quotations about death
How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Suttree
Whatever is certain in death is slightly alleviated by what is not so infallible; the time when it shall happen is undefined, but it is more or less connected with the infinite, and what we call eternity.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Mankind", Les Caractères
Death, with funereal shades in vain surrounds me,
My reason through his darkness seeth light:
'Tis the last step which brings me close to Thee:
'Tis the veil falling, 'twixt Thy face and mine.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"Prayer", Poetical Meditations
If the matter of death is reduced to sleep and rest, what can there be so bitter in it, that any one should pine in eternal grief for the decease of a friend?
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
When one fears that somehow he will not be able to maintain an understanding grasp of something complex and extensive, he tries to find or to make for himself a brief summary of the whole--for the sake of a comprehensive view. Thus death is the briefest summary of life or life reduced to its briefest form. Therefore to those who in truth meditate on human life it has always been very important again and again to test with this brief summary what they have understood about life. For no thinker has power over life as does death, this mighty thinker who is able not only to think through every illusion but can think it analytically and as a whole, think it down to the bottom.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD
Works of Love
Death is tolerable only when it leads again to life.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Collected Poems
In death too, there is always something of the rich cat that lets the mouse run before devouring it.
ERNST BLOCH
Traces
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
Where life is there is death, reasons the vulture, and where there's death there's hope.
EDWARD ABBEY
One Life at a Time
Life is a waste of woes,
And Death a river deep,
That ever onward flows,
Troubled, yet asleep.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
"Lines To --", Imogen and Other Poems
What is Death? Death is the ending of life. When people die, their bodies stop working. The heart stops beating and the brain stops functioning. People have always wanted to learn the secret of living forever. In ancient times, explorers and scientists searched for the secret of eternal life. The truth is, nothing can live forever. Everyone and everything will die in time. Plants, animals, and people all die. Death is a natural part of life.
JOANNE MATTERN
Death
Death
As a dark Shadow
Beckons his prey
Into the unknown
By a soft whisper
In the soul
CINDY CHENEY
"Death"
When one existentially awakens from within, the relation of birth-and-death is not seen as a sequential change from the former to the latter. Rather, living as it is, is no more than dying, and at the same time there is no living separate from dying. This means that life itself is death and death itself is life. That is, we do not shift sequentially from birth to death, but undergo living-dying in each and every moment.
MASAO ABE
A Study of Dogen: His Philosophy and Religion
Death's a fable. Did not Heaven inspire your equal Elements with living Fire blown from the Spring of Life? Is not that breath Immortal? Come; ye are as free from death as He that made ye: Can the flames expire which he kindled?
FRANCIS QUARLES
Emblems
Death is just--to the just.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Odd thing about death ... it reaffirms life.
RITA MAE BROWN
Hounded to Death
Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die. But, once realise what the true object is in life -- that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of noble minds' -- but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect Man -- and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!
LEWIS CARROLL
preface, Sylvie and Bruno
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
My spirit is too weak--mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
JOHN KEATS
"On Seeing the Elgin Marbles"
To take life was to understand your own death--that the Hour of the Huntsman also came for you.
S. M. STIRLING
The Sunrise Lands