quotations about death
I don't necessarily view death as something negative. Death gives meaning to life. Living in fear of death is living in denial. Actually, it's not really living at all, because there is no life without death. It's two sides of the one. You can't pick up one side and say, "I'm just going to use the 'heads' side." No. It doesn't work like that. You have to pick up both sides because nothing is promised to anyone in this world besides death.
50 CENT
From Pieces to Weight
Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Heartbreak House
By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
Death is just--to the just.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Death is the dropping of the flower, that the fruit may swell.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Now death is death! and yet is not one death
Another death? Stabbing is not the same
As shooting! Would you say a strangled man
Was drown'd? The end is one, the means are many,
And there the difference lies!
SHERIDAN KNOWLES
True Unto Death
O Death, the Consecrator!
Nothing so sanctifies a name
As to be written--Dead.
Nothing so wins a life from blame,
So covers it from wrath and shame,
As doth the burial-bed.
CAROLINE SPENCER
"Death the Consecrator"
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 tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
OSCAR WILDE
The Canterville Ghost
It is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realise the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
He steps upon death that stirs a foot.
THOMAS DEKKER
Blurt
When one existentially awakens from within, the relation of birth-and-death is not seen as a sequential change from the former to the latter. Rather, living as it is, is no more than dying, and at the same time there is no living separate from dying. This means that life itself is death and death itself is life. That is, we do not shift sequentially from birth to death, but undergo living-dying in each and every moment.
MASAO ABE
A Study of Dogen: His Philosophy and Religion
When Death puts out our Flame, the Snuff will tell,
If we were Wax, or Tallow by the smell.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanack, 1739
Whatever is certain in death is slightly alleviated by what is not so infallible; the time when it shall happen is undefined, but it is more or less connected with the infinite, and what we call eternity.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Mankind", Les Caractères
The seeds of Death are sown in us when we begin to live, and grow up till, like rampant weeds, they choak the tender flower of life.
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
Clarissa
Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
There is no Death! What seems so is transition;
This life of mortal breath
Is but a suburb of the life elysian,
Whose portal we call Death.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"Resignation"
Death is like an old whore in a bar--I'll buy her a drink but I won't go upstairs with her.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
To Have and Have Not
I don't mean to imply that I'm afraid of Death. I'm just not ready to go out on a date with him.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Thomas