quotations about death
In literature and in art, alike, this gloomy fashion of regarding Death has been characteristic of Christianity. Death has been painted as a skeleton grasping a scythe, a grinning skull, a threatening figure with terrible face and uplifted dart, a bony scarecrow shaking an hour-glass--all that could alarm and repel has been gathered round this rightly-named King of Terrors.
ANNIE WOOD BESANT
Death--and After
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
Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
The Birth of the Clinic
Death is not a self-evident phenomenon. The margins between life and death are socially and culturally constructed, mobile, multiple, and open to dispute and reformulation.
MARGARET LOCK
Twice Dead
Death is no more than a turning of us over from Time to Eternity.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
As soon as one is born, one starts dying.
LUIGI PIRANDELLO
Henry IV
While life could be evaded, death could not.
DEAN KOONTZ
Velocity
When you're Dead ... you stay up all night long.
KELLY LINK
"The Specialist's Hat", Stranger Things Happen
Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?
PLATO
Phaedo
I don't want to die. Damn death. Long live life!
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
Death, vicious death,
Leave a green branch for love.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
Blood Wedding
Death joins us to the great majority.
EDWARD YOUNG
The Revenge
Even as a child I was fascinated by death, not in a spiritual sense, but in an aesthetic one. A hamster or guinea pig would pass away, and, after burying the body, I'd dig it back up: over and over, until all that remained was a shoddy pelt. It earned me a certain reputation, especially when I moved on to other people's pets. "Igor," they called me. "Wicked, spooky." But I think my interest was actually fairly common, at least among adolescent boys. At that age, death is something that happens only to animals and grandparents, and studying it is like a science project.
DAVID SEDARIS
When You Are Engulfed in Flames
The fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
Maxims
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
Feeling funny in my mind, Lord
I believe I'm fixing to die
Well, I don't mind dying
But I hate to leave my children crying
Well, I look over yonder to that burying ground
Look over yonder to that burying ground
Sure seems lonesome, Lord, when the sun goes down
BOB DYLAN
"Fixin' To Die"
Every deceased friend is a magnet drawing us into another world.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Death tripped down the corridor, changing step, struck out here and there, danced pirouettes; often I felt his breath on my face when he was miles away; often I fell asleep and dreamed while he stood leaning over my bed.
ARTHUR KOESTLER
Dialogue with Death
Death has a hundred hands and walks by a thousand ways.
T.S. ELIOT
Murder in the Cathedral