quotations about death
Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
SYLVIA PLATH
The Bell Jar
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
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 the condition of higher and more fruitful life.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Death augments distance and dulls the memory. Death reconciles.
LEONID ANDREYEV
He Who Gets Slapped
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"
The living is a passing traveler;
The dead, a man come home.
LI BAI
"The Old Dust"
Deach becomes some men. Others wear it shamefully; others still, defiantly. Their protest choking, suffocating.
CHRIS ABANI
Kalakuta Republic
The dead can't come to us. We can only go to them.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
The dead body makes the living one obscene. It's why we close the eyes, too. The dead shouldn't have to look on the lewd aliveness of things.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
This flesh and the other will be consumed,
the flower will doubtless perish without residue,
when death--sterile dawn, desiccated dust--
comes one day into the girdle of the haughty island,
and you, statue, daughter of man, will remain
gazing with the empty eyes that rose
up through one and another hand of the absent immortals.
PABLO NERUDA
"The Builders of Statues"
All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.
KURT VONNEGUT
The Sirens of Titan
Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man's cottage door and at the palaces of kings.
HORACE
attributed, The Quotable Intellectual
Certain, when I was born, so long ago,
Death drew the tap of life and let it flow;
And ever since the tap has done its task,
And now there's little but an empty cask.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
The Canterbury Tales
Where life is there is death, reasons the vulture, and where there's death there's hope.
EDWARD ABBEY
One Life at a Time
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
The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.
WASHINGTON IRVING
"The Rural Funeral"
Because I could not stop for Death --
He kindly stopped for me --
The Carriage held but just Ourselves --
And Immortality.
EMILY DICKINSON
"Because I could not stop for Death"
Death is progress, advance, disimprisonment.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life; to regard it, with the understanding and the emotions, as the the inviolable condition of life.
THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain