DEATH QUOTES
quotations about death
Cowards die many times before their deaths
The valiant never taste of death but once.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Julius Caesar
Life is the jailer, Death the angel sent
To draw the unwilling bolts and set us free.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"The Death of a Friend's Child"
Death is not the end; there remains the litigation over the estate.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
A man dies ... only a few circles in the water prove that he was ever there. And even they quickly disappear. And when they're gone, he's forgotten, without a trace, as if he'd never even existed. And that's all.
WOLFGANG BORCHERT
The Outsider
It is the fear of death--24/7 in every shade of hospital white and doomsday black--that sells the pharmaceutical, political, financial, film, and food product promising to make good the wish to live forever.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Momento Mori", Lapham's Quarterly: Death, fall 2013
The great thing about the dead, they make space.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit is Rich
I hope to arrive at my death late, in love and a little drunk.
YURIZAN BELTRAN
Twitter post just months before she died of an apparent drug overdose, July 2017
The world's an inn, and death the journey's end.
JOHN DRYDEN
Palamon and Arcite
I know death is the fascinating snake under the leaves, sliding and sliding; I know the heart loves him too, can't turn away, can't break the spell. Everything wants to enter the slow thickness, aches to be peaceful finally and at any cost. Wants to be stone.
MARY OLIVER
"Members of the Tribe", Dream Work
To die will be an awfully big adventure.
J.M. BARRIE
Peter Pan
You only live twice. Once when you are born and once when you look death in the face.
IAN FLEMING
You Only Live Twice
Death is the end of the struggle to make things work, to keep them together, to show a consistency of plan and action, a directionality of will.
ERMANNO BENCIVENGA
The Discipline of Subjectivity
There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
EUGENE IONESCO
Rhinoceros
Dying is nothing. You have to know how to disappear.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
Better to flee from death than feel its grip.
HOMER
The Iliad
Death, in itself, is nothing; but we fear,
To be we know not what, we know not where.
JOHN DRYDEN
Aureng-Zebe
Fear not Death; for the sooner we die, the longer shall we be immortal.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanack, 1740
Why do we precious ointments shower,
Nobler wines why do we pour,
Beauteous flowers why do we spread,
Upon the monuments of the dead?
Nothing they but dust can show,
Or bones that hasten to be so.
ANACREON
Ode IV, Odes
Death will be a great relief. No more interviews.
KATHARINE HEPBURN
The Mammoth Book of Zingers
Dying is like getting audited by the IRS--something that only happens to other people ... until it happens to you.
JEROME P. CRABB
Death Quotes and Quibbles