DEATH QUOTES XXIV

quotations about death

There is no single best kind of death. A good death is one that is "appropriate" for that person. It is a death in which the hand of the way of dying slips easily into the glove of the act itself. It is in character, ego-syntonic. It, the death, fits the person. It is a death that one might choose if it were realistically possible for one to choose one's own death.

EDWIN SHNEIDMAN

A Commonsense Book of Death


Graves are for the living, not the dead. It gives us something to concentrate on instead of the fact that our loved one is rotting under the ground. The dead don't care about pretty flowers and carved marble statues.

LAURELL K. HAMILTON

Guilty Pleasures


The road to death is a long march beset with all evils, and the heart fails little by little at each new terror, the bones rebel at each step, the mind sets up its own bitter resistance and to what end? The barriers sink one by one, and no covering of the eyes shuts out the landscape of disaster, nor the sight of crimes committed there.

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

"Pale Horse, Pale Rider"


By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death.

LUCRETIUS

De Rerum Natura


Death is the dropping of the flower, that the fruit may swell.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


We are the fools of Time and Terror: Days
Steal on us, and steal from us; yet we live,
Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.

LORD BYRON

Manfred


Living, the nearest claim them; but the dear
Great dead belong to any humble heart.

KARLE WILSON BAKER

"W. V. M.", Blue Smoke


Odd thing about death ... it reaffirms life.

RITA MAE BROWN

Hounded to Death


Now death is death! and yet is not one death
Another death? Stabbing is not the same
As shooting! Would you say a strangled man
Was drown'd? The end is one, the means are many,
And there the difference lies!

SHERIDAN KNOWLES

True Unto Death


People living deeply have no fear of death.

ANAIS NIN

The Diary of Anais Nin


It seemeth such a little way to me
Across to that strange country -- the Beyond;
And yet, not strange, for it has grown to be
The home of those of whom I am so fond,
They make it seem familiar and most dear,
As journeying friends bring distant regions near.

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

"Beyond"


Dying is strange and hard if it is not our death, but a death that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

The Book of Hours


Numbing rumble, countless medicine,
Depleted from years of abuse
Death rattle shaking
And there's no faking, undertaking

PANTERA

"Death Rattle", Reinventing the Steel


The longest-lived and the shortest-lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.

MARCUS AURELIUS

Meditations


O Death, the Consecrator!
Nothing so sanctifies a name
As to be written--Dead.
Nothing so wins a life from blame,
So covers it from wrath and shame,
As doth the burial-bed.

CAROLINE SPENCER

"Death the Consecrator"


Life and death are different sides of the same coin.

NEIL GAIMAN

American Gods


No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Year of the Flood


He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.

JACK LONDON

White Fang


If a man should wanton walk with crime ... he shall find in death no great deliverance.

AESCHYLUS

The Eumenides


The fear of death has been raised too much and set up on high, especially by preachers, like the brazen serpent in the wilderness over the heads of the Israelites; but not with so good excuse as that symbol had, for this fear has not been curative, I think, nor made into pleasant or graceful shape, but rather a horrid spectacle, to affright people. For that men can be frightened into piety has been one of the legacies of religion which barbarous ages have bequeathed us plentifully.

JAMES VILA BLAKE

Essays