD AND COUNTRY: Ted Cruz on ISIS, ISIL, Terrorism, Immigration, Obamacare, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Republicans,)
Today is the anniversary of my husband’s death," Maria announced. It was a dramatic statement, but the occasion seemed to demand it. "And I am going to leave.
Sara Sheridan (On Starlit Seas)
The anniversary of our death, we do it only by the others. (L'anniversaire de notre mort, - On ne le fête que par les autres.)
Charles de Leusse
Tea was the backbone of the working class. It was brewed and drunk on every occasion—good or bad. Whether a death or a birth, an anniversary or a funeral, a fight or a reconciliation, tea was the great calmer
Ann Brough (The Bitter Sweet Life of Annie Jenkins)
The photos hide everything: the twenties that do not roar for the Hoels. The Depression that costs them two hundred acres and sends half the family to Chicago. The radio shows that ruin two of Frank Jr.’s sons for farming. The Hoel death in the South Pacific and the two Hoel guilty survivals. The Deeres and Caterpillars parading through the tractor shed. The barn that burns to the ground one night to the screams of helpless animals. The dozens of joyous weddings, christenings, and graduations. The half dozen adulteries. The two divorces sad enough to silence songbirds. One son’s unsuccessful campaign for the state legislature. The lawsuit between cousins. The three surprise pregnancies. The protracted Hoel guerrilla war against the local pastor and half the Lutheran parish. The handiwork of heroin and Agent Orange that comes home with nephews from ’Nam. The hushed-up incest, the lingering alcoholism, a daughter’s elopement with the high school English teacher. The cancers (breast, colon, lung), the heart disease, the degloving of a worker’s fist in a grain auger, the car death of a cousin’s child on prom night. The countless tons of chemicals with names like Rage, Roundup, and Firestorm, the patented seeds engineered to produce sterile plants. The fiftieth wedding anniversary in Hawaii and its disastrous aftermath. The dispersal of retirees to Arizona and Texas. The generations of grudge, courage, forbearance, and surprise generosity: everything a human being might call the story happens outside his photos’ frame. Inside the frame, through hundreds of revolving seasons, there is only that solo tree, its fissured bark spiraling upward into early middle age, growing at the speed of wood.
Richard Powers (The Overstory)
the B sample was positive fell on the twentieth anniversary of Perón’s death. They were two figures in whom many Argentinians continued to believe, excusing their faults long after their powers had waned.
Jonathan Wilson (Angels With Dirty Faces: The Footballing History of Argentina)
Mother’s Day was born. Combining the talents of the card makers, the candy manufacturers, and the florists, Mother’s Day became the perfect rip-off. Florists had always been in the van of advertising; they had also mounted a successful campaign to remove the unhappy phrase from newspaper death notices: “No flowers by request.” It had been replaced by the far more positive—and profitable—slogan: “Say Farewell with Flowers.” In a mother-orientated nation, no son, however cynical, could refuse to send flowers on that special day; the many florists in and around Wall Street—established originally to provide the carnation boutonnieres favored by fashion-conscious brokers—did a record business during the week before the bogus anniversary. As the day drew closer, the price of blooms soared—a practice perfectly understood in the countinghouses; it was known as pushing the price as high as the market would bear. In fact, candy manufacturers saw the price of their shares rise as a result of Mother’s Day.
Gordon Thomas (The Day the Bubble Burst: A Social History of the Wall Street Crash of 1929)
He’s been inside this church so many times, on Sundays and holy days, for the yearly anniversary Mass of his mother’s death and for his own boyhood sacraments, but it has felt, on these occasions, like nothing more than an echoing and all-too-orderly indoor auction house, filled only with the improbable hopes of those who sit and kneel within, fashioning of their own desperation a god whose intercessions they rely upon for help amidst all the hardships for which they somehow hold him faultless.
