quotations about death
You cannot avoid mortality. But you can choose your way of meeting it. And that is the most that any man can hope for.
DAVID GERROLD
The Man Who Folded Himself
Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death--who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace 'We must all die' transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness 'I must die--and soon,' then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
Death is the veil which those who live call life;
They sleep, and it is lifted.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Prometheus Unbound
To die for others is the highest purpose a person may achieve.
CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN & NANCY HOLDER
Ghost Roads
To death we owe our life; the passing of one generation opens a way for another.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Every deceased friend is a magnet drawing us into another world.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Death stands above me, whispering low
I know not what into my ear:
Of his strange language all I know
Is, there is not a word of fear.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Death Stands above Me
I don't want to die. Damn death. Long live life!
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
Could we draw back the covering of the tomb; could we see, what those are now, who once were mortals, oh! how would it surprise and grieve us! Surprise us, to behold the prodigious transformation that has taken place on every individual; grieve us, to observe the dishonor done to our nature in general, within these subterraneous lodgments!
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
When you're Dead ... you stay up all night long.
KELLY LINK
"The Specialist's Hat", Stranger Things Happen
There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives ... their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them.... Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
It was mad, but I just couldn't shake it. I was Death, Destroyer of Life, and all I wanted was a cottage by a stream, a pot of hot soup on the stove, and someone to love me.
GEORGE PENDLE
Death: A Life
Death happens but once, yet we feel it every moment of our lives; it is worse to dread it than to suffer it.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Mankind", Les Caractères
As soon as one is born, one starts dying.
LUIGI PIRANDELLO
Henry IV
To will the obligatory in relation to death is to fall in line with the major immutable cycles of Nature, especially human nature, and to understand that (whether or not there is a purpose or meaning to life or a life of the spirit beyond the life of the body) no one, absolutely no one, escapes being finite and mortal. And knowing this, and then to accept it, to will it, and not to be in an unnecessary state of angst or rebellion or terror over it.
EDWIN SHNEIDMAN
A Commonsense Book of Death
Death or glory, death or glory
March forever in the sound and fury
MOTORHEAD
"Death or Glory"
Death is release, if you've lived all right.
EDWARD ALBEE
Seascape
Death has a hundred hands and walks by a thousand ways.
T.S. ELIOT
Murder in the Cathedral
When you look at a corpse you can always sense your own breath better.
ZONA GALE
"Miggy"
We are mere notes in a piece of music played by the angel Death--heard and lost.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought