quotations about death
There is death and love
And awful things
The sunlight takes away
All that it brings
BLACK MOTH SUPER RAINBOW
"Seeeds", Start a People
Death is not a checkmate ... it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
In the whole course of our observation there is not so misrepresented and abused a personage as death. Some have styled him the king of terrors, when he might with less impropriety have been termed the terror of kings; others have dreaded him as an evil without end, although it was in their own power to make him the end of all evil. He has been vilified as the cause of anguish, consternation, and despair; but these, alas, are things that appertain not unto death, but unto life. How strange a paradox is this, we love the distemper and loathe the remedy, preferring the fiercest buffetings of the hurricane to the tranquility of the harbour.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
To be human is inevitably, to hate oneself sometimes, to hunger for the perfect stability and in a way the perfect justice -- or at least perfect punishment for our numerous imperfections -- called death.
JOHN GARDNER
In the Suicide Mountains
We no longer have death in our culture: the dead become abstractions, statistics, companies will take charge of the relationship that we can have to our own dead. In 2, 3 days the cremation is done, we can forget, the question is settled and the dead is only a memory. This is problematic, because we risk falling first into what Freud calls melancholy, that is to say the impossibility of mourning because we no longer have an object to mourn.
BRUCE BEGOUT
Postap Mag, July 31, 2017
What happens when the thought of death occurs, this very simple and basic thought about death, that I will most certainly die, and that you will most certainly die, is that all these other questions are stripped down to basic, that the very basis for knowledge and existence is shivering, whether one is trembling in tears for another or oneself shivering in anxiety and awe. Hence, at the end we return to the place where we began, at the graveside.
MARIUS TIMMANN MJAALAND
Autopsia
The distance that the dead have gone
Does not at first appear;
Their coming back seems possible
For many an ardent year.
And then, that we have followed them
We more than half suspect,
So intimate have we become
With their dear retrospect.
EMILY DICKINSON
"The distance that the dead have gone"
There's nothing like a deadline to get the old blood flowing. All the juices, really. It doesn't follow, if you think about it. You'd assume certain things ... certain activities ... would become unimportant. Certain betrayals would become unbearable. But they don't really. In fact, quite the opposite. Everything takes on a new light. The impossible becomes possible, desirable even. It's quite remarkable.
WALTER WYKES
The Salmon Tribunal
In death itself there can be nothing terrible, for the act of death annihilates sensation; but there are many roads to death, and some of them justly formidable, even to the bravest.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Death aims only once, but never misses.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.
E. L. DOCTOROW
Homer & Langley
A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners
You can only go into mourning by transfiguration or disfigurement. There is no rational form of the absorption of death.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
We go to the grave of a friend, saying, "A man is dead;" but angels throng about him, saying, "A man is born."
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Death is God's way of telling you not to be such a wise guy.
GRENVILLE KLEISER
Dictionary of Proverbs
Look out, Death: I am coming.
Art thou not glad? what talks we'll have.
What memories of old battles.
Come, bring the bowl, Death; I am thirsty.
SIDNEY LANIER
Songs Against Death
Only where there are graves are there resurrections.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture,
A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.
JOHN ASHBERY
"A Last World"
A couch of thorns, or an embroidered bed,
Are matters of indifference to the dead.
THEOGNIS OF MEGARA
"Sumptuous Obsequies"
Where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Staring at the Sun