DEATH QUOTES XIV

quotations about death

Think what you like. There are people who die by remaining alive and others who gain life by dying.

EIJI YOSHIKAWA

Musashi


Whatever it is that occurs at death, I believe it deserves to be called a miracle. The miracle, ironically, is that we don't die. The cessation of the body is an illusion, and like a magician sweeping aside a curtain, the soul reveals what lies beyond.

DEEPAK CHOPRA

Life After Death


Death, lonely death,
Beneath the withered leaves.

FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA

Blood Wedding


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


The thorn of death falls from heaven, and its myriad forms leave us no room to move.

KOBO ABE

The Woman in the Dunes


How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep!

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Queen Mab


For a single path leads to the house of Hades.

AESCHYLUS

fragment, Telephos


Death is no more than a turning of us over from Time to Eternity.

WILLIAM PENN

Some Fruits of Solitude


Death is the veil which those who live call life;
They sleep, and it is lifted.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Prometheus Unbound


Ah! hear the dirge that all mankind must learn:
Place not on earth thy trust,
For dust thou art, to dust shalt thou return,
Dust unto dust.

MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN

"Fame"


While life could be evaded, death could not.

DEAN KOONTZ

Velocity


Death joins us to the great majority.

EDWARD YOUNG

The Revenge


You cannot avoid mortality. But you can choose your way of meeting it. And that is the most that any man can hope for.

DAVID GERROLD

The Man Who Folded Himself


Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.

GEORGE ELIOT

Adam Bede


Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a strange feeling when a day of our life comes and we say, "Tomorrow, success or failure won't matter much: and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil.

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

Vanity Fair


Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death--who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace 'We must all die' transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness 'I must die--and soon,' then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.

GEORGE ELIOT

Middlemarch


To death we owe our life; the passing of one generation opens a way for another.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought


There was that feeling one gets in a ride to a cemetery trailing a body in a coffin -- an impatience with the dead, a longing to be back home where one could get on with the illusion that not death but daily life is the permanent condition.

E. L. DOCTOROW

Homer & Langley


Death has this much to be said for it:
You don't have to get out of bed for it.

KINGSLEY AMIS

"Delivery Guaranteed", Collected Poems


When I think of the joy awaiting,
Beyond the bier and the shroud,
Death seems but a transient shadow,
A passing Summer cloud.

MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN

"Summer Clouds"