quotations about death
Every twinge of sensation, even of agony, was a negation of death.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
"A Witch Shall Be Born", Weird Tales, 1934
Death is tolerable only when it leads again to life.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Collected Poems
Death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
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
There's really nothing quite like someone's wanting you dead to make you want to go on living.
ROGER ZELAZNY
This Immortal
Scientists have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is life after death -- though they say it's virtually impossible to get decent Chinese food.
DAVID LETTERMAN
Late Show with David Letterman, October 13, 2014
Oh, sure, I've come close to dying a few times, but usually I was having so much fun at the time that I barely noticed the danger.
BUZZ ALDRIN
No Dream Is Too High: Life Lessons From a Man Who Walked on the Moon
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
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
Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.
MARY SHELLEY
Frankenstein
Leap through the Mystery of death as the circus-rider leaps through the papered hoop ... find Life ambling along beneath us on the Other Side?
SIDNEY LANIER
Songs Against Death
Death--a stopping of impressions through the senses, and of the pulling of the cords of motion, and of the ways of thought, and of service to the flesh.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
Death lies dormant in each of us and will bloom in time.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Thomas
Death is the stone into which our oblivion hardens.
PABLO NERUDA
Evening LXXVIII
Death is a Dialogue between
The Spirit and the Dust.
EMILY DICKINSON
"Death is a Dialogue"
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
The dead body makes the living one obscene. It's why we close the eyes, too. The dead shouldn't have to look on the lewd aliveness of things.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.
ELLEN GILCHRIST
Good Housekeeping, May 2011
Graveyards remind us of the vanity of all human endeavour.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark