DEATH QUOTES XXI

quotations about death

It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

Smiley's People


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


Now that you are dead,
You are splendid.
Photographs of people who have just died
Are worth twenty percent more,
And for suicides
There is an additional five percent.
Now that you are dead
You are much in demand.

KOBO ABE

The Ghost is Here


Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Heartbreak House


Whether or not enlightenment is possible at the moment of death, the practices that prepare one for this possibility also bring one closer to the bone of life.

JOAN HALIFAX

Being with Dying


Who knows but life be that which men call death,
And death what men call life?

EURIPIDES

Phrixus [fragment]


Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible war motion to become
A kneaded clod, and the dilated spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling -- 'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathèd worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Measure for Measure


Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

letter to Cecil Spring-Rice, Mar. 12, 1900


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 stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.

TRUMAN CAPOTE

Other Voices


Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.

MARY SHELLEY

Frankenstein


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


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"


Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily united by a mysterious force called the life-principle. To the materialist the only difference between a living and a dead body is, that in the one case that force is active, in the other latent. When it is extinct or entirely latent, the molecules obey a superior attraction, which draws them asunder and scatters them through space. This dispersion must be death, if it is possible to conceive such a thing as death where the very molecules of the dead body manifest an intense vital energy.

HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY

Isis Unveiled


Death is not regarded as a natural affair by primitive man. Death is believed to be due to the intervention of some malevolent or at least not well disposed power. Normally it should not take place. So we have all through history crude explanations of death, as e.g., the influence of the serpent, the devil, sin.

JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON

The Field of Philosophy


The dead body makes the living one obscene. It's why we close the eyes, too. The dead shouldn't have to look on the lewd aliveness of things.

GLEN DUNCAN

By Blood We Live


The dead can't come to us. We can only go to them.

GLEN DUNCAN

By Blood We Live


The gate of death is never at rest.

EDWARD COUNSEL

Maxims


When bones and flesh have finished their business together,
we lay them carefully, in positions they're willing to keep,
and cover them over.
Their eyes and ours won't meet anymore. We hope.

SARAH LINDSAY

"Shanidar, Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower


Death is tolerable only when it leads again to life.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Collected Poems