quotations about death
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
The longest-lived and the shortest-lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
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
Life and death are different sides of the same coin.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
He steps upon death that stirs a foot.
THOMAS DEKKER
Blurt
Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Heartbreak House
He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.
JACK LONDON
White Fang
Graves are for the living, not the dead. It gives us something to concentrate on instead of the fact that our loved one is rotting under the ground. The dead don't care about pretty flowers and carved marble statues.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Guilty Pleasures
Numbing rumble, countless medicine,
Depleted from years of abuse
Death rattle shaking
And there's no faking, undertaking
PANTERA
"Death Rattle", Reinventing the Steel
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
When we pray for death we really desire a fuller life.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Weep strong men must,
Since all before us now is lifeless dust;
Majestic clay
Is all, good friends, death leaves to us today.
ELIZA ALLEN STARR
"Col. James A. Mulligan"
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
Day by day Time rolls the scroll of Life,
Yet man heeds not in worldly strife
The vanished years, till Death demands his claim--
The mound-lines of the clay that mark his name.
HARRIET MAXWELL CONVERSE
"Day by Day"
Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die. But, once realise what the true object is in life -- that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of noble minds' -- but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect Man -- and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!
LEWIS CARROLL
preface, Sylvie and Bruno
People living deeply have no fear of death.
ANAIS NIN
The Diary of Anais Nin
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
There is no knowing beyond that membrane, the meniscus of death. What can be seen from here is distorted, refracted. All we can know are those untrustworthy glimpses--that and rumour. The prattle. The dead gossip: it is the reverberation of that gossip against the surface tension of death that the better mediums hear. It is like listening to whispered secrets through a toilet door. It is a crude and muffled susurrus.
CHINA MIéVILLE
Kraken
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
We live as we die, and die as we live.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims