quotations about death
Far happier he, who, young and full of pride
And radiant with the glory of the sun,
Leaves earth before his singing time is done.
All wounds of Time the graveyard flowers hide,
His beauty lives, as fresh as when he died.
JOYCE KILMER
"The Clouded Sun"
Death is a Dialogue between
The Spirit and the Dust.
EMILY DICKINSON
"Death is a Dialogue"
Sweet lovely death
I am waiting for your breath
Come sweet death, one last caress
METALLICA
"Last Caress"
Give me to die like a beast, afar, alone
With but the hawk and crow
To watch beside me while I cast my soul,
And but the sky to know
What my racked lips have uttered, what last groan,
Or curse or prayer, I breathed to heaven above.
KENNETH RAND
"Straw-Death"
That is the gods' work, spinning threads of death
through the lives of mortal men,
an all to make a song for those to come.
HOMER
The Odyssey
When a house has just lost its soul, a stricken silence falls over the sudden emptiness that no one will fill again. And all the noises that may be made later in that house will be like a scandalous din, ugly echoes from one room to another, from one corridor to another, sharp and discordant as if the walls are no longer able to absorb any music once the source of harmony has been taken away. But this strange detail about the power of death can only be picked up by ears that are very attentive to the smallest murmurs of life. Rational people go through these empty spaces with the serenity of a lawyer, and their indulgent smiles categorise you if you decide to point out in their presence that there is something lacking in the atmosphere.
PIERRE MAGNAN
The Messengers of Death
Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Honorary Consul
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 natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force.
YODA
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
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 to the wicked is all loss, to the righteous all gain.
JOHN THORNTON
Maxims and Directions for Youth
We are mere notes in a piece of music played by the angel Death--heard and lost.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Unjustly men hate death, which is the greatest defence against their many ills.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
Death is simply the soul's change of residence.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Graveyards remind us of the vanity of all human endeavour.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark
There are too many poems about death. Death, churchyards, wormy cadavers. Death is really a small part of life, and it's not the part that you want to concentrate on, because life is life and it's full of untold particulars.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Who knows but life be that which men call death,
And death what men call life?
EURIPIDES
Phrixus [fragment]
We give our dead
To the orchards
And the groves.
We give our dead
To life.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
Parable of the Talents
Death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
Other Voices
Old man death sits all alone
In quiet contemplation
Picking at his blackened nails
Waiting for his next victim
Watching as your life force drains
VENOM
"Death & Dying", Metal Black