quotations about death
Man dies. Come from darkness, into darkness he returns, and is reabsorbed, without a trace left, into the illimitable void of time.
LEONID ANDREYEV
The Life of Man
All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.
KURT VONNEGUT
The Sirens of Titan
Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
The dead can't come to us. We can only go to them.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
Deach becomes some men. Others wear it shamefully; others still, defiantly. Their protest choking, suffocating.
CHRIS ABANI
Kalakuta Republic
Death, with funereal shades in vain surrounds me,
My reason through his darkness seeth light:
'Tis the last step which brings me close to Thee:
'Tis the veil falling, 'twixt Thy face and mine.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"Prayer", Poetical Meditations
There must be some unwritten law that says about fifty people have to move into your house when somebody dies. If it weren’t for the smell of death clinging to the walls, you might think it was your family’s turn to host the month neighborhood potluck supper.
ADAM RAPP
Under the Wolf
When one fears that somehow he will not be able to maintain an understanding grasp of something complex and extensive, he tries to find or to make for himself a brief summary of the whole--for the sake of a comprehensive view. Thus death is the briefest summary of life or life reduced to its briefest form. Therefore to those who in truth meditate on human life it has always been very important again and again to test with this brief summary what they have understood about life. For no thinker has power over life as does death, this mighty thinker who is able not only to think through every illusion but can think it analytically and as a whole, think it down to the bottom.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD
Works of Love
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
If the matter of death is reduced to sleep and rest, what can there be so bitter in it, that any one should pine in eternal grief for the decease of a friend?
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
A man's life breath cannot come back again--
no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
once it slips through a man's clenched teeth.
HOMER
The Iliad
We have the promises of God as thick as daisies in summer meadows, that death, which men most fear, shall be to us the most blessed of experiences, if we trust in him. Death is unclasping; joy, breaking out in the desert; the heart, come to its blossoming time! Do we call it dying when the bud bursts into flower?
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Suttree
Death
As a dark Shadow
Beckons his prey
Into the unknown
By a soft whisper
In the soul
CINDY CHENEY
"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 progress, advance, disimprisonment.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
What is
Death, so it be but glorious? 'Tis a sunset;
And mortals may be happy to resemble
The Gods but in decay.
LORD BYRON
Sardanapalus
There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Death is the dropping of the flower, that the fruit may swell.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
He that abideth when he might depart
From this world hath no wisdom in his heart.
FERDOWSI
Shahnameh