DEATH QUOTES XV

quotations about death

It was mad, but I just couldn't shake it. I was Death, Destroyer of Life, and all I wanted was a cottage by a stream, a pot of hot soup on the stove, and someone to love me.

GEORGE PENDLE

Death: A Life


In literature and in art, alike, this gloomy fashion of regarding Death has been characteristic of Christianity. Death has been painted as a skeleton grasping a scythe, a grinning skull, a threatening figure with terrible face and uplifted dart, a bony scarecrow shaking an hour-glass--all that could alarm and repel has been gathered round this rightly-named King of Terrors.

ANNIE WOOD BESANT

Death--and After


Death stands above me, whispering low
I know not what into my ear:
Of his strange language all I know
Is, there is not a word of fear.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR

Death Stands above Me


I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man's place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

"What I Believe"


The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

EDGAR ALLAN POE

"The Premature Burial"


I don't want to die. Damn death. Long live life!

JAMES JOYCE

Ulysses


Death joins us to the great majority.

EDWARD YOUNG

The Revenge


When you're Dead ... you stay up all night long.

KELLY LINK

"The Specialist's Hat", Stranger Things Happen


Death is no more than a turning of us over from Time to Eternity.

WILLIAM PENN

Some Fruits of Solitude


Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.

GEORGE ELIOT

Adam Bede


Even as a child I was fascinated by death, not in a spiritual sense, but in an aesthetic one. A hamster or guinea pig would pass away, and, after burying the body, I'd dig it back up: over and over, until all that remained was a shoddy pelt. It earned me a certain reputation, especially when I moved on to other people's pets. "Igor," they called me. "Wicked, spooky." But I think my interest was actually fairly common, at least among adolescent boys. At that age, death is something that happens only to animals and grandparents, and studying it is like a science project.

DAVID SEDARIS

When You Are Engulfed in Flames


While life could be evaded, death could not.

DEAN KOONTZ

Velocity


Death, vicious death,
Leave a green branch for love.

FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA

Blood Wedding


Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

PLATO

Phaedo


Death has a hundred hands and walks by a thousand ways.

T.S. ELIOT

Murder in the Cathedral


Death and the sun can't be looked at steadily.

FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

Moral Maxims


Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death--who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace 'We must all die' transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness 'I must die--and soon,' then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.

GEORGE ELIOT

Middlemarch


Every deceased friend is a magnet drawing us into another world.

ELIZA COOK

Diamond Dust


Death tripped down the corridor, changing step, struck out here and there, danced pirouettes; often I felt his breath on my face when he was miles away; often I fell asleep and dreamed while he stood leaning over my bed.

ARTHUR KOESTLER

Dialogue with Death


Feeling funny in my mind, Lord
I believe I'm fixing to die
Well, I don't mind dying
But I hate to leave my children crying
Well, I look over yonder to that burying ground
Look over yonder to that burying ground
Sure seems lonesome, Lord, when the sun goes down

BOB DYLAN

"Fixin' To Die"