Death Quotes

“Now all my teachers are dead except silence. —W.S. Merwin”
― Joan Tollifson, Death: The End of Self-Improvement

“Practice is not about overcoming human problems. It’s not about becoming serene and transcendent. It’s about embracing our lives as they really are, and understanding at every point how deep and profound and gorgeous everything is—even the suffering, even the difficulty. So we forgive ourselves for our limitations, and we forgive this world for its pain. We don’t say, “That’s not pain.” It is pain. You don’t say, “It’s not difficulty.” It is difficult. But when we embrace the difficulty… we see this is exactly the difficulty we need, and this difficulty is the most beautiful and poignant thing in this world. — Zoketsu Norman Fischer”
― Joan Tollifson, Death: The End of Self-Improvement

“There is a natural impulse to pursue what attracts us, to heal what is broken, to clarify what is obscure, to explore new territory, to discover and develop and extend our capacities and capabilities, to envision different possibilities, to help others, to bring forth what is within us.”
― Joan Tollifson, Death: The End of Self-Improvement

“No wave can ever go off in a direction other than the one in which the whole ocean is moving.”
― Joan Tollifson, Death: The End of Self-Improvement

“Eventually, I encountered radical nondualists like Tony Parsons, Leo Hartong, Sailor Bob, Nathan Gill, Chuck Hillig, Karl Renz and Darryl Bailey. From radical nonduality, you get nothing.”
― Joan Tollifson, Death: The End of Self-Improvement

“One day, as my father told me years ago, the sun will explode and this solar system will be no more. The show will be over. Whether this happens billions of years from now, in the next moment, or at the moment of death, everything perceivable and conceivable will be erased, as it is every night in deep sleep. In reality, all of it is a momentary appearance, fleeting and dreamlike.”
― Joan Tollifson, Death: The End of Self-Improvement

“Once we name this omnipresent ground of being, there is always the danger of reifying it and creating a false duality in the mind between awareness and content, emptiness and form, subject and object, screen and movie. But as they say in Buddhism, form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. Not two. The division is purely conceptual, a helpful map to use for a moment on the pathless path, but then equally important to discard. Subject and object are one seamless whole.”
― Joan Tollifson, Death: The End of Self-Improvement

“Death is the great liberator thinly disguised as our worst fear.”
― Joan Tollifson, Death: The End of Self-Improvement

“In deep sleep, everything perceivable and conceivable vanishes, as does the one who cares about all of this. Every night in deep sleep, the caretaker, the controller, the author, the observer, the scorekeeper, the seeker, the judge, the critic, the decider, the phantom helmsman is gone.”
― Joan Tollifson, Death: The End of Self-Improvement

“Whether it is the personal death that awaits each of us, or the inevitable planetary death in which the earth itself will be no more, or even the end of the entire known universe, death is the single reality that most clearly informs us that the future is a fantasy and that the person and the world and everything that we have been so concerned about are all fleeting bubbles in a stream.”
― Joan Tollifson, Death: The End of Self-Improvement

“As I realize more and more deeply, the greatest gift we can offer to ourselves and the world is to be awake and rooted in love.”
― Joan Tollifson, Death: The End of Self-Improvement