quotations about death
Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
Death is the only sovereign whom no partiality can warp, and no price corrupt.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.
WOODY ALLEN
Death: A Comedy in One Act
The day of death ... is one of the five mysteries, the key of which God holds in his own hands.
éDOUARD RENé DE LABOULAYE
Abdallah
The rabbi intones that today is the day that God will put your name in the Book of Life ... or the Book of DEATH. I'm five, and I'm going, "Uhhh, what the f*** is that? The book of WHAT?!?" Death? Death was not anything that had ever occurred to me. My greatest fear was that my parents were going to leave me in a grocery store.
LEWIS BLACK
The Carnegie Hall Performance
Each heart has its graveyard, each household its dead,
And knells ring around us wherever we tread,
And the feet that awhile made our pathway so bright
Pass on to a land that is out of our sight.
MARY T. LATHRAP
"Unfinished Lines"
Death is the end of those who have done nothing to cause their names to live after them.
XENOPHON
attributed, Day's Collacon
A dead man's shroud has no pockets.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
Death is the greatest evil; because it cuts off hope.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
When among the graves of thy fellows, walk with circumspection; thine own is open at thy feet.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
Could the best and kindest of us who depart from the earth have an opportunity of revisiting it, I suppose he or she (assuming that any Vanity Fair feelings subsist in the sphere whither we are bound) would have a pang of mortification at finding how soon our survivors were consoled.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Vanity Fair
Death walks behind you.
ATOMIC ROOSTER
"Death Walks Behind You"
Into the chilly, artificial air, death slipped and snuck--the god of all thieves.
J. D. ROBB
Salvation in Death
There are some dead who are more alive than the living.
ROMAIN ROLLAND
Jean-Christophe
Face your faith
Remove all the lace
You love me to death
But death my love you more
HOOVERPHONIC
"You Love Me to Death", No More Sweet Music
O Death the Healer, scorn thou not, I pray,
To come to me; of cureless ills thou art
The one physician. Pain lays not its touch
Upon a corpse.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
In each thing there is an insinuation of death. Stillness, silence, serenity are all apprenticeships.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
attributed, Only Mystery: Federico García Lorca's Poetry in Word and Image
Death submits to no one.
HOMER
The Iliad
Death is a child of stone.
EVELYN SCOTT
"Immortality"
Death is a process, not an event, despite medical and legal imperatives to give it a date and hour.
JAMES W. GREEN
Beyond the Good Death