quotations about death
Graveyards remind us of the vanity of all human endeavour.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark
Those who think about death, carrying with them their existing ideas and emotions, usually assume that they will have, during their last hours, ideas and emotions of like vividness ... but they do not fully recognize the implication that the feeling faculty, too, is almost gone. The imagine the state to be one in which they can have emotions such as they now have on contemplating the cessation of life. But at the last all the mental powers simultaneously ebb, as do the bodily powers, and with them goes the capacity for emotion in general. It is, indeed, possible that in its last stages consciousness is occupied by a not displeasurable sense of rest.
HERBERT SPENCER
Facts and Comments
When bones and flesh have finished their business together,
we lay them carefully, in positions they're willing to keep,
and cover them over.
Their eyes and ours won't meet anymore. We hope.
SARAH LINDSAY
"Shanidar, Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower
Who knows but life be that which men call death,
And death what men call life?
EURIPIDES
Phrixus [fragment]
Death hath this also; that it openeth the gate to good fame, and extinguisheth envy.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
Death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
Other Voices
Death--a stopping of impressions through the senses, and of the pulling of the cords of motion, and of the ways of thought, and of service to the flesh.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
Fair Death, kind Death, it was a gracious deed
To take that weary vagrant to thy breast.
Love, Song and Wine had he, and but one need--Rest.
JOYCE KILMER
"A Dead Poet"
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Fight Club
Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man's cottage door and at the palaces of kings.
HORACE
attributed, The Quotable Intellectual
The grave itself is but a covered bridge,
Leading from light to light, through a brief darkness!
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
The Golden Legend
There is a Reaper, whose name is Death,
And, with his sickle keen,
He reaps the bearded grain at a breath,
And the flowers that grow between.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"The Reaper and the Flowers"
We give our dead
To the orchards
And the groves.
We give our dead
To life.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
Parable of the Talents
We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we think of that hour as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time; it does not occur to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned and can mean that death -- or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again -- may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon whose time-table, hour by hour, has been settled in advance.
MARCEL PROUST
The Guermantes Way
Where life is there is death, reasons the vulture, and where there's death there's hope.
EDWARD ABBEY
One Life at a Time
Because I could not stop for Death --
He kindly stopped for me --
The Carriage held but just Ourselves --
And Immortality.
EMILY DICKINSON
"Because I could not stop for Death"
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 the fate no one can escape. The question, then, is, How does one die? A person can die like a hero or like a coward. The difference is that the hero can face death without fear, whereas the coward can't.
ALEXANDER LOWEN
Fear of Life
Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
letter to W. von Hulewicz, The Duino Elegies
Death is when the monsters get you.
STEPHEN KING
Salem's Lot