quotations about death
The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
The laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between king and cobbler, manager and call-boy; and, if haply your dates of life were conterminant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by cheek (O ignoble levelling of Death) with the shade of some recently departed candle-snuffer.
CHARLES LAMB
"To the Shade of Elliston", Elia and the Last Essays of Elia
She is death,
All of the time.
She is death,
All of the days.
She is death,
And I can't leave
From her trap.
THE FLAMING LIPS
"She Is Death", Hear It Is
The cure for death is not being born.
K. J. PARKER
Evil for Evil
All are stoics in the grave.
ANACREON
Ode IV, Odes
Shun death, is my advice.
ROBERT BROWNING
"Arcades Ambo"
It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.
WOODY ALLEN
Death: A Comedy in One Act
Even if those who take their own lives feel they have no choice--indeed, they often tragically believe their family and friends will be better off without them--the death rarely appears inevitable to those left behind. Feelings of anger and guilt and abandonment invade them, as if love should or could have prevented what happened. Survivors relive, over and over, the last days and months, even years, before the suicide, seeing now the signs that were missed, which they believe they should have recognized.
SUSAN STERLING
"The Quilt People"
Death is the only sovereign whom no partiality can warp, and no price corrupt.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
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
All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Death in the Afternoon
No intellect is needed to see those figures who wait beyond the void of death -- every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, wrapped in authority older than the universe. They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions. Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them, the builders of the unimaginable, the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence.
GENE WOLFE
The Shadow of the Torturer
God has created too few unmixed evils to warrant the belief that death is one of them. In all things else in nature, goodness so abounds that we are authorized to infer that it does not stop even at the grave. It is only that her footprints have become invisible.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Death smiles at us all, all a man can do is smile back.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
Death is the end of those who have done nothing to cause their names to live after them.
XENOPHON
attributed, Day's Collacon
To conquer death you only have to die.
ALANE FERGUSON
The Angel of Death
One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
JAMES JOYCE
"The Dead", Dubliners
Death is the last intimate thing we ever do.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Obsidian Butterfly
For life be, after all, only a waitin' for somethin' else than what we're doin', and death be all that we can rightly depend on.
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love! -- then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
JOHN KEATS
"When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be"