Dying Quotes

“As we are enabled to live longer, we are also condemned to die longer.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“The short answer to the question of what I'll miss most is Shin, my husband of thirty-one years, and the faces of my children.
The long answer is the world and everything in it: wind, sun, rain, snow and all the rest.
And I will miss being around to see what happens next, how things turn out, whether my children's lives will prove as lucky as my own.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“But I will not miss dying. It is by far the hardest thing I have ever done, and I will be glad when it’s over.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“We are all just a millimetre away from death, all of the time, if only we knew it.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“but escape continued to be my main aim in life, possibly my only aim.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“I think we’re a species with godlike pretensions but an animal nature, and that, of all of the animals that have ever walked the earth, we are by far the most dangerous.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“Grief can accumulate,” she said. “Little losses one after the other can mount up.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“But then, as Sartre says, everybody dies too early or too late.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“We have lost our common rituals and our common language for dying, and must either improvise, or fall back on traditions about which we feel deeply ambivalent. I am talking especially about people like me, who have no religious faith.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“So many times I've wondered what might have happened to me if I had lost my legs, or even just my right one, where my first melanoma appeared two or three years later. If I'd been a second slower stepping away from the car, I might not be dying now. I'd be legless, of course, but still in good health. Of these fateful forks in the road our lives are made up. We are all just a millimetre away from death, all of the time, if only we knew it.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“It's often said that life is short. But life is also simultaneous, all of our experiences existing in time together, in the flesh. For what are we, if not a body taking a mind for a walk, just to see what's there? And, in the end, where do we get to, if not back to a beginning that we've never really left behind? Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past. It is all, according to T.S. Eliot, the same thing. I am a girl and I am a dying woman. My body is my journey, the truest record of all I have done and seen, the site of all my joys and heartbreaks, of all my misapprehensions and blinding insights. if I feel the need to relive the journey it is all there written in runes on my body. Even my cells remember it, all that sunshine I bathed in as a child, too much as it turned out. In my beginning is my end.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“To become a mother is to die to oneself in some essential way. After I had children I was no longer an individual separate from other individuals. I leaked into everyone else.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“If I tell these little histories now, it is because they conjure a feeling of what it was like to be me back then, the same but different, the body still growing up and out into the world instead of contracting and retreating from it. It’s often said that life is short. But life is also simultaneous, all of our experiences existing in time together, in the flesh. For what are we, if not a body taking a mind for a walk, just to see what’s there? And, in the end, where do we get to, if not back to a beginning that we’ve never really left behind? Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past. It is all, according to T. S. Eliot, the same thing. I am a girl and I am a dying woman. My body is my journey, the truest record of all I have done and seen, the site of all my joys and heartbreaks, of all my misapprehensions and blinding insights. If I feel the need to relive the journey it is all there written in runes on my body. Even my cells remember it, all that sunshine I bathed in as a child, too much as it turned out. In my beginning is my end.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“I still write so as not to feel alone in the world, but now I type. What is lost in the process is the hand-drawn aspect of the written word—some of the magic has faded, as it must do from all childhood pleasures. They begin and they end.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“A bucket list implies a lack, a store of unfulfilled desires or aspirations, a worry that you haven’t done enough with your life. It suggests that more experience is better, whereas the opposite might equally be true. I don’t have a bucket list because it comforts me to remember the things I have done, rather than hanker after the things I haven’t done. Whatever they are, I figure they weren’t for me, and that gives me a sense of contentment, a sort of ballast as I set out on my very last trip.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“Every love story is a potential grief story,” says Julian Barnes in Levels of Life,”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“In my beginning is my end.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“For what are we, if not a body taking a mind for a walk, just to see what’s there? And, in the end, where do we get to, if not back to a beginning that we’ve never really left behind?”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“I still write so as not to feel alone in the world, but now I type. What is lost in the process is the hand-drawn aspect of the written word—some of the magic has faded, as it must do from all childhood pleasures.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“The more wakeful I become the more I yearn for the state of unknowing from which I emerged back then.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“In the past, whenever someone has asked me where I’m from, I’ve always struggled to answer.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“In my beginning is my end says T. S. Eliot.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“Now I see the life I’ve lived as the only life, a singularity, saturated with its own oneness.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“The problem with reverie is that you always assume you know how the unlived life turns out.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“I found Oxford both intimidating and dull.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“Still, as the British psychotherapist and essayist Adam Phillips says, we are all haunted by the life not lived,”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“there is a price to be paid for wanting to be everywhere and nowhere,”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“None of my past troubles could compete with the death of a child, not my parents’ messy divorce, or my own romantic flounderings, or my failures and setbacks as a writer.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“It’s good,” she said, “to set aside time every day, to just enjoy the small things, the taste of an apple, the play of sunlight on the water, the smell of the rain.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“I am talking especially about people like me, who have no religious faith. For us it seems that dying exposes the limitations of secularism like nothing else.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir