DEATH QUOTES XVIII

quotations about death

Every twinge of sensation, even of agony, was a negation of death.

ROBERT E. HOWARD

"A Witch Shall Be Born", Weird Tales, 1934


Give me to die like a beast, afar, alone
With but the hawk and crow
To watch beside me while I cast my soul,
And but the sky to know
What my racked lips have uttered, what last groan,
Or curse or prayer, I breathed to heaven above.

KENNETH RAND

"Straw-Death"


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

JOHN LE CARRÉ

Smiley's People


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


Life is hard, but death is even harder.

PETER KREEFT

Between Heaven and Hell


Oh! that "eternal shore,"
When Death shall be no more!
How widely differing from this mortal state,
Where we but draw our earliest breath
To yield it up again in death,
Obedient to the unchanging laws of fate!

ANNE S. BUSHBY

"Easter Morning"


That is the gods' work, spinning threads of death
through the lives of mortal men,
an all to make a song for those to come.

HOMER

The Odyssey


The body is placed under the earth, and after a certain period there remains no vestige even of its form. This is that contemplation of inexhaustible melancholy, whose shadow eclipses the brightness of the world. The common observer is struck with dejection of the spectacle. He contends in vain against the persuasion of the grave, that the dead indeed cease to be. The corpse at his feet is prophetic of his own destiny. Those who have preceded him, and whose voice was delightful to his ear; whose touch met his like sweet and subtle fire: whose aspect spread a visionary light upon his path -- these he cannot meet again.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

The Necessity of Atheism


There is no god but death.

MAXWELL ANDERSON

Elizabeth the Queen


They say death comes like a thief in the night, where is he? I'll hug his neck.

CORMAC MCCARTHY

Suttree


A man dies not for the many wounds that pierce his
breast, unless it be that life's end keep pace with
death, nor by sitting on his hearth at home doth he the
more escape his appointed doom.

AESCHYLUS

fragment


Death ... doesn't take her eyes off us for a minute, so much so that even those who are not yet due to die feel her gaze pursuing them constantly.

JOSé SARAMAGO

Death with Interruptions


Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.

GRAHAM GREENE

The Honorary Consul


It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.

YEVGENY ZAMYATIN

A Soviet Heretic


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


Scientists have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is life after death -- though they say it's virtually impossible to get decent Chinese food.

DAVID LETTERMAN

Late Show with David Letterman, October 13, 2014


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


Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Philosophical Essays


Death is simply the soul's change of residence.

ELIZA COOK

Diamond Dust


Death lies dormant in each of us and will bloom in time.

DEAN KOONTZ

Odd Thomas