quotations about death
Death is a process, not an event, despite medical and legal imperatives to give it a date and hour.
JAMES W. GREEN
Beyond the Good Death
Death ... was the only kept promise out of all life's false starts and switchbacks, all there was at the end of the dusty road.
WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night
Always be thou prepared, and so live that death may never find thee unprepared.
THOMAS A. KEMPIS
The Imitation of Christ
In every cradle decked with rosy wreath
Lurk germs of death.
VICTOR HUGO
"Hope"
When a man has the rope about his neck, you don't ask him about his health!
LEONID ANDREYEV
He Who Gets Slapped
I dream of the face of Death. It's an ever-changing face, worn by many at the wrong time, worn by all eventually.
CODY MCFADYEN
The Face of Death
The thought of death deceives us; for it causes us to neglect to live.
LUC DE CLAPIERS
MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES, Reflections and Maxims
If thou hadst a good conscience thou wouldst not greatly fear death.
THOMAS A. KEMPIS
The Imitation of Christ
Being dead will be no different from being unborn -- I shall be just as I was in the time of William the Conqueror or the dinosaurs or the trilobites. There is nothing to fear in that.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God Delusion
Death strips all men of dignity.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
Death is real. Death changes things. Everything else is filler, merely a message from our sponsor.
MICHAEL MARSHALL
The Upright Man
Better to live or die, once and for all, than die by inches.
HOMER
The Iliad
That's the happiest moment. When it's all done. When we stop. When we can stop.
EDWARD ALBEE
Three Tall Women
Health care is, at its core, about improving the odds of life in its struggle against death. Of extending that game which we will all lose, each and every one of us unto eternity, extending it another year or month or second.
KEITH OLBERMANN
Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Oct. 7, 2009
Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The House of the Seven Gables
Flirting with death is the spice of life.
MARGARET LOCK
Twice Dead
In a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown. This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.
IRVIN D. YALOM
interview, Salon Magazine
How dreadful is the prospect of death, at the remotest distance! how the smallest apprehensions of it can pall the most gay, airy, and brisk spirits! even I, who thought I could have been merry in sight of my coffin, and drink a health with the sexton in my own grave, now tremble at the least envoy of the king of terrors. To see but the shaking of my glass makes me turn pale ... all the jollity of my humour and conversation is turned on a sudden into chagrin and melancholy, black as despair, and gloomy as the grave.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Man dies, his white bones are dumb without a word
When the green pines feel the coming of spring.
Looking back, I sigh; looking before, I sigh again.
What is there to prize in the life's vaporous glory?
LI BAI
"The Old Dust"
In accepting death as inevitable, we don't label it as a good thing or a bad thing. As one of my teachers once said to me, "Death happens. It is just death, and how we meet it is up to us."
JOAN HALIFAX
Being with Dying