quotations about death
If the matter of death is reduced to sleep and rest, what can there be so bitter in it, that any one should pine in eternal grief for the decease of a friend?
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
Every twinge of sensation, even of agony, was a negation of death.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
"A Witch Shall Be Born", Weird Tales, 1934
Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.
ELLEN GILCHRIST
Good Housekeeping, May 2011
Death is the Christian's vacation morning. School is out. It is time to go home.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Death is tolerable only when it leads again to life.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Collected Poems
The dead can't come to us. We can only go to them.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
Certain, when I was born, so long ago,
Death drew the tap of life and let it flow;
And ever since the tap has done its task,
And now there's little but an empty cask.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
The Canterbury Tales
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"
To take life was to understand your own death--that the Hour of the Huntsman also came for you.
S. M. STIRLING
The Sunrise Lands
Death is the fate no one can escape. The question, then, is, How does one die? A person can die like a hero or like a coward. The difference is that the hero can face death without fear, whereas the coward can't.
ALEXANDER LOWEN
Fear of Life
Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.
RAY BRADBURY
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
Other Voices
Graveyards remind us of the vanity of all human endeavour.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark
For though Death be a dark passage, it leads to immortality, and that is recompence enough for suffering of it.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
Death is not regarded as a natural affair by primitive man. Death is believed to be due to the intervention of some malevolent or at least not well disposed power. Normally it should not take place. So we have all through history crude explanations of death, as e.g., the influence of the serpent, the devil, sin.
JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON
The Field of Philosophy
Life is hard, but death is even harder.
PETER KREEFT
Between Heaven and Hell
In death too, there is always something of the rich cat that lets the mouse run before devouring it.
ERNST BLOCH
Traces
Death is a meeting place of sea and sea.
CONRAD AIKEN
The House of Dust
There must be some unwritten law that says about fifty people have to move into your house when somebody dies. If it weren’t for the smell of death clinging to the walls, you might think it was your family’s turn to host the month neighborhood potluck supper.
ADAM RAPP
Under the Wolf
Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man's cottage door and at the palaces of kings.
HORACE
attributed, The Quotable Intellectual