A Very Easy Death Quotes

“There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“Death itself does not frighten me; it is the jump I am afraid of.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consultation for death.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“But it is impossible for anyone to say ‘I am sacrificing myself’ without feeling bitterness.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“She had appetites in plenty: she spent all her strength in repressing them and she underwent this denial in anger.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“For the first time I saw her as a dead body under suspended sentence.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“He is certainly of an age to die.’ The sadness of the old; their banishment: most of them do not think that this age has yet come for them. I too made use of this cliché, and that when I was referring to my mother. I did not understand that one might sincerely weep for a relative, a grandfather aged seventy and more. If I met a woman of fifty overcome with sadness because she had just lost her mother, I thought her neurotic: we are all mortal; at eighty you are quite old enough to be one of the dead…

But it is not true.

You do not die from being born, nor from having lived, nor from old age. You die from something. The knowledge that because of her age my mother’s life must soon come to an end did not lessen the horrible surprise: she had sarcoma. Cancer, thrombosis, pneumonia: it is as violent and unforeseen as an engine stopping in the middle of the sky.

My mother encouraged one to be optimistic when, crippled with arthritis and dying, she asserted the infinite value of each instant; but her vain tenaciousness also ripped and tore the reassuring curtain of everyday triviality.

There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“She asked us to raise the curtain that was covering the window and she looked at the golden leaves of the trees. 'How lovely. I shouldn't see that from my flat!' She smiled. And both of us, my sister and I, had the same thought: it was that same smile that had dazzled us when we were little children, the radiant smile of a young woman. Where had it been between then and now?”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“Aujourd'hui, je n'ai pas vécu”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“As we talked in the half-darkness I assuaged an old unhappiness.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“Religion could do no more for my mother than the hope of posthumous success could do for me. Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“Time vanishes behind those who leave this world, and the older I get the more my past years draw together.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“By her eyes she clung to the world, as by her nails she clung to the sheet, so that she might not be engulfed. ‘Live! Live!”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“It was a lovely autumn day with a blue sky: I made my way through a lead-coloured world, and I realized that my mother’s accident was affecting me far more than I had thought it would. I could not really see why. It had wrenched her out of the framework, the role, the set of images in which I had imprisoned her: I recognized her in this patient in bed, but I did not recognize either the pity or the kind of disturbance that she aroused in me.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“There are photographs of both of us, taken at about the same time: I am eighteen, she is nearly forty. Today I could almost be her mother and the grandmother of that sad-eyed girl. I am so sorry for them – for me because I am so young and I understand nothing; for her because her future is closed and she has never understood anything.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“It is useless to try to integrate life and death and to behave rationally in the presence of something that is not rational: each must manage as well as he can in the tumult of his feelings. I can understand all last wishes and the total absence of them: the hugging of the bones or the abandonment of the body of the one you love to the common grave.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“And is one to be sorry that the doctors brought her back to life and operated, or not? She, who did not want to lose a single day, “won” thirty: they brought her joys; but they also brought her anxiety and suffering. Since she did escape from the martyrdom that I sometimes thought was hanging over her, I cannot decide for her. For my sister, losing Maman the very day she saw her again would have been a shock from which she would scarcely have recovered. And as for me? Those four weeks have left me pictures, nightmares, sadnesses that I should never have known if Maman had died that Wednesday morning. But I cannot measure the disturbance that I should have felt since my sorrow broke out in a way that I had not foreseen.
We did derive an undoubted good from this respite; it saved us, or almost saved us, from remorse. When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets. Her death brings to light her unique quality; she grows as vast as the world that her absence annihilates for her and whose whole existence was caused by her being there; you feel that she should have had more room in your life—all the room, if need be. You snatch yourself away from this wildness: she was only one among many.
