quotations about death
Death is a Dialogue between
The Spirit and the Dust.
EMILY DICKINSON
"Death is a Dialogue"
Death hath this also; that it openeth the gate to good fame, and extinguisheth envy.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
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
Death augments distance and dulls the memory. Death reconciles.
LEONID ANDREYEV
He Who Gets Slapped
Certain, when I was born, so long ago,
Death drew the tap of life and let it flow;
And ever since the tap has done its task,
And now there's little but an empty cask.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
The Canterbury Tales
Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Philosophical Essays
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Fight Club
Life is a waste of woes,
And Death a river deep,
That ever onward flows,
Troubled, yet asleep.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
"Lines To --", Imogen and Other Poems
I cannot tell you if the dead,
Who loved us fondly when on earth,
Walk by our side, sit at our hearth,
By ties of old affection led....
But this I know--in many dreams
They come to us from realms afar,
And leave the golden gates ajar
Through which immortal glory streams.
ALBERT LAIGHTON
"The Dead"
This flesh and the other will be consumed,
the flower will doubtless perish without residue,
when death--sterile dawn, desiccated dust--
comes one day into the girdle of the haughty island,
and you, statue, daughter of man, will remain
gazing with the empty eyes that rose
up through one and another hand of the absent immortals.
PABLO NERUDA
"The Builders of Statues"
There are too many poems about death. Death, churchyards, wormy cadavers. Death is really a small part of life, and it's not the part that you want to concentrate on, because life is life and it's full of untold particulars.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Now that you are dead,
You are splendid.
Photographs of people who have just died
Are worth twenty percent more,
And for suicides
There is an additional five percent.
Now that you are dead
You are much in demand.
KOBO ABE
The Ghost is Here
If death turned out to be a lack of being rather than a lack of consciousness, well, then, that sucked.
LINDA HOWARD
Death Angel
Graveyards remind us of the vanity of all human endeavour.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark
Far happier he, who, young and full of pride
And radiant with the glory of the sun,
Leaves earth before his singing time is done.
All wounds of Time the graveyard flowers hide,
His beauty lives, as fresh as when he died.
JOYCE KILMER
"The Clouded Sun"
Fair Death, kind Death, it was a gracious deed
To take that weary vagrant to thy breast.
Love, Song and Wine had he, and but one need--Rest.
JOYCE KILMER
"A Dead Poet"
Death was an accident like any other, and, moreover, one as certain as hunger or as sleep.
HILAIRE BELLOC
On Nothing & Kindred Subjects
Death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Because I could not stop for Death --
He kindly stopped for me --
The Carriage held but just Ourselves --
And Immortality.
EMILY DICKINSON
"Because I could not stop for Death"
To take life was to understand your own death--that the Hour of the Huntsman also came for you.
S. M. STIRLING
The Sunrise Lands