quotations about death
Death was everywhere,
In the air
And in the sounds
Coming off the mounds
Of Bolton's Ridge.
Death's anchorage.
When you rolled a smoke
Or told a joke,
It was in the laughter
And drinking water
It approached the beach
As strings of cutters,
Dropped in the sea and lay around us.
PJ HARVEY
"All and Everyone", Let England Shake
Death ... doesn't take her eyes off us for a minute, so much so that even those who are not yet due to die feel her gaze pursuing them constantly.
JOSé SARAMAGO
Death with Interruptions
You feel sorry for yourself. You think you're missing something and you don't know what it is. You're lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.
UMBERTO ECO
The Island of the Day Before
Death is a great revealer of what is in a man, and in its solemn shadow appear the naked lineaments of the soul.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Scientists have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is life after death -- though they say it's virtually impossible to get decent Chinese food.
DAVID LETTERMAN
Late Show with David Letterman, October 13, 2014
Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force.
YODA
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Leap through the Mystery of death as the circus-rider leaps through the papered hoop ... find Life ambling along beneath us on the Other Side?
SIDNEY LANIER
Songs Against Death
Death is the only god that comes when you call.
ROGER ZELAZNY
"24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai"
Every twinge of sensation, even of agony, was a negation of death.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
"A Witch Shall Be Born", Weird Tales, 1934
The dead's dead ... get 'em in the ground and look to the live ones.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
Death to the wicked is all loss, to the righteous all gain.
JOHN THORNTON
Maxims and Directions for Youth
Dying makes what is left of living seem precious. The dying, and those about to die, feel that these last moments must be made beautiful. The cannot be permitted to include the bitterness and the enmities of the living that seem so inexhaustible. So often we hear people who, in dying, resign the old enmities and ask and grant forgiveness. Through such forgiveness they help to make dying beautiful. And, incidentally, they offer a lesson to those who go on living the apparently inexhaustibel life.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"The Dead", Reactions and Other Essays
Death is simply the soul's change of residence.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Death is tolerable only when it leads again to life.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Collected Poems
So when the friends we love the best lie in their churchyard bed, we must not cry too bitterly over the happy dead; because, for our dear Saviour's sake, our sins are all forgiven; and Christians only fall asleep to wake again in Heaven.
CECIL FRANCES ALEXANDER
"Child's Funeral"
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible war motion to become
A kneaded clod, and the dilated spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling -- 'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathèd worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Measure for Measure
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
JAMES BALDWIN
"Letter from a Region of My Mind", The New Yorker, November 17, 1962
Men believe death's elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
The Crossing
Death is a meeting place of sea and sea.
CONRAD AIKEN
The House of Dust