Deathbed Quotes - page 3
Aghast, Tauno exclaimed, "but this is frightful!”
"Oh? Many would count it glorious good fortune.”
His eye stabbed at hers. "Would you?”
"Well... No.”
"Locked among bleak brick walls for all her days; shorn, harshly clad, ill-fed, droning through her nose at God while letting wither that which God put between her legs; never to know love, children about her, the growth of home and kin, or even wanderings under apple trees in blossom time....”
"Tauno, it is the way to eternal bliss.”
"Hm. Rather would I have my bliss now, and then the dark. You, too-in your heart-not so?-whether or not you have said you mean to repent on your deathbed. Your Christian Heaven seems to me a shabby place to spend forever.”.
Poul Anderson
On his deathbed he called my father to him and said, "Son, after I'm gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open." They thought the old man had gone out of his mind. He had been the meekest of men. The younger children were rushed from the room, the shades drawn and the flame of the lamp turned so low that it spouttered on the wick like the old man's breathing. "Learn it to the younsters," he whisdpered fiercely; then he died.
Ralph Ellison