DEATH QUOTES XVIII

quotations about death

Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

letter to Cecil Spring-Rice, Mar. 12, 1900


That is the gods' work, spinning threads of death
through the lives of mortal men,
an all to make a song for those to come.

HOMER

The Odyssey


When a house has just lost its soul, a stricken silence falls over the sudden emptiness that no one will fill again. And all the noises that may be made later in that house will be like a scandalous din, ugly echoes from one room to another, from one corridor to another, sharp and discordant as if the walls are no longer able to absorb any music once the source of harmony has been taken away. But this strange detail about the power of death can only be picked up by ears that are very attentive to the smallest murmurs of life. Rational people go through these empty spaces with the serenity of a lawyer, and their indulgent smiles categorise you if you decide to point out in their presence that there is something lacking in the atmosphere.

PIERRE MAGNAN

The Messengers of Death


Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.

GRAHAM GREENE

The Honorary Consul


Men believe death's elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny.

CORMAC MCCARTHY

The Crossing


It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

Smiley's People


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


So when the friends we love the best lie in their churchyard bed, we must not cry too bitterly over the happy dead; because, for our dear Saviour's sake, our sins are all forgiven; and Christians only fall asleep to wake again in Heaven.

CECIL FRANCES ALEXANDER

"Child's Funeral"


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"


There's really nothing quite like someone's wanting you dead to make you want to go on living.

ROGER ZELAZNY

This Immortal


Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force.

YODA

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith


Dying makes what is left of living seem precious. The dying, and those about to die, feel that these last moments must be made beautiful. The cannot be permitted to include the bitterness and the enmities of the living that seem so inexhaustible. So often we hear people who, in dying, resign the old enmities and ask and grant forgiveness. Through such forgiveness they help to make dying beautiful. And, incidentally, they offer a lesson to those who go on living the apparently inexhaustibel life.

JOHN DANIEL BARRY

"The Dead", Reactions and Other Essays


To live in hearts we leave behind
Is not to die.

THOMAS CAMPBELL

Hallowed Ground


Death is the stone into which our oblivion hardens.

PABLO NERUDA

Evening LXXVIII


A man dies not for the many wounds that pierce his
breast, unless it be that life's end keep pace with
death, nor by sitting on his hearth at home doth he the
more escape his appointed doom.

AESCHYLUS

fragment


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


Who knows but life be that which men call death,
And death what men call life?

EURIPIDES

Phrixus [fragment]


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


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


Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily united by a mysterious force called the life-principle. To the materialist the only difference between a living and a dead body is, that in the one case that force is active, in the other latent. When it is extinct or entirely latent, the molecules obey a superior attraction, which draws them asunder and scatters them through space. This dispersion must be death, if it is possible to conceive such a thing as death where the very molecules of the dead body manifest an intense vital energy.

HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY

Isis Unveiled