quotations about death
Death ends at last the fear of it.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
And last of all comes death.
ANACREON
Odes
We must die alone. To the very verge of the stream our friends may accompany us; they may bend over us, they may cling to us there; but that one long wave from the sea of eternity washes up to the lips, sweeps us from the shore, and we go forth alone! In that untried and utter solitude, then, what can there be for us but the pulsation of that assurance, "I am not alone, because the Father is with me!"
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
That's the happiest moment. When it's all done. When we stop. When we can stop.
EDWARD ALBEE
Three Tall Women
Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern--why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners
We shall see later on that the diversity of the forms of death that circulate invisibly is the cause of the peculiar unexpectedness of obituary notices in the newspapers.
MARCEL PROUST
Sodom and Gomorrah
We're all embers from the same fire. Our ember winks out, we're ashes, we go back to the fire.
WILLIAM SHATNER
Esquire Magazine, May 2012
From too much love of living
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
"The Garden of Proserpine"
The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.
DON DELILLO
White Noise
Death has no need to be cruel, taking people's lives is more than enough.
JOSé SARAMAGO
Death with Interruptions
Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
Pale Horse
Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The House of the Seven Gables
Health care is, at its core, about improving the odds of life in its struggle against death. Of extending that game which we will all lose, each and every one of us unto eternity, extending it another year or month or second.
KEITH OLBERMANN
Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Oct. 7, 2009
Death! great proprietor of all! 'tis thine
To tread out empire, and to quench the stars.
EDWARD YOUNG
Night Thoughts
When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
In accepting death as inevitable, we don't label it as a good thing or a bad thing. As one of my teachers once said to me, "Death happens. It is just death, and how we meet it is up to us."
JOAN HALIFAX
Being with Dying
Death had a curious way of ennobling people. Of washing away their flaws and elevating their reputations to a new purity. Sinners became saints once their bodies were lowered into the ground.
JOANNA CAMPBELL SLAN
Paper
Any guy afraid to die was a guy who was afraid to live.
JOANN ROSS
No Safe Place
O, the one happiness, when, out of breath,
Our feet slip, and we stumble upon death!
ARTHUR SYMONS
"The Beggars"
My only fear of death is reincarnation.
TUPAC SHAKUR
"No More Pain"