quotations about death
Whatever it is that occurs at death, I believe it deserves to be called a miracle. The miracle, ironically, is that we don't die. The cessation of the body is an illusion, and like a magician sweeping aside a curtain, the soul reveals what lies beyond.
DEEPAK CHOPRA
Life After Death
When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.
DON DELILLO
White Noise
O the anguish of that thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the light answers we returned to their plaints or their pleadings, for the little reverence we showed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God had given us to know!
GEORGE ELIOT
Amos Barton
When I think of the joy awaiting,
Beyond the bier and the shroud,
Death seems but a transient shadow,
A passing Summer cloud.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"Summer Clouds"
Death! great proprietor of all! 'tis thine
To tread out empire, and to quench the stars.
EDWARD YOUNG
Night Thoughts
We must die alone. To the very verge of the stream our friends may accompany us; they may bend over us, they may cling to us there; but that one long wave from the sea of eternity washes up to the lips, sweeps us from the shore, and we go forth alone! In that untried and utter solitude, then, what can there be for us but the pulsation of that assurance, "I am not alone, because the Father is with me!"
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Queen Mab
Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
The Birth of the Clinic
For a single path leads to the house of Hades.
AESCHYLUS
fragment, Telephos
In accepting death as inevitable, we don't label it as a good thing or a bad thing. As one of my teachers once said to me, "Death happens. It is just death, and how we meet it is up to us."
JOAN HALIFAX
Being with Dying
Health care is, at its core, about improving the odds of life in its struggle against death. Of extending that game which we will all lose, each and every one of us unto eternity, extending it another year or month or second.
KEITH OLBERMANN
Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Oct. 7, 2009
As soon as one is born, one starts dying.
LUIGI PIRANDELLO
Henry IV
No one on his deathbed ever said, "I wish I had spent more time on my business."
PAUL E. TSONGAS
New York Times, Jan. 14, 1987
As the woodpecker taps in a spiral quest
From the root to the top of the tree,
Then flies to another tree,
So have I bored into life to find what lay therein,
And now it is time to die,
And I will fly to another tree.
SIDNEY LANIER
Songs Against Death
Life is hard, but death is even harder.
PETER KREEFT
Between Heaven and Hell
Think what you like. There are people who die by remaining alive and others who gain life by dying.
EIJI YOSHIKAWA
Musashi
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"
Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.
AUGUST WILSON
Fences
Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede