quotations about death
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
JAMES BALDWIN
"Letter from a Region of My Mind", The New Yorker, November 17, 1962
Graveyards remind us of the vanity of all human endeavour.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark
After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
Deach becomes some men. Others wear it shamefully; others still, defiantly. Their protest choking, suffocating.
CHRIS ABANI
Kalakuta Republic
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
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
Death is a meeting place of sea and sea.
CONRAD AIKEN
The House of Dust
About the presence of death and dying I don't remember the society in the 1950s being so skittish as it has since become. People still died at home, among relatives and friends, often in the care of a family physician. Death was still to be seen sitting in the parlor, hanging in a butcher shop, sometimes lying in the street.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Momento Mori", Lapham's Quarterly: Death, fall 2013
In death too, there is always something of the rich cat that lets the mouse run before devouring it.
ERNST BLOCH
Traces
He that abideth when he might depart
From this world hath no wisdom in his heart.
FERDOWSI
Shahnameh
How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Suttree
If death turned out to be a lack of being rather than a lack of consciousness, well, then, that sucked.
LINDA HOWARD
Death Angel
Odd thing about death ... it reaffirms life.
RITA MAE BROWN
Hounded to Death
When one fears that somehow he will not be able to maintain an understanding grasp of something complex and extensive, he tries to find or to make for himself a brief summary of the whole--for the sake of a comprehensive view. Thus death is the briefest summary of life or life reduced to its briefest form. Therefore to those who in truth meditate on human life it has always been very important again and again to test with this brief summary what they have understood about life. For no thinker has power over life as does death, this mighty thinker who is able not only to think through every illusion but can think it analytically and as a whole, think it down to the bottom.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD
Works of Love
Death is a Pepsi truck with no place to go. Dying is wham, feeling like the world's biggest fuck-up and being jerked up and out of it all. Like a puppy being lifted out of its box by the nape of its neck. Like a chess piece being removed from the board by an angry player. Wham, jerk, gone.
DAN SIMMONS
Lovedeath
Death makes equal the high and low.
JOHN HEYWOOD
Be Merry Friends
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 must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
SYLVIA PLATH
The Bell Jar
All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.
KURT VONNEGUT
The Sirens of Titan
Leap through the Mystery of death as the circus-rider leaps through the papered hoop ... find Life ambling along beneath us on the Other Side?
SIDNEY LANIER
Songs Against Death