quotations about death
Oh the grave!--the grave!--It buries every error--covers every defect--extinguishes every resentment! From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections. Who can look down upon the grave even of an enemy, and not feel a compunctious throb, that he should ever have warred with the poor handful of earth that lies mouldering before him!
WASHINGTON IRVING
"Rural Funerals", The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon
Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, Jun. 7, 1938
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly long'd for death.
ALFRED TENNYSON
The Two Voices
If souls survive death for all eternity, how can the heavens hold them all? Or for that matter, how can the earth hold all the bodies that have been buried in it? The answers are the same. Just as on earth, with the passage of time, decaying and transmogrified corpses make way for the newly dead, so souls released into the heavens, after a season of flight, begin to break up, burn, and be absorbed back into the womb of reason, leaving room for souls just beginning to fly. This is the answer for those who believe that souls survive death.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
There is something wonderful about a death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important. Your husband can feed the kids, he can work the new oven, he can find the sausages in the fridge, after all. And his important meeting was not important, not in the slightest.
ANNE ENRIGHT
The Gathering
Death was far more certain than God.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Quiet American
There is no birth, there is no death; there is no coming, there is no going; there is no same, there is no different; there is no permanent self, there is no annihilation. We only think there is.
THICH NHAT HANH
No Death