quotations about death
A death-blow is a life-blow to some
Who, till they died, did not alive become;
Who, had they lived, had died, but
when They died, vitality begun.
EMILY DICKINSON
"A Death blow is a Life blow to Some"
Death is not a checkmate ... it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
A couch of thorns, or an embroidered bed,
Are matters of indifference to the dead.
THEOGNIS OF MEGARA
"Sumptuous Obsequies"
We go to the grave of a friend, saying, "A man is dead;" but angels throng about him, saying, "A man is born."
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
In the whole course of our observation there is not so misrepresented and abused a personage as death. Some have styled him the king of terrors, when he might with less impropriety have been termed the terror of kings; others have dreaded him as an evil without end, although it was in their own power to make him the end of all evil. He has been vilified as the cause of anguish, consternation, and despair; but these, alas, are things that appertain not unto death, but unto life. How strange a paradox is this, we love the distemper and loathe the remedy, preferring the fiercest buffetings of the hurricane to the tranquility of the harbour.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
There is death and love
And awful things
The sunlight takes away
All that it brings
BLACK MOTH SUPER RAINBOW
"Seeeds", Start a People
Look out, Death: I am coming.
Art thou not glad? what talks we'll have.
What memories of old battles.
Come, bring the bowl, Death; I am thirsty.
SIDNEY LANIER
Songs Against Death
In death itself there can be nothing terrible, for the act of death annihilates sensation; but there are many roads to death, and some of them justly formidable, even to the bravest.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Without death in the world, existence in it would soon become, through over-population, the most frightful of curses.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
To be human is inevitably, to hate oneself sometimes, to hunger for the perfect stability and in a way the perfect justice -- or at least perfect punishment for our numerous imperfections -- called death.
JOHN GARDNER
In the Suicide Mountains
The distance that the dead have gone
Does not at first appear;
Their coming back seems possible
For many an ardent year.
And then, that we have followed them
We more than half suspect,
So intimate have we become
With their dear retrospect.
EMILY DICKINSON
"The distance that the dead have gone"
You can only go into mourning by transfiguration or disfigurement. There is no rational form of the absorption of death.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
What happens when the thought of death occurs, this very simple and basic thought about death, that I will most certainly die, and that you will most certainly die, is that all these other questions are stripped down to basic, that the very basis for knowledge and existence is shivering, whether one is trembling in tears for another or oneself shivering in anxiety and awe. Hence, at the end we return to the place where we began, at the graveside.
MARIUS TIMMANN MJAALAND
Autopsia
A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners
Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.
E. L. DOCTOROW
Homer & Langley
Where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Staring at the Sun
Death aims only once, but never misses.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
To die alone, on rock under sun at the brink of the unknown, like a wolf, like a great bird, seems to me very good fortune indeed.
EDWARD ABBEY. "The Dead Man at Grandview Point"
Desert Solitaire
And death, that sits in marble silence cold,
Will furnish hope to those who may behold
The meaning in the everlasting change
Of all that dies, returning, wondrous strange.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Quest for God"
Every loss which we incur leaves behind it vexation in the memory, save the greatest loss of all, that is, death, which annihilates the memory, together with life.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life