quotations about death
People living deeply have no fear of death.
ANAIS NIN
The Diary of Anais Nin
My spirit is too weak--mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
JOHN KEATS
"On Seeing the Elgin Marbles"
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
If a man should wanton walk with crime ... he shall find in death no great deliverance.
AESCHYLUS
The Eumenides
People walk along the streets the day after our deaths just as they did before, and the crowd is not diminished. While we were living, the world seemed in a manner to exist only for us, for our delight and amusement, because it contributed to them. But our hearts cease to beat, and it goes on as usual, and thinks no more about us than it did in our lifetime.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners
We live as we die, and die as we live.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The seeds of Death are sown in us when we begin to live, and grow up till, like rampant weeds, they choak the tender flower of life.
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
Clarissa
Oh the grave!--the grave!--It buries every error--covers every defect--extinguishes every resentment! From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections. Who can look down upon the grave even of an enemy, and not feel a compunctious throb, that he should ever have warred with the poor handful of earth that lies mouldering before him!
WASHINGTON IRVING
"Rural Funerals", The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon
The dying need but little, dear,
A glass of water's all,
A flower's unobtrusive face
To punctuate the wall,
A fan, perhaps, a friend's regret
And certainty that one
No color in the rainbow
Perceive, when you are gone.
EMILY DICKINSON
"The Dying need but little, Dear"
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 tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
OSCAR WILDE
The Canterville Ghost
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
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
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"
When we pray for death we really desire a fuller life.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
I don't know what's waiting for us when we die--something better, something worse. I only know I'm not ready to find out yet.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
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
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
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
Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die. But, once realise what the true object is in life -- that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of noble minds' -- but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect Man -- and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!
LEWIS CARROLL
preface, Sylvie and Bruno
Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Heartbreak House