I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling, but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain, and that was death - a state which I feared yet did not understand.

I have tried to live my life such that in the hour of my death I would feel joy rather than fear.

I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later - yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering?

Death frees from the fear of dying

I hope death will be a great happiness, a happiness as great as that of love, fulfilled love

Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.

Death should take me while I am in the mood.

I'd love to tell you I had some deep revelation on my way down, that I came to terms with my own mortality, laughed in the face of death, et cetera.

The truth? My only thought was: Aaaaggghhhhh!

For it would be better to die once and for all than to suffer pain for all one's life.

There's her silence, loud as a roar, pulling at me like the greatest sadness ever, like I want to take it and press myself into it and just disappear forever down into nothing.
What a relief that would feel like right now. What a blessed relief.

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmostphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.

For my part, I should prefer death to hopeless bondage.

An end to my fear of being alone. An end to a soul’s solitude, when death at last arrives. There is something in that, something in there, that comforts.

He was in a room of the Gesshuuji, which he had thought it would be impossible to visit. The approach of death had made the visit easy, had unloosed the weight that held him in the depths of being. It was even a comfort to think, from the light repose the struggle up the hill had brought him, that Kiyoaki, struggling against illness up that same road, had been given wings to soar with by the denial that awaited him.