quotations about death
The dead's dead ... get 'em in the ground and look to the live ones.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
Leap through the Mystery of death as the circus-rider leaps through the papered hoop ... find Life ambling along beneath us on the Other Side?
SIDNEY LANIER
Songs Against Death
So when the friends we love the best lie in their churchyard bed, we must not cry too bitterly over the happy dead; because, for our dear Saviour's sake, our sins are all forgiven; and Christians only fall asleep to wake again in Heaven.
CECIL FRANCES ALEXANDER
"Child's Funeral"
Death is a Dialogue between
The Spirit and the Dust.
EMILY DICKINSON
"Death is a Dialogue"
In statistics, what disappears behind rows of numbers is death.
GUNTER GRASS
Crabwalk
When you look at a corpse you can always sense your own breath better.
ZONA GALE
"Miggy"
Give me to die like a beast, afar, alone
With but the hawk and crow
To watch beside me while I cast my soul,
And but the sky to know
What my racked lips have uttered, what last groan,
Or curse or prayer, I breathed to heaven above.
KENNETH RAND
"Straw-Death"
Every twinge of sensation, even of agony, was a negation of death.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
"A Witch Shall Be Born", Weird Tales, 1934
Men believe death's elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
The Crossing
There's really nothing quite like someone's wanting you dead to make you want to go on living.
ROGER ZELAZNY
This Immortal
A man dies not for the many wounds that pierce his
breast, unless it be that life's end keep pace with
death, nor by sitting on his hearth at home doth he the
more escape his appointed doom.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
Unjustly men hate death, which is the greatest defence against their many ills.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream: it may be so the moment after death.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
American Note-Books, 1836
Death is an antidote for this life, and it makes another more stable form of life which is insoluble in everything.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died.
MACKEY MILLER
Mouse Attack 5!!!
How terrible is Death to one man, yet to another it appears the greatest providence in nature; even to all ages and conditions it is the wish of some, relief of many, and the end of all. It puts us all upon a level; the prince and peasant are doomed to the same fate.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Far happier he, who, young and full of pride
And radiant with the glory of the sun,
Leaves earth before his singing time is done.
All wounds of Time the graveyard flowers hide,
His beauty lives, as fresh as when he died.
JOYCE KILMER
"The Clouded Sun"
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
JAMES BALDWIN
"Letter from a Region of My Mind", The New Yorker, November 17, 1962
The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life; to regard it, with the understanding and the emotions, as the the inviolable condition of life.
THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain
It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.
UMBERTO ECO
The Island of the Day Before