quotations about death
Death is no more than a turning of us over from Time to Eternity.
WILLIAM PENN
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Some Fruits of Solitude
O the anguish of that thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the light answers we returned to their plaints or their pleadings, for the little reverence we showed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God had given us to know!
GEORGE ELIOT
Amos Barton
Always the idea of unbroken quiet broods around the grave. It is a port where the storms of life never beat, and the forms that have been tossed on its chafing waves lie quiet forevermore. There the child nestles peacefully as ever it lay in its mother's arms, and the workman's hands lie still by his side, and the thinker's brain is pillowed in silent mystery, and the poor girl's broken heart is steeped in a balm that extracts its secret woe, and is in the keeping of a charity that covers all blame.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Ah! hear the dirge that all mankind must learn:
Place not on earth thy trust,
For dust thou art, to dust shalt thou return,
Dust unto dust.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"Fame"
When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
To die for others is the highest purpose a person may achieve.
CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN & NANCY HOLDER
Ghost Roads
Death, lonely death,
Beneath the withered leaves.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
Blood Wedding
Death is the liberator of him whom freedom cannot release, the physician of him whom medicine cannot cure, and the comforter of him whom time cannot console.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome, Pandora's box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
IRVIN D. YALOM
interview, Wise Counsel
From too much love of living
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
"The Garden of Proserpine"
Could we draw back the covering of the tomb; could we see, what those are now, who once were mortals, oh! how would it surprise and grieve us! Surprise us, to behold the prodigious transformation that has taken place on every individual; grieve us, to observe the dishonor done to our nature in general, within these subterraneous lodgments!
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
We're all embers from the same fire. Our ember winks out, we're ashes, we go back to the fire.
WILLIAM SHATNER
Esquire Magazine, May 2012
There was that feeling one gets in a ride to a cemetery trailing a body in a coffin -- an impatience with the dead, a longing to be back home where one could get on with the illusion that not death but daily life is the permanent condition.
E. L. DOCTOROW
Homer & Langley
It was mad, but I just couldn't shake it. I was Death, Destroyer of Life, and all I wanted was a cottage by a stream, a pot of hot soup on the stove, and someone to love me.
GEORGE PENDLE
Death: A Life
Death is everywhere
The more I look
The more I see
The more I feel
A sense of urgency
Tonight
DEPECHE MODE
"Fly on the Windscreen"
Death has this much to be said for it:
You don't have to get out of bed for it.
KINGSLEY AMIS
"Delivery Guaranteed", Collected Poems
There is a strange sense of uplifting--a kind of new-found feeling of benediction--that arises in the hearts of those who lay themselves open to learn the lessons that death will teach. How many have borne witness to this, to a fulness and richness which has entered their life after the departure (it almost seems because of the departure) of those they love!
ARTHUR FOLEY WINNINGTON-INGRAM
"The Silence of the Grave", Thoughts on Love and Death
Why is a door-knob deader than anything else?
D. H. LAWRENCE
Sons and Lovers
That's life. Still the best alternative to death.
CODY MCFADYEN
The Face of Death
Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret to life is to "die before you die"--and find that there is no death.
ECKHART TOLLE
The Power of Now