DEATH QUOTES XXVI

quotations about death

Death is the monster we all fear, yet with each day, we walk toward it, and can't help doing so; we can't help but walk toward the one thing we're most trying to avoid.

BILL MAHER

"On Being Over 50", HuffPost, Oct. 3, 2011


Dying is an art.
Like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I have a call.

SYLVIA PLATH

Ariel


I don't know what's waiting for us when we die--something better, something worse. I only know I'm not ready to find out yet.

CHARLES DE LINT

The Onion Girl


Most of us were not afraid of death, only of the act of dying; and there were times when we overcame even this fear. At such moments we were free--men without shadows, dismissed from the ranks of the mortal; it was the most complete experience of freedom that can be granted a man.

ARTHUR KOESTLER

Dialogue with 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


Oh the grave!--the grave!--It buries every error--covers every defect--extinguishes every resentment! From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections. Who can look down upon the grave even of an enemy, and not feel a compunctious throb, that he should ever have warred with the poor handful of earth that lies mouldering before him!

WASHINGTON IRVING

"Rural Funerals", The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon


The Fear of Death often proves Mortal.

JOSEPH ADDISON

The Spectator, Mar. 29, 1711


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


We live as we die, and die as we live.

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"


Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Heartbreak House


When Death puts out our Flame, the Snuff will tell,
If we were Wax, or Tallow by the smell.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Poor Richard's Almanack, 1739


Day by day Time rolls the scroll of Life,
Yet man heeds not in worldly strife
The vanished years, till Death demands his claim--
The mound-lines of the clay that mark his name.

HARRIET MAXWELL CONVERSE

"Day by Day"


Death fixes forever the relation existing between the departed spirit and the survivors upon earth.

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

journal, Jul. 24, 1831


I ... shall die, I do suppose, with a full consciousness of my being and with a great fear in my eyes. And though many die decrepit and senile, that is not the normal death of men, for men have in them something of a self-creative power, which pushes them on to the further realization of themselves, right up to the edge of their doom.

HILAIRE BELLOC

On Nothing & Kindred Subjects


O Death, the Consecrator!
Nothing so sanctifies a name
As to be written--Dead.
Nothing so wins a life from blame,
So covers it from wrath and shame,
As doth the burial-bed.

CAROLINE SPENCER

"Death the Consecrator"


Only through the death experience could man fully understand his life experience. Only through the realization that his days on earth were finite could he grasp the importance of living those days with honor, integrity, and service to his fellow man.

DAN BROWN

The Lost Symbol


It is not desirable that we should live as in the constant atmosphere and presence of death; that would unfit us for life; but it is well for us, now and then, to talk with death as friend talketh with friend, and to bathe in the strange seas, and to anticipate the experiences of that land to which it will lead us. These forethinkings are meant, not to make us discontented with life, but to bring us back with more strength, and a nobler purpose in living.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


Life and death are different sides of the same coin.

NEIL GAIMAN

American Gods


When you die it's the end of your life.

SAM SHEPARD

Tongues