But since you never do all you might for anyone—not even within the arguable limits that you have set yourself—you have plenty of room left for self reproach. With regard to Maman we were all guilty, these last years, of carelessness, omission, and abstention. We felt that we atoned for this by the days that we gave up to her, by the peace that our being there gave her, and by the victories gained over fear and pain. Without our obstinate watchfulness she would have suffered far more.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“ولكن عندما عدت إلى البيت، انهار حزن ورعب الأيام الماضية فوق كتفي بكل ثقله. فقد كان بداخلي أنا أيضا سرطانا ينهش داخلي-الندم. "لا تدعوهم يجرون لها العملية". ولم أمنع أي شىء.
كثيرا ما كانت لا مبالاة أقارب المرضي الذين يقاسون عذاب الاحتضار تثير سخطي. "لو كان الأمر بيدي، لقتلته". وفي أول اختبار استسلمت: تنكرت لقيمي بعد أن غلبتني اخلاقيات المجتمع. "لا،" أخبرني سارتر. "غلبك الفكر العلمي: وقد كان ذلك قاتلا". وبالفعل قد كان. فكل منا يدور في رُحى الأطباء مجبرا، مغلوبا أمام تشخيصاتهم وتنبوءاتهم وقراراتهم. يصبح المريض ملكا خاصا بهم: أيمكنك الهروب به منهم؟
في تلك الأربعاء، لم يكن هناك سوى خياران: إجراء العملية أو القتل الرحيم.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“With regard to us, she often displayed a cruel unkindness that was more thoughtless than sadistic: her desire was not to cause us unhappiness but to prove her own power to herself.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“Hätten Sie nicht den Glauben verloren, dann würde der Tod Sie nicht derart erschrecken", schrieben mir fromme Seelen mit hämischem Mitgefühl. Wohlwollende Leser redeten mir gut zu: "Verschwinden bedeutet nichts; Ihr Werk wird bleiben." Und in Gedanken antwortete ich ihnen allen, daß sie sich täuschten. Die Religion konnte für meine Mutter ebensowenig leisten wie für mich die Hoffnung auf einen Erfolg nach dem Tode. Ob man sich die Unsterblichkeit als eine himmlische oder eine irdische vorstellt – solange man am Leben hängt, tröstet sie nicht über den Tod hinweg.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“the absolute could be enclosed within the last moments of a dying person.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“And that evening too, as I looked at her arm, into which was flowing a life that was no longer anything but sickness and torment, I asked myself why?
At the nursing home I did not have time to go into it... But when I reached home, all the sadness and horror of these last days dropped upon me with all its weight. And I too had a cancer eating into me—remorse. “Don’t let them operate on her.” And I had not prevented anything. Often, hearing of sick people undergoing a long martyrdom, I had felt indignant at the apathy of their relatives. “For my part, I should kill him.” At the first trial I had given in: beaten by the ethics of society, I had abjured my own. “No,” Sartre said to me. “You were beaten by technique: and that was fatal.” Indeed it was. One is caught up in the wheels and dragged along, powerless in the face of specialists’ diagnoses, their forecasts, their decisions. The patient becomes their property: get him away from them if you can! There were only two things to choose between on that Wednesday—operating or euthanasia. Maman, vigorously resuscitated, and having a strong heart, would have stood out against intestinal stoppage for a long while and she would have lived through hell, for the doctors would have refused euthanasia…
A race had begun between death and torture. I asked myself how one manages to go on living when someone you love has called out to you “Have pity on me” in vain.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“Only this body, suddenly reduced by her capitulation to being a body and nothing more, hardly differed at all from a corpse – a poor defenseless carcass turned and manipulated by professional hands, one in which life seemed to carry on only because of its own stupid momentum. For me, my mother had always been there, and I had never seriously thought that some day, that soon I should see her go. Her death, like her birth, had its place in some legendary time. When I said to myself ‘She is of an age to die’ the words were devoid of meaning, as so many words are. For the first time I saw her as a dead body under suspended sentence.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“No existe muerte natural: nada de lo que sucede al hombre es natural puesto que su sola presencia cuestiona al mundo. Todos los hombres son mortales: pero para todos los hombres la muerte es un accidente y, aunque la concozca y la acepte, es una violencia indebida.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“Sorumlusu olmadığım halde, benim olan, hiçbir zaman da bağışlatamayacağım bir günahın, umutsuzluk içinde, cezasını çekiyordum.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“**But it is impossible for anyone to say ‘I am sacrificing myself’ without feeling bitterness.**”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“Souvent, quand les malades souffraient un long martyre, je m'étais indignée de l'inertie de leurs proches. [...] Je me demandais comment on s'arrange pour survivre quand quelqu'un de cher vous a crié en vain : Pitié !”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death