DEATH QUOTES XXI

quotations about death

Nowadays, we have technology that's improved so that we can bring people back to life. In fact, there are drugs being developed right now -- who knows if they'll ever make it to the market -- that may actually slow down the process of brain-cell injury and death. Imagine, you fast-forward to ten years down the line and you've given a patient whose heart has just stopped this amazing drug, and actually what it does is it slows everything down so that the things that would've happened over an hour, now happen over two days. As medicine progresses, we will end up with lots and lots of ethical questions.

SAM PARNIA

interview, Time, Sep. 18, 2008


Because I could not stop for Death --
He kindly stopped for me --
The Carriage held but just Ourselves --
And Immortality.

EMILY DICKINSON

"Because I could not stop for Death"


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 lies dormant in each of us and will bloom in time.

DEAN KOONTZ

Odd Thomas


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


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 the side of life which is turned away from us.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

letter to W. von Hulewicz, The Duino Elegies


Taunting Death ... means pitting oneself against a wily enemy who cannot lose.

J. K. ROWLING

The Tales of Beedle the Bard


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


The dead body makes the living one obscene. It's why we close the eyes, too. The dead shouldn't have to look on the lewd aliveness of things.

GLEN DUNCAN

By Blood We Live


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


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


Death is not an end, but a transition-crisis. All the forms of decay are but masks of regeneration--the secret alembics of vitality.

E. H. CHAPIN

Living Words


Death was an accident like any other, and, moreover, one as certain as hunger or as sleep.

HILAIRE BELLOC

On Nothing & Kindred Subjects


Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.

IRVIN D. YALOM

Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death


Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.

SYLVIA PLATH

The Bell Jar


Death comes black and hard, rushing down on me from the future, with no possible chance of escape.

DAVID GERROLD

The Man Who Folded Himself


When one fears that somehow he will not be able to maintain an understanding grasp of something complex and extensive, he tries to find or to make for himself a brief summary of the whole--for the sake of a comprehensive view. Thus death is the briefest summary of life or life reduced to its briefest form. Therefore to those who in truth meditate on human life it has always been very important again and again to test with this brief summary what they have understood about life. For no thinker has power over life as does death, this mighty thinker who is able not only to think through every illusion but can think it analytically and as a whole, think it down to the bottom.

SOREN KIERKEGAARD

Works of Love


Life is a waste of woes,
And Death a river deep,
That ever onward flows,
Troubled, yet asleep.

WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE

"Lines To --", Imogen and Other Poems


Death is only a small interruption.

ANITA BROOKNER

Latecomers