Handout 1: Quotes for the Common Bowl

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me. — Psalm 23 (KJV)

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The state of death is one of two things: either the dead man wholly ceases to be, and loses all sensation; or according to the common belief, it is a change and a migration of the soul to another place... But now the time has come, and we must go hence; I to die, and you to live. Whether life or death is better is known to God, and to God only. — Plato

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Dukkha. All is impermanence. Nothing lasts. I thought of that yesterday, watching leaves come down in a shower, and the smell of the rotting ones going back into the earth. Leaf to humus and back to earth to nourish the roots of the mother tree. The crows crying as the leaves fall and their nests are exposed: dukkha...all is impermanence.

And life goes on, and people who were with us last year at this time have died, all souls pass on, all is dukkha, nothing lasts. — Elizabeth Tarbox

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Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay;

The worst is death, and death will have his day. — William Shakespeare

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Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. — Matthew 5:4 (NRSV)

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The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any

time. — Mark Twain

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We know not when, we know not where, we know not what that world will be; but this we know: it will be fair. — Christina Rossetti

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So let me die laughing, savoring one of life’s crazy moments. Let me die holding the hand of one I love, and recalling that I tried to love and was loved in return. Let me die remembering that life has been good, and that I did what I could. — Mark Morrison-Reed

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It hath often been said, that it is not death, but dying, which is terrible. — Henry Fielding

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Because I could not stop for Death—

He kindly stopped for me—

The Carriage held but just Ourselves—

And Immortality... — Emily Dickinson

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I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. That was their obsession to be remembered, and anyone who does not remember betrays them again. — Elie Wiesel

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No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. — Steve Jobs

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To die completely, a person must not only forget, but be forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not dead. — Samuel Butler

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And death shall have no dominion, dead man naked they shall be one with the man in the wind and the west moon... Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion. — Dylan Thomas

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Death is the supreme festival on the road to freedom. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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There is no such thing as a natural death; nothing that ever 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

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Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody. — J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

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Man is the only animal that contemplates death, and also the only animal that shows any sign of doubt of its finality. — W. E. Hocking

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Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death. — Albert Camus

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Do not seek death. Death will find you, but seek the road which makes death a fulfillment. — Dag Hammarskjöld

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You are now before the Yama, King of the Dead. In vain will you try to live, and to deny or conceal the evil deeds you have done. The Judge holds up before you the shining mirror of Karma, wherein all your deeds are reflected. — Tibetan Book of the Dead, III

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Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. — Julia Ward Howe

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From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity. — Edvard Munch

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Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it. — Alice Walker

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Life would be as insupportable without the prospect of death, as it would be without sleep. — Countess of Blessington

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Death is the last fact of which we can be certain. — Geraldine Jewsbury

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A human being does not cease to exist at death. It is change, not destruction, which takes place. — Florence Nightingale

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Death! It is rest to the aged, it is oblivion to the atheist, it is immortality to the poet! — Ouida

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Death is a debt we all must pay. — Euripides

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What we call the beginning is often the end, and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. — T. S. Eliot

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One pities most those who loved, and still died. Only those who love, dread death. — Craig Rice

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Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever. — Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

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I don’t want to die. I think death is a greatly overrated experience. — Rita Mae Brown

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Death is the ultimate disappearing act. — Kate Green

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Death is a slave’s freedom. — Nikki Giovanni, speech at Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral

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Her mother was no longer there. Susanna did not think of it as death, but as a fading away, like a pattern on washed cloth. It was the continuation of something that had been happening all her life anyway. — Margaret Atwood, “Uncles”

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When I think of ages past

That have floated down the stream

Of life and love and death,

I feel how free it makes us

To pass away. — Rabindranath Tagore