DEATH QUOTES XXV

quotations about death

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


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

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Heartbreak House


Death is just--to the just.

EDWARD COUNSEL

Maxims


Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides


No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Year of the Flood


The fear of death has been raised too much and set up on high, especially by preachers, like the brazen serpent in the wilderness over the heads of the Israelites; but not with so good excuse as that symbol had, for this fear has not been curative, I think, nor made into pleasant or graceful shape, but rather a horrid spectacle, to affright people. For that men can be frightened into piety has been one of the legacies of religion which barbarous ages have bequeathed us plentifully.

JAMES VILA BLAKE

Essays


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


Death is the dropping of the flower, that the fruit may swell.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


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


He steps upon death that stirs a foot.

THOMAS DEKKER

Blurt


It is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realise the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.

HERMAN MELVILLE

Moby Dick


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"


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


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


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


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 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


Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored.

HERMAN MELVILLE

Moby Dick


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"


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