quotations about death
The gate of death is never at rest.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Deach becomes some men. Others wear it shamefully; others still, defiantly. Their protest choking, suffocating.
CHRIS ABANI
Kalakuta Republic
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
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
The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.
WASHINGTON IRVING
"The Rural Funeral"
Death is when the monsters get you.
STEPHEN KING
Salem's Lot
Death--a stopping of impressions through the senses, and of the pulling of the cords of motion, and of the ways of thought, and of service to the flesh.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
Fair Death, kind Death, it was a gracious deed
To take that weary vagrant to thy breast.
Love, Song and Wine had he, and but one need--Rest.
JOYCE KILMER
"A Dead Poet"
Taunting Death ... means pitting oneself against a wily enemy who cannot lose.
J. K. ROWLING
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily united by a mysterious force called the life-principle. To the materialist the only difference between a living and a dead body is, that in the one case that force is active, in the other latent. When it is extinct or entirely latent, the molecules obey a superior attraction, which draws them asunder and scatters them through space. This dispersion must be death, if it is possible to conceive such a thing as death where the very molecules of the dead body manifest an intense vital energy.
HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY
Isis Unveiled
The dead can't come to us. We can only go to them.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
Death lies dormant in each of us and will bloom in time.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Thomas
How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Suttree
Death is progress, advance, disimprisonment.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
Death's gang is bigger and tougher than anyone else's. Always has been and always will be. Death's the man.
MICHAEL MARSHALL
The Upright Man
We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we think of that hour as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time; it does not occur to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned and can mean that death -- or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again -- may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon whose time-table, hour by hour, has been settled in advance.
MARCEL PROUST
The Guermantes Way
What is
Death, so it be but glorious? 'Tis a sunset;
And mortals may be happy to resemble
The Gods but in decay.
LORD BYRON
Sardanapalus
About the presence of death and dying I don't remember the society in the 1950s being so skittish as it has since become. People still died at home, among relatives and friends, often in the care of a family physician. Death was still to be seen sitting in the parlor, hanging in a butcher shop, sometimes lying in the street.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Momento Mori", Lapham's Quarterly: Death, fall 2013
Man dies. Come from darkness, into darkness he returns, and is reabsorbed, without a trace left, into the illimitable void of time.
LEONID ANDREYEV
The Life of Man
All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.
KURT VONNEGUT
The Sirens of Titan