quotations about death
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
Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
letter to W. von Hulewicz, The Duino Elegies
We give our dead
To the orchards
And the groves.
We give our dead
To life.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
Parable of the Talents
Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.
MARY SHELLEY
Frankenstein
Death augments distance and dulls the memory. Death reconciles.
LEONID ANDREYEV
He Who Gets Slapped
Alone in a room
needless I sit
I close my eyes
and try to forget
Death is calling
get in line
JAY REATARD
"Death Is Forming", Blood Visions
There is a Reaper, whose name is Death,
And, with his sickle keen,
He reaps the bearded grain at a breath,
And the flowers that grow between.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"The Reaper and the Flowers"
After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
Death hath this also; that it openeth the gate to good fame, and extinguisheth envy.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
Death is a great revealer of what is in a man, and in its solemn shadow appear the naked lineaments of the soul.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
They say death comes like a thief in the night, where is he? I'll hug his neck.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Suttree
Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force.
YODA
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
A Soviet Heretic
Death is the stone into which our oblivion hardens.
PABLO NERUDA
Evening LXXVIII
The living is a passing traveler;
The dead, a man come home.
LI BAI
"The Old Dust"
Now that you are dead,
You are splendid.
Photographs of people who have just died
Are worth twenty percent more,
And for suicides
There is an additional five percent.
Now that you are dead
You are much in demand.
KOBO ABE
The Ghost is Here
Graveyards remind us of the vanity of all human endeavour.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark
Certain, when I was born, so long ago,
Death drew the tap of life and let it flow;
And ever since the tap has done its task,
And now there's little but an empty cask.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
The Canterbury Tales
Who knows but life be that which men call death,
And death what men call life?
EURIPIDES
Phrixus [fragment]