DEATH QUOTES XXIV

quotations about death

There must be some unwritten law that says about fifty people have to move into your house when somebody dies. If it weren’t for the smell of death clinging to the walls, you might think it was your family’s turn to host the month neighborhood potluck supper.

ADAM RAPP

Under the Wolf


Of all the Gods, Death only craves not gifts:
Nor sacrifice, nor yet drink-offering poured
Avails; no altars hath he, nor is soothed
By hymns of praise. From him alone of all
The powers of Heaven Persuasion holds aloof.

AESCHYLUS

fragment


Death is just--to the just.

EDWARD COUNSEL

Maxims


Life and death are different sides of the same coin.

NEIL GAIMAN

American Gods


So long as men die, life will reassert its tragic interest from time to time with fresh energy, and to this interest Christianity alone can respond. If the scientific people could rid us of death, they might indeed hope to win over the heart and conscience of the world, permanently, to some form of non-theistic speculation. As it is, the tide ebbs, as I believe, only that it may flow again.

HENRY PARRY LIDDON

letter to C. T. Redington, June 27, 1877


Whatever is certain in death is slightly alleviated by what is not so infallible; the time when it shall happen is undefined, but it is more or less connected with the infinite, and what we call eternity.

JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE

"Of Mankind", Les Caractères


Death is the dropping of the flower, that the fruit may swell.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


When you die it's the end of your life.

SAM SHEPARD

Tongues


Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.

CHARLES FROHMAN

his last words before going down on the Lusitania


Now death is death! and yet is not one death
Another death? Stabbing is not the same
As shooting! Would you say a strangled man
Was drown'd? The end is one, the means are many,
And there the difference lies!

SHERIDAN KNOWLES

True Unto Death


My spirit is too weak--mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.

JOHN KEATS

"On Seeing the Elgin Marbles"


There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit


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

H. P. LOVECRAFT

"Nietzscheism and Realism"


When one existentially awakens from within, the relation of birth-and-death is not seen as a sequential change from the former to the latter. Rather, living as it is, is no more than dying, and at the same time there is no living separate from dying. This means that life itself is death and death itself is life. That is, we do not shift sequentially from birth to death, but undergo living-dying in each and every moment.

MASAO ABE

A Study of Dogen: His Philosophy and Religion


There is no knowing beyond that membrane, the meniscus of death. What can be seen from here is distorted, refracted. All we can know are those untrustworthy glimpses--that and rumour. The prattle. The dead gossip: it is the reverberation of that gossip against the surface tension of death that the better mediums hear. It is like listening to whispered secrets through a toilet door. It is a crude and muffled susurrus.

CHINA MIéVILLE

Kraken


When do the dead die? When they are forgotten.

LAURA ESQUIVEL

The Law of Love


What is
Death, so it be but glorious? 'Tis a sunset;
And mortals may be happy to resemble
The Gods but in decay.

LORD BYRON

Sardanapalus


Most of us were not afraid of death, only of the act of dying; and there were times when we overcame even this fear. At such moments we were free--men without shadows, dismissed from the ranks of the mortal; it was the most complete experience of freedom that can be granted a man.

ARTHUR KOESTLER

Dialogue with Death


Birds of Hell awaiting
With the wings on fire
Insane old Phoenix, baby
It's your death desire
The birds of Hell awaiting
With the wings on fire

MARILYN MANSON

"Birds of Hell Awaiting", The Pale Emperor


Not the least of the hardships to which the dying are subject is the visitation of their loved ones. The poor darlings, God bless them, may feel every impulse to condole and console, but their primary sensation is nonetheless one of embarrassment in the presence of the unspeakable and a guilty gratitude that it is not yet their fate.

LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS

East Side Story