quotations about death
Death--some form of termination--is the universal ending of all living things; but only man, by virtue of his verbally reportable introspective life, can conceptualize his own cessation.
EDWIN SHNEIDMAN
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A Commonsense Book of Death
The road to death is a long march beset with all evils, and the heart fails little by little at each new terror, the bones rebel at each step, the mind sets up its own bitter resistance and to what end? The barriers sink one by one, and no covering of the eyes shuts out the landscape of disaster, nor the sight of crimes committed there.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
"Pale Horse, Pale Rider"
That which we call Death is but a pause of suspension; and in truth a progress to life, only our thoughts look downwards upon the body, and not upwards upon things to come.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
It is not death to have the body called back to the earth, and dissolved into its kindred elements, and mouldered to dust, and, it may be, turn to daisies, in the grave. But it is death to have the soul paralyzed, its inner life quenched, its faculties dissipated; that is death.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Death was far more certain than God.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Quiet American
Life was to these a dream fulfilled,
And death a starry night.
HERMAN MELVILLE
"Chattanooga"
Death fixes forever the relation existing between the departed spirit and the survivors upon earth.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
journal, Jul. 24, 1831
Death is the end of one story and the beginning of another.
PHILIP MOELLER
Helena's Husband
On every blessing lent to man
Are traces of the Grave.
WILLIAM B. TAPPAN
"Beauty in the Grave"
Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die. But, once realise what the true object is in life -- that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of noble minds' -- but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect Man -- and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!
LEWIS CARROLL
preface, Sylvie and Bruno
Spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
The reaction to death is sometimes as violent as death itself. Shock throws a cautious coolness over your senses, but your stomach still has knots, your skin stings as if the Reaper is glaring at you as well.
TIM LEBBON
Fears Unnamed
It used to be I thought of death as a man something like Grandfather a friend of his a kind of private and particular friend like we used to think of Grandfather's desk not to touch it not even to talk loud in the room where it was.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Sound and the Fury
He that begins to live, begins to die.
FRANCIS QUARLES
Hieroglyphics
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly long'd for death.
ALFRED TENNYSON
The Two Voices
She had nut painted arms that were hers to keep
And in her fear she sought cracked pleasures
The passion of lovers is for death, said she
Licked her lips and turned to feather
BAUHAUS
"The Passion of Lovers"
In his bleak mercy, Death forever strips
The soul of light and memory, rendering blind
Our vision, lest surmounted deeps appal,
As when on mountain-heights a glance behind
Betrays with knowledge, and the climber slips
Down gulfs of fear to some enormous fall.
CLARK ASHTON SMITH
"The Unremembered"
Only through the death experience could man fully understand his life experience. Only through the realization that his days on earth were finite could he grasp the importance of living those days with honor, integrity, and service to his fellow man.
DAN BROWN
The Lost Symbol
I don't like tombstones. They're like bookends to spent lives, trapping the person inside.
ELIZABETH DANIELS
"A Rose in the Willow Garden", Red Velvet and Absinthe
There is no birth, there is no death; there is no coming, there is no going; there is no same, there is no different; there is no permanent self, there is no annihilation. We only think there is.
THICH NHAT HANH
No Death