quotations about death
He steps upon death that stirs a foot.
THOMAS DEKKER
Blurt
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
If souls survive death for all eternity, how can the heavens hold them all? Or for that matter, how can the earth hold all the bodies that have been buried in it? The answers are the same. Just as on earth, with the passage of time, decaying and transmogrified corpses make way for the newly dead, so souls released into the heavens, after a season of flight, begin to break up, burn, and be absorbed back into the womb of reason, leaving room for souls just beginning to fly. This is the answer for those who believe that souls survive death.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave--thank God for the quiet grave--O! I can feel the cold earth upon me--the daisies growing over me--O for this quiet--it will be my first.
JOHN KEATS
attributed, letter from Joseph Severn to John Taylor, Mar. 6, 1821
There is no Death! What seems so is transition;
This life of mortal breath
Is but a suburb of the life elysian,
Whose portal we call Death.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"Resignation"
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
Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Heartbreak House
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
The seeds of Death are sown in us when we begin to live, and grow up till, like rampant weeds, they choak the tender flower of life.
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
Clarissa
Numbing rumble, countless medicine,
Depleted from years of abuse
Death rattle shaking
And there's no faking, undertaking
PANTERA
"Death Rattle", Reinventing the Steel
I don't necessarily view death as something negative. Death gives meaning to life. Living in fear of death is living in denial. Actually, it's not really living at all, because there is no life without death. It's two sides of the one. You can't pick up one side and say, "I'm just going to use the 'heads' side." No. It doesn't work like that. You have to pick up both sides because nothing is promised to anyone in this world besides death.
50 CENT
From Pieces to Weight
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
Death is the dropping of the flower, that the fruit may swell.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Birds of Hell awaiting
With the wings on fire
Insane old Phoenix, baby
It's your death desire
The birds of Hell awaiting
With the wings on fire
MARILYN MANSON
"Birds of Hell Awaiting", The Pale Emperor
Death is like an old whore in a bar--I'll buy her a drink but I won't go upstairs with her.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
To Have and Have Not
The road to death is a long march beset with all evils, and the heart fails little by little at each new terror, the bones rebel at each step, the mind sets up its own bitter resistance and to what end? The barriers sink one by one, and no covering of the eyes shuts out the landscape of disaster, nor the sight of crimes committed there.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
"Pale Horse, Pale Rider"
Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
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 tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
OSCAR WILDE
The Canterville Ghost
Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die. But, once realise what the true object is in life -- that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of noble minds' -- but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect Man -- and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!
LEWIS CARROLL
preface, Sylvie and Bruno
Weep strong men must,
Since all before us now is lifeless dust;
Majestic clay
Is all, good friends, death leaves to us today.
ELIZA ALLEN STARR
"Col. James A. Mulligan"