quotations about death
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
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 no knowing beyond that membrane, the meniscus of death. What can be seen from here is distorted, refracted. All we can know are those untrustworthy glimpses--that and rumour. The prattle. The dead gossip: it is the reverberation of that gossip against the surface tension of death that the better mediums hear. It is like listening to whispered secrets through a toilet door. It is a crude and muffled susurrus.
CHINA MIéVILLE
Kraken
Dying is like coming to the end of a long novel--you only regret it if the ride was enjoyable and left you wanting more.
JEROME P. CRABB
Death Quotes and Quibbles
The reaction to death is sometimes as violent as death itself. Shock throws a cautious coolness over your senses, but your stomach still has knots, your skin stings as if the Reaper is glaring at you as well.
TIM LEBBON
Fears Unnamed
Weep strong men must,
Since all before us now is lifeless dust;
Majestic clay
Is all, good friends, death leaves to us today.
ELIZA ALLEN STARR
"Col. James A. Mulligan"
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
It hath been often said, that it is not death, but dying, which is terrible.
HENRY FIELDING
Amelia
I'm not afraid of death because I don't believe in it. It's just getting out of one car, and into another.
JOHN LENNON
attributed, Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History
To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.
ELIE WIESEL
Night
In his bleak mercy, Death forever strips
The soul of light and memory, rendering blind
Our vision, lest surmounted deeps appal,
As when on mountain-heights a glance behind
Betrays with knowledge, and the climber slips
Down gulfs of fear to some enormous fall.
CLARK ASHTON SMITH
"The Unremembered"
With death comes honesty.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
The Satanic Verses
On every blessing lent to man
Are traces of the Grave.
WILLIAM B. TAPPAN
"Beauty in the Grave"
The Fear of Death often proves Mortal.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Spectator, Mar. 29, 1711
Death is one dream out of another flowing.
CONRAD AIKEN
The House of Dust
Death is the end of one story and the beginning of another.
PHILIP MOELLER
Helena's Husband
He that begins to live, begins to die.
FRANCIS QUARLES
Hieroglyphics
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly long'd for death.
ALFRED TENNYSON
The Two Voices
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