quotations about death
The cure for death is not being born.
K. J. PARKER
Evil for Evil
When death occurs, death as you know it, the universe embraces you and takes you to its heart.
ROSEMARY ALTEA
A Matter of Life and Death
To conquer death you only have to die.
ALANE FERGUSON
The Angel of Death
The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
God has created too few unmixed evils to warrant the belief that death is one of them. In all things else in nature, goodness so abounds that we are authorized to infer that it does not stop even at the grave. It is only that her footprints have become invisible.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Even if those who take their own lives feel they have no choice--indeed, they often tragically believe their family and friends will be better off without them--the death rarely appears inevitable to those left behind. Feelings of anger and guilt and abandonment invade them, as if love should or could have prevented what happened. Survivors relive, over and over, the last days and months, even years, before the suicide, seeing now the signs that were missed, which they believe they should have recognized.
SUSAN STERLING
"The Quilt People"
Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.
J. D. SALINGER
The Catcher in the Rye
O Death the Healer, scorn thou not, I pray,
To come to me; of cureless ills thou art
The one physician. Pain lays not its touch
Upon a corpse.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
For life be, after all, only a waitin' for somethin' else than what we're doin', and death be all that we can rightly depend on.
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
Mark, how the ready hands of Death prepare:
His bow is bent, and he hath notch'd his dart;
He aims, he levels at thy slumb'ring heart:
The wound is posting, O be wise, beware.
FRANCIS QUARLES
Emblems
Death is the last intimate thing we ever do.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Obsidian Butterfly
Whither canst thou carry us, O death, from the presence of that God, whose loving-kindness is better than life? When, with thy trident, thou shalt break the pitcher of this mortal frame; the deathless soul is not like water spilt upon the ground; for the pitcher being broken at the fountain, it runs to its original, and can be gathered up again.
WILLIAM MCEWEN
Select Essays
All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Death in the Afternoon
One day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death.
GLEN DUNCAN
I, Lucifer
Shun death, is my advice.
ROBERT BROWNING
"Arcades Ambo"
In each thing there is an insinuation of death. Stillness, silence, serenity are all apprenticeships.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
attributed, Only Mystery: Federico García Lorca's Poetry in Word and Image
No intellect is needed to see those figures who wait beyond the void of death -- every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, wrapped in authority older than the universe. They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions. Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them, the builders of the unimaginable, the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence.
GENE WOLFE
The Shadow of the Torturer
For soon, very soon do men forget
Their friends upon whom Death's seal is set.
ISAAC MCLELLAN
"The Last Night of the Year"
The day of death ... is one of the five mysteries, the key of which God holds in his own hands.
éDOUARD RENé DE LABOULAYE
Abdallah
Death! the deep, sublime and unsubdued fiat!
The licensed liberator of imprisoned souls!
The conqueror of conquerors! th' inexorable,
Unfathomed and unfathomable fate! Arch foe,
And dread antagonist of life! Its armed and fierce
Invader, horror, and dismay! whose naked sword,
In trembling balance hung, is over all its joys,
And banquets of delight, ready to pierce the heart
That with fond ardour beats! Oh! who can turn its point?
Or its swift aim arrest?
C. B. LANGSTON
"Death"