quotations about death
Every hour wounds. The last one kills.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
What greater gift is there than to demonstrate you need not fear death?
FRANK HERBERT
Chapterhouse: Dune
Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death.
JOHN DONNE
Annunciation
So they pass away: friends, kindred, the dearest-loved, grown people, aged, infants. As we go on the down-hill journey, the mile-stones are grave-stones, and on each more and more names are written; unless haply you live beyond man's common age, when friends have dropped off, and, tottering, and feeble, and unpitied, you reach the terminus alone.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Roundabout Papers
It is not pleasant to come upon Death in a lonely place at midnight.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
"The God in the Bowl"
Death is a creditor that is never ignored.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for him who has walked in the right path.
JAMES JOYCE
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Death has an energy. It is thick as sludge, heavy as iron, and pulls you down into yourself like an imploding building.
VICTORIA LAURIE
Death Perception
A man would die, though he were neither valiant nor miserable, only upon a weariness to do the same thing so oft over and over.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
They, then, who are destined to die, need not be careful to inquire what death they are to die, but into what place death will usher them.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
Religio Medici
Death is a flock of blackbirds low over muddy streets
in war-torn Sarajevo. Dirt-stained walls yearn
for all that is night. Elegies fall like raw silk.
If there is a way it is here.
Salt and ash.
CHRIS ABANI
Sanctificum
It seems a strange and repugnant conclusion that with the cessation of consciousness at death, there ceases to be any knowledge of having existed. With his last breath it becomes to each the same thing as though he had never lived. And then the consciousness itself -- what is it during the time that it continues? And what becomes of it when it ends? We can only infer that it is a specialized and individualized form of that Infinite and Eternal Energy which transcends both our knowledge and our imagination; and that at death its elements lapse into the Infinite and Eternal Energy whence they were derived.
HERBERT SPENCER
Facts and Comments
Death is the end of every worldly pain.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
The Canterbury Tales
Death envies those asleep in her ...
Extinguished softly in her womb.
EVELYN SCOTT
"For Wives and Mistresses"
For 3 days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow but the phone calls taper off.
JOHNNY CARSON
The Tonight Show
Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Stranger
But the great leveler, Death: not even the gods
can defend a man, not even one they love, that day
when fate takes hold and lays him out at last.
HOMER
The Odyssey
We no longer have death in our culture: the dead become abstractions, statistics, companies will take charge of the relationship that we can have to our own dead. In 2, 3 days the cremation is done, we can forget, the question is settled and the dead is only a memory. This is problematic, because we risk falling first into what Freud calls melancholy, that is to say the impossibility of mourning because we no longer have an object to mourn.
BRUCE BEGOUT
Postap Mag, July 31, 2017
There's nothing like a deadline to get the old blood flowing. All the juices, really. It doesn't follow, if you think about it. You'd assume certain things ... certain activities ... would become unimportant. Certain betrayals would become unbearable. But they don't really. In fact, quite the opposite. Everything takes on a new light. The impossible becomes possible, desirable even. It's quite remarkable.
WALTER WYKES
The Salmon Tribunal