quotations about death
What greater gift is there than to demonstrate you need not fear death?
FRANK HERBERT
Chapterhouse: Dune
So they pass away: friends, kindred, the dearest-loved, grown people, aged, infants. As we go on the down-hill journey, the mile-stones are grave-stones, and on each more and more names are written; unless haply you live beyond man's common age, when friends have dropped off, and, tottering, and feeble, and unpitied, you reach the terminus alone.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Roundabout Papers
Death, I am told, is as easy and as simple as going to sleep and then awakening. Our etheric body slips out of the physical body, carrying the mind with it, and we awake to our new surroundings to find our friends and relations ready to help and instruct us in our new life. Death is simply the severance of this etheric body or structure from the physical body. The physical body returns to earth, and the etheric body, controlled by the mind, continues to function in the etheric world which, though within and also without the physical, yet cannot be appreciated by us so long as we are inhabitants of the physical body. Our range of sight and touch is too confined for us to appreciate these finer vibrations.
J. ARTHUR FINDLAY
On the Edge of the Etheric
Death has an energy. It is thick as sludge, heavy as iron, and pulls you down into yourself like an imploding building.
VICTORIA LAURIE
Death Perception
Every hour wounds. The last one kills.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
Death is a creditor that is never ignored.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
"Insurance Up to Date", Literary Lapses
A man would die, though he were neither valiant nor miserable, only upon a weariness to do the same thing so oft over and over.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
Death is a flock of blackbirds low over muddy streets
in war-torn Sarajevo. Dirt-stained walls yearn
for all that is night. Elegies fall like raw silk.
If there is a way it is here.
Salt and ash.
CHRIS ABANI
Sanctificum
For 3 days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow but the phone calls taper off.
JOHNNY CARSON
The Tonight Show
It seems a strange and repugnant conclusion that with the cessation of consciousness at death, there ceases to be any knowledge of having existed. With his last breath it becomes to each the same thing as though he had never lived. And then the consciousness itself -- what is it during the time that it continues? And what becomes of it when it ends? We can only infer that it is a specialized and individualized form of that Infinite and Eternal Energy which transcends both our knowledge and our imagination; and that at death its elements lapse into the Infinite and Eternal Energy whence they were derived.
HERBERT SPENCER
Facts and Comments
Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for him who has walked in the right path.
JAMES JOYCE
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Stranger
We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
Religio Medici
Death is the end of every worldly pain.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
The Canterbury Tales
It is not pleasant to come upon Death in a lonely place at midnight.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
"The God in the Bowl"
Death envies those asleep in her ...
Extinguished softly in her womb.
EVELYN SCOTT
"For Wives and Mistresses"
There is death and love
And awful things
The sunlight takes away
All that it brings
BLACK MOTH SUPER RAINBOW
"Seeeds", Start a People
Death is not a checkmate ... it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Without death in the world, existence in it would soon become, through over-population, the most frightful of curses.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought