DEATH QUOTES XXIII

quotations about death

There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit


The gate of death is never at rest.

EDWARD COUNSEL

Maxims


The dying need but little, dear,
A glass of water's all,
A flower's unobtrusive face
To punctuate the wall,
A fan, perhaps, a friend's regret
And certainty that one
No color in the rainbow
Perceive, when you are gone.

EMILY DICKINSON

"The Dying need but little, Dear"


It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.

DANIEL HANDLER (as Lemony Snicket)

The Reptile Room


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


By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death.

LUCRETIUS

De Rerum Natura


What is
Death, so it be but glorious? 'Tis a sunset;
And mortals may be happy to resemble
The Gods but in decay.

LORD BYRON

Sardanapalus


We have the promises of God as thick as daisies in summer meadows, that death, which men most fear, shall be to us the most blessed of experiences, if we trust in him. Death is unclasping; joy, breaking out in the desert; the heart, come to its blossoming time! Do we call it dying when the bud bursts into flower?

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


Man dies. Come from darkness, into darkness he returns, and is reabsorbed, without a trace left, into the illimitable void of time.

LEONID ANDREYEV

The Life of Man


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


There is a time in a patient's life when the pain ceases to be, when the mind slips off into a dreamless state, when the need for food becomes minimal and the awareness of the environment all but disappears into darkness. This is the time when the relatives walk up and down the hospital hallways, tormented by the waiting, not knowing if they should leave to attend the living or stay to be around for the moment of death. This is the time when it is too late for words, and yet the time when the relatives cry the loudest for help--with out without words.... It is the hardest time for the next of kin as he either wishes to take off, to get it over with; or he desperately clings to something that he is in the process of losing forever.

ELISABETH KUBLER-ROSS

On Death and Dying


Odd thing about death ... it reaffirms life.

RITA MAE BROWN

Hounded to Death


Now death is death! and yet is not one death
Another death? Stabbing is not the same
As shooting! Would you say a strangled man
Was drown'd? The end is one, the means are many,
And there the difference lies!

SHERIDAN KNOWLES

True Unto Death


Not the least of the hardships to which the dying are subject is the visitation of their loved ones. The poor darlings, God bless them, may feel every impulse to condole and console, but their primary sensation is nonetheless one of embarrassment in the presence of the unspeakable and a guilty gratitude that it is not yet their fate.

LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS

East Side Story


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


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 the dropping of the flower, that the fruit may swell.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Death is just--to the just.

EDWARD COUNSEL

Maxims


Death is a Pepsi truck with no place to go. Dying is wham, feeling like the world's biggest fuck-up and being jerked up and out of it all. Like a puppy being lifted out of its box by the nape of its neck. Like a chess piece being removed from the board by an angry player. Wham, jerk, gone.

DAN SIMMONS

Lovedeath


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