Bruce Machart (The Wake of Forgiveness)
I was clearing some plates off a table when I heard the familiar strum of guitar chords. My heart clenched painfully as I slowly made my way to the kitchen. Tonight was another open-mic night, and while I enjoyed having live music playing throughout the bar and dining room, I didn’t usually pay that much attention to it. But there was no way to miss this song. The deep, husky voice began crooning through the speakers as I came back out of the kitchen empty-handed. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew that voice as I made my way to a spot where I could see the stage. I rubbed a hand over my aching chest and stopped suddenly when I saw Kash sitting on the stool in front of the mic with a guitar in his hands. What was he doing? Since when did he play guitar and sing? And why this song? His eyes searched the dining area and landed on me just as he began the first chorus of “I’ll Be.” Tears pricked the back of my eyes and my entire body warmed under his intense stare as he continued through words that meant more to me than he could have known. Not once did he take his eyes from me, and my mind and heart fought over my conflicting feelings. Part of me wanted to yell that he was the guy I’d been waiting for. That I was in love with him and was done being only his friend. The other part wanted to know why he was torturing me with this song. With everything else that had happened tonight and the fourth anniversary of my parents’ death less than two months away, I wanted to run away from there, to curl in a ball and mourn what I had lost and would never have. I couldn’t call my mom and tell her I’d met a guy whose presence alone made me dizzy. Who sang to me the same song Dad had always sung to her. I couldn’t tell my parents that no matter how hard I fought my feelings and pushed Kash away, I knew I’d met the man I wanted to marry. The haunting words drifted to an end, and soon the chords did too. When Kash was finished, he put the guitar on the stand and began walking in my direction. Throughout all of this, his eyes still hadn’t left mine. Before he could reach me, the bitter side of me won out and I turned on my heel and rushed back to my customers. I kept myself busy for the rest of the hour and whenever I had to go over to the bar, I made sure to go to Bryce’s side so I wouldn’t have to face Kash again. I knew I was being ridiculous, but if it had been any song other than that one, if it had been on a night that wasn’t wearing me completely down, I may have been brave enough to finally fight for what I wanted. But right now all I could think of was finishing out this shift at work and staying far from Logan Hendricks. Somehow, he knew how to get to me. And somehow, I knew that our being together was right. But especially after that morning, everything about him—and us together—scared me. And I wasn’t sure I could handle that right now. People say that being in love is amazing. They lie. It’s freaking terrifying.  
Molly McAdams (Forgiving Lies (Forgiving Lies, #1))
He had become so disconnected from what gives life—family, friends, community, acquaintances, and even food—that he realized that death would be the natural next step. All at once he saw clearly the path he had chosen and where it would lead him; he understood his own death choice; and he knew that one more step in the direction he was going would take him to self-destruction.
Henri J.M. Nouwen (The Return of the Prodigal Son Anniversary Edition: A Special Two-in-One Volume, including Home Tonight)
Judas betrayed Jesus. Peter denied him. Both were lost children. Judas, no longer able to hold on to the truth that he remained God’s child, hung himself. In terms of the prodigal son, he sold the sword of his sonship. Peter, in the midst of his despair, claimed it and returned with many tears. Judas chose death. Peter chose life. I realize that this choice is always before me. Constantly
Henri J.M. Nouwen (The Return of the Prodigal Son Anniversary Edition: A Special Two-in-One Volume, including Home Tonight)
As time passed, I felt especially grateful to my family and friends who continued to check in and show up. On the six month anniversary of Dave's death, I sent them a poem, "Footprints in the Sand." It was originally a religious parable, but to me it also expressed something profound about friendship. the poem relates a dream of walking on the beach with God. The storyteller observes that in the sane there are two sets of footprints except during those periods of life filled with "anguish, sorrow or defeat." Then there is only one set of footprints. Feeling forsaken, the storyteller challenges God, "Why, when I needed you most, have you not been there for me?" The Lord replies, "The years when you have seen only one set of footprints, my child, are when I carried you." I used to think there was only one set of footprints because my friends were carrying me through the worst days of my life. But now it means something else to me. When I saw one set of footprints, it was because they were following directly behind me, ready to catch me if I fell.
Sheryl Sandberg (Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy)
Propped on a small easel she uses for orders and ingredient lists is a request for a 'gateau Saint-Honore' bearing the legend "Together, Toujours" in scrolling Edwardian script. She attempts to calm herself with her work. It's a nicely time-consuming cake, though Avis finds it distasteful to deface her pastries with these slogans- even "Happy Birthday"- using fine creations as billboards. Today's order, from a Cutler Road matriarch, is an anniversary commandment- "till death do us..." Avis embarks on the journey of the cake which will require both the work of 'pate feuilletee,' and the 'pate a choux,' a carefully timed caramel, a 'creme patisserie,' as well as a 'creme Chantilly.
