DEATH QUOTES XXII

quotations about death


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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
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Other Voices


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Look on the grave where thou must sleep
Thy last, and strongest foe;
It is endurance not to weep,
If that repose seem woe.

EMILY BRONTE

Self-Interrogation


People living deeply have no fear of death.

ANAIS NIN

The Diary of Anais Nin


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


Remember the coffin where men
All must to dust be returning.

HENRI CAZALIS

"Always"


Death's a fable. Did not Heaven inspire your equal Elements with living Fire blown from the Spring of Life? Is not that breath Immortal? Come; ye are as free from death as He that made ye: Can the flames expire which he kindled?

FRANCIS QUARLES

Emblems


Death is the continuing of life ... the next part of our life. It's like walking through a door, you know? Walking through the door marked "Death": It's the beginning of a new part of our journey.

ROSEMARY ALTEA

interview, Larry King Live, Mar. 15, 2000


Death is not an end, but a transition-crisis. All the forms of decay are but masks of regeneration--the secret alembics of vitality.

E. H. CHAPIN

Living Words


People walk along the streets the day after our deaths just as they did before, and the crowd is not diminished. While we were living, the world seemed in a manner to exist only for us, for our delight and amusement, because it contributed to them. But our hearts cease to beat, and it goes on as usual, and thinks no more about us than it did in our lifetime.

WILLIAM HAZLITT

Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners


Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.

SYLVIA PLATH

The Bell Jar


All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.

KURT VONNEGUT

The Sirens of Titan


If we were sensible we would seek death--the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.

H. P. LOVECRAFT

"Nietzscheism and Realism"


Whether or not enlightenment is possible at the moment of death, the practices that prepare one for this possibility also bring one closer to the bone of life.

JOAN HALIFAX

Being with Dying


The dead body makes the living one obscene. It's why we close the eyes, too. The dead shouldn't have to look on the lewd aliveness of things.

GLEN DUNCAN

By Blood We Live


It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man's death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred too--as if it were comparatively a light thing to fail in love and reverence to the brother who has to climb the whole toilsome steep with us, and all our tears and tenderness were due to the one who is spared that hard journey.

GEORGE ELIOT

Janet's Repentance


The gate of death is never at rest.

EDWARD COUNSEL

Maxims


If a man should wanton walk with crime ... he shall find in death no great deliverance.

AESCHYLUS

The Eumenides


Death is a meeting place of sea and sea.

CONRAD AIKEN

The House of Dust


Nowadays, we have technology that's improved so that we can bring people back to life. In fact, there are drugs being developed right now -- who knows if they'll ever make it to the market -- that may actually slow down the process of brain-cell injury and death. Imagine, you fast-forward to ten years down the line and you've given a patient whose heart has just stopped this amazing drug, and actually what it does is it slows everything down so that the things that would've happened over an hour, now happen over two days. As medicine progresses, we will end up with lots and lots of ethical questions.

SAM PARNIA

interview, Time, Sep. 18, 2008


It seemeth such a little way to me
Across to that strange country -- the Beyond;
And yet, not strange, for it has grown to be
The home of those of whom I am so fond,
They make it seem familiar and most dear,
As journeying friends bring distant regions near.

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

"Beyond"