The Art of Death Quotes

“Hearing, they say, is one of the last senses to go. My mother smiled. I tearfully asked her, "Mommy, can you see heaven?" She smiled again. Then she was gone. There was no death rattle, no sudden in-breath or out-breath. She simply stopped breathing. She smiled and slipped away. Smiling while dying is apparently not that unusual. The body tries to produce a state of euphoria to usher us out. It releases the same kinds of neurochemicals, dopamine and serotonin, that flood our brains as we are falling in love.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story

“Perhaps Hurston saw in her mother, Lucy, a version of Persephone, who is so missed when she's gone that the world literally starts to die. This type of grief, as Toni Morrison writes in Sula, has no top and no bottom, "just circles and circles of sorrow.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story

“There's no such thing as simple mourning for anyone, really, except that as writers our grief becomes woven into the fabric of our work as well as into our source material.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story

“We’re all carrying our coffins with us every day.” Or “We are all constantly cheating death.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story

“I sometimes feel as though we are all daughters of the same mythical mother. Some of us are super direct, funny. Others are pensive, inquisitive, maudlin, bitter, sarcastic, or a combination of all those things. Yet we have all been orphaned, except by our words, which we eventually turn to in order to make sense of the impossible, the unknowable.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story

“We are all bodies, but the dying body starts decaying right before our eyes. And those narratives that tell us what it's like to live, and die, inside those bodies are helpful to all of us, because no matter how old we are, our bodies never stop being mysterious to us.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story

“Please remind them that none of us have all the time we think we have in this troubled but still beautiful world.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story

“Maybe the way death folds into the most private of spaces encourages us to underestimate the shattering weight of such a devastating loss. Perhaps uninterrupted routines and the daily flow of life force us to forget that losing a loved one to death is confounding, excruciating, sometimes even unbearable. That is, until it is our turn to grieve, and no matter how many people surround us, we end up, at one point or another, feeling totally alone.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story

“We cannot write about death without writing about life. Stories that start at the end of life often take us back to the past, to the beginning - or to some beginning - to unearth what there was before, what will be missed, what will be lost.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story

“Each death is as singular as the individual who is dying, and in the end we will get no definitive answers.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story

“Each death frames previous deaths in a different light, and even deaths to come. During the time my mother was sick, I found myself crying uncontrollably over the deaths of people I barely knew.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story

“For in grief nothing ‘stays put,”’ C. S. Lewis writes. “One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story