Diana Abu-Jaber (Birds of Paradise)
A few years ago, I made a serious effort to get better about turning off the lights in my house, and my wife’s and my electricity consumption went down by a noticeable amount. But our overall energy consumption didn’t fall, because the money we saved on our electric bills helped to pay for a big anniversary trip that we took to Europe, and that means that the real impact of our reduction in household electricity use was merely to transform natural gas into jet fuel. As we get better at doing things, we do more things.
David Owen (Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River)
On the afternoon of August 9, hearing the news that Nagasaki had been bombed, Emperor Hirohito called an imperial conference at which his ministers debated the wisdom of surrender. After hours of talk, at 2 a.m. Hirohito stated that he felt Japan should accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, terms of surrender proposed in late July by Truman (who had only become president on Roosevelt’s death in April). But Potsdam called for the emperor to step down; and his ministers insisted that their acceptance depended on Hirohito being allowed to remain as sovereign—an astute demand that would ensure a sense of national exoneration. James F. Byrnes, the U.S. secretary of state, did not deal directly with this, and on August 14 Japan surrendered at Hirohito’s command. The next day, the entire country heard with astonishment the first radio broadcast from a supreme ruler, now telling them squeakily, in the antiquated argot of the imperial court, that he was surrendering to save all mankind “from total extinction.” Until then, Japan’s goal had been full, all-out war, as a country wholly committed; any Japanese famously preferred to die for the emperor rather than to surrender. (One hundred million die together! was the slogan.) Today the goal was surrender: all-out peace. It was the emperor’s new will. Later that day a member of his cabinet, over the radio, formally denounced the United States for ignoring international law by dropping the atomic bombs. In 1988, on the forty-seventh anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when the mayor of Nagasaki accused Hirohito of responsibility for the war and its numerous atrocities, he inadvertently stirred up petitions for his own impeachment, and nationwide protests and riots calling for his assassination. A month afterward, in January 1989, Hirohito died at age eighty-seven, still emperor of Japan. Eleven days later the mayor, whom the Nagasaki police were no longer protecting, was shot in the back. He barely survived.
George Weller (First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War)
Concerning Attis, apologist Weigall remarks: Then again, there was the worship of Attis, a very popular religion which must have influenced the early Christians. Attis was the Good Shepherd, the son of Cybele, the Great Mother, or alternatively, of the Virgin Nana, who conceived him without union with mortal man, as in the story of the Virgin Mary... In Rome the festival of his death and resurrection was annually held from March 22nd to 25th; and the connection of this religion with Christianity is shown by the fact that in Phrygia, Gaul, Italy and other countries where Attis-worship was powerful, the Christians adopted the actual date, March 25th, as the anniversary of our Lord's passion.258
D.M. Murdock (Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled)
On September 16, 2020—the fourth anniversary of Crutcher’s death—religious leaders from Tulsa’s churches and temples gathered outside a midtown Unitarian Church to commemorate Crutcher and to endorse the message that “Black Lives Matter.” Rabbi Dan Kaiman of Congregation B’Nai Emunah said, “We… see a need, the need, right now to hold up this phrase, ‘Black Lives Matter,’ and to reclaim it for our lives, for all our lives, here in Tulsa. We do not view this phrase, ‘Black Lives Matter,’ as political speech but as a declaration of something that should be obvious but is not.”33
David Horowitz (I Can't Breathe: How a Racial Hoax Is Killing America)
as the bomb for Bohr and Oppenheimer was a weapon of death that might also end war and redeem mankind—is one way the poem expresses the paradox.
Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition)
When you see only the waves, you might miss the water. But if you are mindful, you will be able to touch the water within the waves as well. Once you are capable of touching the water, you will not mind the coming and going of the waves. You are no longer concerned about the birth and the death of the wave. You are no longer afraid. You are no longer upset about the beginning or the end of the wave, or that the wave is higher or lower, more or less beautiful. You are capable of letting these ideas go because you have already touched the water.
Thich Nhat Hanh (Living Buddha, living Christ 20th Anniversary Edition)