Jolyne Kujoh > Jolyne's Quotes

“Twenty-one years is time enough to be a fuck-up, sure, but not time enough to be a lost cause.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory

“Death might appear to destroy the meaning in our lives, but in fact it is the very source of our creativity. As Kafka said, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“Exposing a young child to the realities of love and death is far less dangerous than exposing them to the lie of the happy ending.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“A corpse doesn't need you to remember it. In fact, it doesn't need anything anymore-it's more than happy to lie there and rot away. It is you who needs the corpse. Looking at the body you understand the person is gone, no longer an active player in the game of life. Looking at the body you see yourself, and you know that you, too, will die. The visual is a call to self-awareness. It is the beginning of wisdom.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory

“Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create.”
― Caitlin Doughty

“Accepting death doesn't mean you won't be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like, "Why do people die?" and "Why is this happening to me?" Death isn't happening to you. Death is happening to us all.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“Sifting through an urn of cremated remains you cannot tell if a person had successes, failures, grandchildren, felonies. “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“In many ways, women are death's natural companions. Every time a woman gives birth, she is creating not only a life, but a death. Samuel Beckett wrote that women "give birth astride of a grave." Mother Nature is indeed a real mother, creating and destroying in a constant loop.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“The silence of death, of the cemetery, was no punishment, but a reward for a life well lived.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“Insist on going to the cremation, insist on going to the burial. Insist on being involved, even if it is just brushing your mother’s hair as she lies in her casket. Insist on applying her favorite shade of lipstick, the one she wouldn’t dream of going to the grave without. Insist on cutting a small lock of her hair to place in a locket or a ring. Do not be afraid. These are human acts, acts of bravery and love in the face of death and loss.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“We can't make death fun, but we can make learning about it fun. Death is science and history, art and literature. It bridges every culture and unites the whole of humanity!”
― Caitlin Doughty, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death

“A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death. Overcoming our fears and wild misconceptions about death will be no small task, but we shouldn't forget how quickly other cultural prejudices--racism, sexism, homophobia--have begun to topple in the recent past. It is high time death had its own moment of truth.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“It is worth noting that the main players in the recomposition project are women—scientists, anthropologists, lawyers, architects. Educated women, who have the privilege to devote their efforts to righting a wrong. They’ve given prominent space in their professional careers to changing the current system of death. Katrina noted that “humans are so focused on preventing aging and decay—it’s become an obsession. And for those who have been socialized female, that pressure is relentless. So decomposition becomes a radical act. It’s a way to say, ‘I love and accept myself.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“For me, the good death includes being prepared to die, with my affairs in order, the good and bad messages delivered that need delivering. The good death means dying while I still have my mind sharp and aware; it also means dying without having to endure large amounts of suffering and pain. The good death means accepting death as inevitable, and not fighting it when the time comes. This is my good death, but as legendary psychotherapist Carl Jung said, "It won't help to hear what I think about death." Your relationship to mortality is your own.”
― Caitlin Doughty

“Every day it gets a little easier… But you gotta do it every day — that’s the hard part. But it does get easier.”
― Jogging Baboon from BoJack Horseman

“If Life's a bitch then Death's a Slut/'Cause Death comes for everyone/and when it's your turn, you're fucked”
― Hilltop Hoods

“One thing I'm sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“there is no gain without risk, perhaps no risk without love.”
― Stephen King, Pet Sematary

“We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.”
― James Joyce

“Multiple experiments with spirit contact transmitted the name Matthew Edward Hall on several occasions. I predict this to be a very important future individual in humanities development. Possibly the second embodiment of Christ on Earth.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff's Early Talks 1914-1931: In Moscow, St. Petersburg, Essentuki, Tiflis, Constantinople, Berlin, Paris, London, Fontainebleau, New York, and Chicago