quotations about death
Could the best and kindest of us who depart from the earth have an opportunity of revisiting it, I suppose he or she (assuming that any Vanity Fair feelings subsist in the sphere whither we are bound) would have a pang of mortification at finding how soon our survivors were consoled.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Vanity Fair
For life be, after all, only a waitin' for somethin' else than what we're doin', and death be all that we can rightly depend on.
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
There are some dead who are more alive than the living.
ROMAIN ROLLAND
Jean-Christophe
Death! the deep, sublime and unsubdued fiat!
The licensed liberator of imprisoned souls!
The conqueror of conquerors! th' inexorable,
Unfathomed and unfathomable fate! Arch foe,
And dread antagonist of life! Its armed and fierce
Invader, horror, and dismay! whose naked sword,
In trembling balance hung, is over all its joys,
And banquets of delight, ready to pierce the heart
That with fond ardour beats! Oh! who can turn its point?
Or its swift aim arrest?
C. B. LANGSTON
"Death"
To conquer death you only have to die.
ALANE FERGUSON
The Angel of Death
O Death the Healer, scorn thou not, I pray,
To come to me; of cureless ills thou art
The one physician. Pain lays not its touch
Upon a corpse.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
Death walks behind you.
ATOMIC ROOSTER
"Death Walks Behind You"
Into the chilly, artificial air, death slipped and snuck--the god of all thieves.
J. D. ROBB
Salvation in Death
The rabbi intones that today is the day that God will put your name in the Book of Life ... or the Book of DEATH. I'm five, and I'm going, "Uhhh, what the f*** is that? The book of WHAT?!?" Death? Death was not anything that had ever occurred to me. My greatest fear was that my parents were going to leave me in a grocery store.
LEWIS BLACK
The Carnegie Hall Performance
Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
One day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death.
GLEN DUNCAN
I, Lucifer
The day of death ... is one of the five mysteries, the key of which God holds in his own hands.
éDOUARD RENé DE LABOULAYE
Abdallah
Death is a process, not an event, despite medical and legal imperatives to give it a date and hour.
JAMES W. GREEN
Beyond the Good Death
Death submits to no one.
HOMER
The Iliad
Each heart has its graveyard, each household its dead,
And knells ring around us wherever we tread,
And the feet that awhile made our pathway so bright
Pass on to a land that is out of our sight.
MARY T. LATHRAP
"Unfinished Lines"
Death is the greatest evil; because it cuts off hope.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
A dead man's shroud has no pockets.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
Death is a child of stone.
EVELYN SCOTT
"Immortality"
In each thing there is an insinuation of death. Stillness, silence, serenity are all apprenticeships.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
attributed, Only Mystery: Federico García Lorca's Poetry in Word and Image
When among the graves of thy fellows, walk with circumspection; thine own is open at thy feet.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"