quotations about death
Death is tolerable only when it leads again to life.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Collected 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
Life is hard, but death is even harder.
PETER KREEFT
Between Heaven and Hell
Death is the fate no one can escape. The question, then, is, How does one die? A person can die like a hero or like a coward. The difference is that the hero can face death without fear, whereas the coward can't.
ALEXANDER LOWEN
Fear of Life
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
Far happier he, who, young and full of pride
And radiant with the glory of the sun,
Leaves earth before his singing time is done.
All wounds of Time the graveyard flowers hide,
His beauty lives, as fresh as when he died.
JOYCE KILMER
"The Clouded Sun"
Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.
ELLEN GILCHRIST
Good Housekeeping, May 2011
Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.
RAY BRADBURY
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man's cottage door and at the palaces of kings.
HORACE
attributed, The Quotable Intellectual
The dead can't come to us. We can only go to them.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
Death is a Dialogue between
The Spirit and the Dust.
EMILY DICKINSON
"Death is a Dialogue"
We're ever making plans for life,
But seldom plans for death,
Though death we know must come to us,
And life is but a breath.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
Thoughts
Death is not regarded as a natural affair by primitive man. Death is believed to be due to the intervention of some malevolent or at least not well disposed power. Normally it should not take place. So we have all through history crude explanations of death, as e.g., the influence of the serpent, the devil, sin.
JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON
The Field of Philosophy
Death is the Christian's vacation morning. School is out. It is time to go home.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Graveyards remind us of the vanity of all human endeavour.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark
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 is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
Other Voices
Leap through the Mystery of death as the circus-rider leaps through the papered hoop ... find Life ambling along beneath us on the Other Side?
SIDNEY LANIER
Songs Against Death
Death is a meeting place of sea and sea.
CONRAD AIKEN
The House of Dust
About the presence of death and dying I don't remember the society in the 1950s being so skittish as it has since become. People still died at home, among relatives and friends, often in the care of a family physician. Death was still to be seen sitting in the parlor, hanging in a butcher shop, sometimes lying in the street.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Momento Mori", Lapham's Quarterly: Death, fall 2013