DEATH QUOTES XXVI

quotations about death

Death hides within every religion. And at any time it can flash forth--not with healing in its wings but with poison, with that which wounds.

PHILIP K. DICK

Valis


The death anxiety of many people is fueled ... by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential. Many people are in despair because their dreams didn't come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true. A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.

IRVIN D. YALOM

Staring at the Sun


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


Death is the continuing of life ... the next part of our life. It's like walking through a door, you know? Walking through the door marked "Death": It's the beginning of a new part of our journey.

ROSEMARY ALTEA

interview, Larry King Live, Mar. 15, 2000


Life is what you celebrate. All of it. Even its end.

JOANNE HARRIS

Chocolat


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


Day by day Time rolls the scroll of Life,
Yet man heeds not in worldly strife
The vanished years, till Death demands his claim--
The mound-lines of the clay that mark his name.

HARRIET MAXWELL CONVERSE

"Day by Day"


When I take a full view and circle of myself, without this reasonable moderator, and equal piece of justice, Death, I concieve myself the most miserable person extant; were there not another life that I hope for, all the vanities of this world should not entreat a moments breath from me.

WELLINS CALCOTT

Thoughts Moral and Divine


It used to be I thought of death as a man something like Grandfather a friend of his a kind of private and particular friend like we used to think of Grandfather's desk not to touch it not even to talk loud in the room where it was.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

The Sound and the Fury


When we pray for death we really desire a fuller life.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought


Death is the monster we all fear, yet with each day, we walk toward it, and can't help doing so; we can't help but walk toward the one thing we're most trying to avoid.

BILL MAHER

"On Being Over 50", HuffPost, Oct. 3, 2011


It has always seemed to me that the only painless death must be that which takes the intelligence by violent surprise and from the rear so to speak since if death be anything at all beyond a brief and peculiar emotional state of the bereaved it must be a brief and likewise peculiar state of the subject as well and if aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewilderment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

Absalom


Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.

CHARLES FROHMAN

his last words before going down on the Lusitania


Life was to these a dream fulfilled,
And death a starry night.

HERMAN MELVILLE

"Chattanooga"


Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose.

CESARE PAVESE

This Business of Living, Jun. 7, 1938


As men, we are all equal in the presence of death.

PUBLILIUS SYRUS

Maxims


It is not death to have the body called back to the earth, and dissolved into its kindred elements, and mouldered to dust, and, it may be, turn to daisies, in the grave. But it is death to have the soul paralyzed, its inner life quenched, its faculties dissipated; that is death.

E. H. CHAPIN

Living Words


Dying is an art.
Like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I have a call.

SYLVIA PLATH

Ariel


When you die it's the end of your life.

SAM SHEPARD

Tongues


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