quotations about death
Life is a waste of woes,
And Death a river deep,
That ever onward flows,
Troubled, yet asleep.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
"Lines To --", Imogen and Other Poems
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"
No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.
CHARLES FROHMAN
his last words before going down on the Lusitania
Death is like an old whore in a bar--I'll buy her a drink but I won't go upstairs with her.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
To Have and Have Not
Dying is strange and hard if it is not our death, but a death that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
The Book of Hours
It is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realise the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
Life was to these a dream fulfilled,
And death a starry night.
HERMAN MELVILLE
"Chattanooga"
The longest-lived and the shortest-lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
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
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
By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
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
I don't mean to imply that I'm afraid of Death. I'm just not ready to go out on a date with him.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Thomas
I don't necessarily view death as something negative. Death gives meaning to life. Living in fear of death is living in denial. Actually, it's not really living at all, because there is no life without death. It's two sides of the one. You can't pick up one side and say, "I'm just going to use the 'heads' side." No. It doesn't work like that. You have to pick up both sides because nothing is promised to anyone in this world besides death.
50 CENT
From Pieces to Weight
I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave--thank God for the quiet grave--O! I can feel the cold earth upon me--the daisies growing over me--O for this quiet--it will be my first.
JOHN KEATS
attributed, letter from Joseph Severn to John Taylor, Mar. 6, 1821
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
Life is what you celebrate. All of it. Even its end.
JOANNE HARRIS
Chocolat
Living, the nearest claim them; but the dear
Great dead belong to any humble heart.
KARLE WILSON BAKER
"W. V. M.", Blue Smoke
Numbing rumble, countless medicine,
Depleted from years of abuse
Death rattle shaking
And there's no faking, undertaking
PANTERA
"Death Rattle", Reinventing the Steel