DEATH QUOTES XXII

quotations about death

This flesh and the other will be consumed,
the flower will doubtless perish without residue,
when death--sterile dawn, desiccated dust--
comes one day into the girdle of the haughty island,
and you, statue, daughter of man, will remain
gazing with the empty eyes that rose
up through one and another hand of the absent immortals.

PABLO NERUDA

"The Builders of Statues"


Death is progress, advance, disimprisonment.

REUEN THOMAS

Thoughts for the Thoughtful


When one fears that somehow he will not be able to maintain an understanding grasp of something complex and extensive, he tries to find or to make for himself a brief summary of the whole--for the sake of a comprehensive view. Thus death is the briefest summary of life or life reduced to its briefest form. Therefore to those who in truth meditate on human life it has always been very important again and again to test with this brief summary what they have understood about life. For no thinker has power over life as does death, this mighty thinker who is able not only to think through every illusion but can think it analytically and as a whole, think it down to the bottom.

SOREN KIERKEGAARD

Works of Love


If death turned out to be a lack of being rather than a lack of consciousness, well, then, that sucked.

LINDA HOWARD

Death Angel


How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

CORMAC MCCARTHY

Suttree


Death is when the monsters get you.

STEPHEN KING

Salem's Lot


Those who think about death, carrying with them their existing ideas and emotions, usually assume that they will have, during their last hours, ideas and emotions of like vividness ... but they do not fully recognize the implication that the feeling faculty, too, is almost gone. The imagine the state to be one in which they can have emotions such as they now have on contemplating the cessation of life. But at the last all the mental powers simultaneously ebb, as do the bodily powers, and with them goes the capacity for emotion in general. It is, indeed, possible that in its last stages consciousness is occupied by a not displeasurable sense of rest.

HERBERT SPENCER

Facts and Comments


The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.

WASHINGTON IRVING

"The Rural Funeral"


It seemeth such a little way to me
Across to that strange country -- the Beyond;
And yet, not strange, for it has grown to be
The home of those of whom I am so fond,
They make it seem familiar and most dear,
As journeying friends bring distant regions near.

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

"Beyond"


Alone in a room
needless I sit
I close my eyes
and try to forget
Death is calling
get in line

JAY REATARD

"Death Is Forming", Blood Visions


Death was an accident like any other, and, moreover, one as certain as hunger or as sleep.

HILAIRE BELLOC

On Nothing & Kindred Subjects


The dying need but little, dear,
A glass of water's all,
A flower's unobtrusive face
To punctuate the wall,
A fan, perhaps, a friend's regret
And certainty that one
No color in the rainbow
Perceive, when you are gone.

EMILY DICKINSON

"The Dying need but little, Dear"


Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

letter to W. von Hulewicz, The Duino Elegies


There is nothing frightening about an eternal dreamless sleep. Surely it is better than eternal torment in Hell and eternal boredom in Heaven.

ISAAC ASIMOV

I, Asimov


Man dies. Come from darkness, into darkness he returns, and is reabsorbed, without a trace left, into the illimitable void of time.

LEONID ANDREYEV

The Life of Man


Death is not an end, but a transition-crisis. All the forms of decay are but masks of regeneration--the secret alembics of vitality.

E. H. CHAPIN

Living Words


Death is the continuing of life ... the next part of our life. It's like walking through a door, you know? Walking through the door marked "Death": It's the beginning of a new part of our journey.

ROSEMARY ALTEA

interview, Larry King Live, Mar. 15, 2000


If we were sensible we would seek death--the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.

H. P. LOVECRAFT

"Nietzscheism and Realism"


Graves are for the living, not the dead. It gives us something to concentrate on instead of the fact that our loved one is rotting under the ground. The dead don't care about pretty flowers and carved marble statues.

LAURELL K. HAMILTON

Guilty Pleasures


We have the promises of God as thick as daisies in summer meadows, that death, which men most fear, shall be to us the most blessed of experiences, if we trust in him. Death is unclasping; joy, breaking out in the desert; the heart, come to its blossoming time! Do we call it dying when the bud bursts into flower?

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts