quotations about death
She is death,
All of the time.
She is death,
All of the days.
She is death,
And I can't leave
From her trap.
THE FLAMING LIPS
"She Is Death", Hear It Is
The laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between king and cobbler, manager and call-boy; and, if haply your dates of life were conterminant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by cheek (O ignoble levelling of Death) with the shade of some recently departed candle-snuffer.
CHARLES LAMB
"To the Shade of Elliston", Elia and the Last Essays of Elia
One day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death.
GLEN DUNCAN
I, Lucifer
The cure for death is not being born.
K. J. PARKER
Evil for Evil
God has created too few unmixed evils to warrant the belief that death is one of them. In all things else in nature, goodness so abounds that we are authorized to infer that it does not stop even at the grave. It is only that her footprints have become invisible.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Whither canst thou carry us, O death, from the presence of that God, whose loving-kindness is better than life? When, with thy trident, thou shalt break the pitcher of this mortal frame; the deathless soul is not like water spilt upon the ground; for the pitcher being broken at the fountain, it runs to its original, and can be gathered up again.
WILLIAM MCEWEN
Select Essays
Shun death, is my advice.
ROBERT BROWNING
"Arcades Ambo"
Death smiles at us all, all a man can do is smile back.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
All are stoics in the grave.
ANACREON
Ode IV, Odes
Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.
J. D. SALINGER
The Catcher in the Rye
No intellect is needed to see those figures who wait beyond the void of death -- every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, wrapped in authority older than the universe. They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions. Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them, the builders of the unimaginable, the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence.
GENE WOLFE
The Shadow of the Torturer
Death! the deep, sublime and unsubdued fiat!
The licensed liberator of imprisoned souls!
The conqueror of conquerors! th' inexorable,
Unfathomed and unfathomable fate! Arch foe,
And dread antagonist of life! Its armed and fierce
Invader, horror, and dismay! whose naked sword,
In trembling balance hung, is over all its joys,
And banquets of delight, ready to pierce the heart
That with fond ardour beats! Oh! who can turn its point?
Or its swift aim arrest?
C. B. LANGSTON
"Death"
To conquer death you only have to die.
ALANE FERGUSON
The Angel of Death
All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Death in the Afternoon
Even if those who take their own lives feel they have no choice--indeed, they often tragically believe their family and friends will be better off without them--the death rarely appears inevitable to those left behind. Feelings of anger and guilt and abandonment invade them, as if love should or could have prevented what happened. Survivors relive, over and over, the last days and months, even years, before the suicide, seeing now the signs that were missed, which they believe they should have recognized.
SUSAN STERLING
"The Quilt People"
For life be, after all, only a waitin' for somethin' else than what we're doin', and death be all that we can rightly depend on.
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
Death is the last intimate thing we ever do.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Obsidian Butterfly
One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
JAMES JOYCE
"The Dead", Dubliners
Could the best and kindest of us who depart from the earth have an opportunity of revisiting it, I suppose he or she (assuming that any Vanity Fair feelings subsist in the sphere whither we are bound) would have a pang of mortification at finding how soon our survivors were consoled.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Vanity Fair
For soon, very soon do men forget
Their friends upon whom Death's seal is set.
ISAAC MCLELLAN
"The Last Night of the Year"