quotations about death
I don't mean to imply that I'm afraid of Death. I'm just not ready to go out on a date with him.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Thomas
When do the dead die? When they are forgotten.
LAURA ESQUIVEL
The Law of Love
He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.
JACK LONDON
White Fang
It is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realise the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
O Death, the Consecrator!
Nothing so sanctifies a name
As to be written--Dead.
Nothing so wins a life from blame,
So covers it from wrath and shame,
As doth the burial-bed.
CAROLINE SPENCER
"Death the Consecrator"
As men, we are all equal in the presence of death.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
Maxims
Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
Death--some form of termination--is the universal ending of all living things; but only man, by virtue of his verbally reportable introspective life, can conceptualize his own cessation.
EDWIN SHNEIDMAN
A Commonsense Book of Death
Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, Jun. 7, 1938
Life is what you celebrate. All of it. Even its end.
JOANNE HARRIS
Chocolat
Life was to these a dream fulfilled,
And death a starry night.
HERMAN MELVILLE
"Chattanooga"
To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.
ELIE WIESEL
Night
Death is the monster we all fear, yet with each day, we walk toward it, and can't help doing so; we can't help but walk toward the one thing we're most trying to avoid.
BILL MAHER
"On Being Over 50", HuffPost, Oct. 3, 2011
Death is only a small interruption.
ANITA BROOKNER
Latecomers
When you die it's the end of your life.
SAM SHEPARD
Tongues
Death fixes forever the relation existing between the departed spirit and the survivors upon earth.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
journal, Jul. 24, 1831
Day by day Time rolls the scroll of Life,
Yet man heeds not in worldly strife
The vanished years, till Death demands his claim--
The mound-lines of the clay that mark his name.
HARRIET MAXWELL CONVERSE
"Day by Day"
Dying is an art.
Like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I have a call.
SYLVIA PLATH
Ariel
It used to be I thought of death as a man something like Grandfather a friend of his a kind of private and particular friend like we used to think of Grandfather's desk not to touch it not even to talk loud in the room where it was.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Sound and the Fury
On every blessing lent to man
Are traces of the Grave.
WILLIAM B. TAPPAN
"Beauty in the Grave"