Death
We euphemize death with the softer phrase "passed away", as if everyone, instead of only a lucky few, died peacefully in his sleep.
Death fixes us forever in the amber of our final identity.
Oil barons who plundered Alaska’s tundras, over millions of years dissolve into oil themselves.
From the delivery room to the morgue is a short walk down the hallway of life.
At the funerals of the old, we grieve for the young of fifty years ago.
Getting dead and being dead would be more tolerable individually. The problem with each is the other.
Death transforms the body from earth's most precious to its most repulsive substance.
Organ donation is being buried in someone else's body.
Teeth: the one place where our skeleton already pokes through our skin.
All books about death are written by the living.
For a happy marriage, the only counseling couples need is an occasional fear that each other has died.
An everlasting heavenly banquet would weary us with bliss and make us wish our souls were in the coffin with our bodies.
Our names burn out like light bulbs, briefly flashing before going black.
For a fallen Marine, a heaven of harps would be hell.
Customs are a culture's deep thoughts, embodied in the thoughtless actions of its people.
A desperate man moves through society like a wave through deep water, its power hidden till, suddenly rising, it bursts against the rocks.
A conundrum of lovers is who will die first. Happy are the honeymooners whose car careens from the cliff, smashing their atoms into everlasting union.
No wonder in youth we feel immortal. How could we die when it seems we have always lived?
Mr. Stanley’s Aphorisms and Paradoxes are outstanding examples of the long-form aphorism...
inevitably studded with discrete individual aphorisms that could easily stand on their own.
-James Geary, author of The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism
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