merh licht, more light" GOETHE
merh licht, more light" GOETHE
dying is incredibly boring ;I would hate to have to die twice! Richard feymann
I told you Iwas sick! Spike milligan
My deathbed quote would be my epitaph engraved in the tombstone or the ash container. Your Choice.
"Cafolini doesn't live here anylonger. Care to join?"
Last edited by cafolini; 11-04-2012 at 09:32 PM.
One I particularly like it this one,
"You who are deep in the ages, now, deep in the ages, you whom the world could not break or the years tame."
-Sara Teadeale
"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear."
-As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
When asked if ever she wants something, Jane Austen said, "Nothing, but death."
When asked if he might consider a trip, that might improve his health, to the seaside resort of Bognor, King George V replied: "Bugger Bognor."
"L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.
"Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.
"I'll be back. Like Lord Jesus ... and The Terminator."
According to our creation story, night came first: darkness upon the deep. Put another way, night is older than day; night is older than time; night is the womb from which the world emerged. ... I’ll have you praying for dawn. Excerpts from Night Shifts, by Elissa Wald.
Me too, me too. I want to go with grandpa. ~ C A Cafolini, six years old when grandpa was hit by a train. I climbed into the coffin embracing the old man and felt at home. Later, when I became a Buddha, I would remember often that episode in the death bed.
"You become what you always were, just a really Big Fish."
"That, is the story of my life."
Big Fish
"We sat around, scratching the earth with our feet, half looking up for a sign of the end. And all the while it had long since come and gone." Alexi Murdoch
nice!
There is some dispute about what Goethe was actually saying on his deathbed. "More light" certainly sounds like a very "philosophical" request from the dying philosopher. But it's also possible, and this requires a good knowledge of the German language and specifically of Goethe's dialect, that the old guy may have been complaining not about the lack of illumination so much as the uncomfortable way that his pillow was supporting his head...i.e. that he was not asking for "more light" but rather that he was complaining about how uncomfortably his head was lying on his deathbed pillow.
Dylan Thomas's poem seems appropriate "Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Do not go gentle in to that good night".
True. It certainly is unlikely it had much to do with light in any metaphorical sense. As Thomas Mann put it: "It is said that his last word before he closed his eyes in final slumber was: 'Let more light in!' It is not quite certain. But what he really said, his actual last word, a word against death and for life, is this:
The only thing that counts in the end is progress!"
Hazlitt's final words (corroborated by multiple sources, incidentally) are as fitting as they can be: "Well.. I've had a happy life!" I hope I can utter those words in my final breaths too!