quotations about death
Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily united by a mysterious force called the life-principle. To the materialist the only difference between a living and a dead body is, that in the one case that force is active, in the other latent. When it is extinct or entirely latent, the molecules obey a superior attraction, which draws them asunder and scatters them through space. This dispersion must be death, if it is possible to conceive such a thing as death where the very molecules of the dead body manifest an intense vital energy.
HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY
Isis Unveiled
Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Death was an accident like any other, and, moreover, one as certain as hunger or as sleep.
HILAIRE BELLOC
On Nothing & Kindred Subjects
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
As a dark Shadow
Beckons his prey
Into the unknown
By a soft whisper
In the soul
CINDY CHENEY
"Death"
Death is only a small interruption.
ANITA BROOKNER
Latecomers
The gate of death is never at rest.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Death, with funereal shades in vain surrounds me,
My reason through his darkness seeth light:
'Tis the last step which brings me close to Thee:
'Tis the veil falling, 'twixt Thy face and mine.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"Prayer", Poetical Meditations
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
Deach becomes some men. Others wear it shamefully; others still, defiantly. Their protest choking, suffocating.
CHRIS ABANI
Kalakuta Republic
He that abideth when he might depart
From this world hath no wisdom in his heart.
FERDOWSI
Shahnameh
In death too, there is always something of the rich cat that lets the mouse run before devouring it.
ERNST BLOCH
Traces
There must be some unwritten law that says about fifty people have to move into your house when somebody dies. If it weren’t for the smell of death clinging to the walls, you might think it was your family’s turn to host the month neighborhood potluck supper.
ADAM RAPP
Under the Wolf
Whether or not enlightenment is possible at the moment of death, the practices that prepare one for this possibility also bring one closer to the bone of life.
JOAN HALIFAX
Being with Dying
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
Death is the Christian's vacation morning. School is out. It is time to go home.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
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
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
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
A man's life breath cannot come back again--
no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
once it slips through a man's clenched teeth.
HOMER
The Iliad