quotations about death
The living is a passing traveler;
The dead, a man come home.
LI BAI
"The Old Dust"
If death turned out to be a lack of being rather than a lack of consciousness, well, then, that sucked.
LINDA HOWARD
Death Angel
To live in hearts we leave behind
Is not to die.
THOMAS CAMPBELL
Hallowed Ground
Death is the Christian's vacation morning. School is out. It is time to go home.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Death is not an end, but a transition-crisis. All the forms of decay are but masks of regeneration--the secret alembics of vitality.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
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
Death was an accident like any other, and, moreover, one as certain as hunger or as sleep.
HILAIRE BELLOC
On Nothing & Kindred Subjects
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
Death is a meeting place of sea and sea.
CONRAD AIKEN
The House of Dust
Those who think about death, carrying with them their existing ideas and emotions, usually assume that they will have, during their last hours, ideas and emotions of like vividness ... but they do not fully recognize the implication that the feeling faculty, too, is almost gone. The imagine the state to be one in which they can have emotions such as they now have on contemplating the cessation of life. But at the last all the mental powers simultaneously ebb, as do the bodily powers, and with them goes the capacity for emotion in general. It is, indeed, possible that in its last stages consciousness is occupied by a not displeasurable sense of rest.
HERBERT SPENCER
Facts and Comments
Deach becomes some men. Others wear it shamefully; others still, defiantly. Their protest choking, suffocating.
CHRIS ABANI
Kalakuta Republic
Death is when the monsters get you.
STEPHEN KING
Salem's Lot
Death is progress, advance, disimprisonment.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
Graveyards remind us of the vanity of all human endeavour.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark
Death makes equal the high and low.
JOHN HEYWOOD
Be Merry Friends
Death is the fate no one can escape. The question, then, is, How does one die? A person can die like a hero or like a coward. The difference is that the hero can face death without fear, whereas the coward can't.
ALEXANDER LOWEN
Fear of Life
About the presence of death and dying I don't remember the society in the 1950s being so skittish as it has since become. People still died at home, among relatives and friends, often in the care of a family physician. Death was still to be seen sitting in the parlor, hanging in a butcher shop, sometimes lying in the street.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Momento Mori", Lapham's Quarterly: Death, fall 2013
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
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
It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
Smiley's People