quotations about death
Death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
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Other Voices
Look on the grave where thou must sleep
Thy last, and strongest foe;
It is endurance not to weep,
If that repose seem woe.
EMILY BRONTE
Self-Interrogation
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
Death makes equal the high and low.
JOHN HEYWOOD
Be Merry Friends
Death is a meeting place of sea and sea.
CONRAD AIKEN
The House of Dust
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
The gate of death is never at rest.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Death's a fable. Did not Heaven inspire your equal Elements with living Fire blown from the Spring of Life? Is not that breath Immortal? Come; ye are as free from death as He that made ye: Can the flames expire which he kindled?
FRANCIS QUARLES
Emblems
If we were sensible we would seek death--the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Nietzscheism and Realism"
Remember the coffin where men
All must to dust be returning.
HENRI CAZALIS
"Always"
All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.
KURT VONNEGUT
The Sirens of Titan
Death is progress, advance, disimprisonment.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
Death is the continuing of life ... the next part of our life. It's like walking through a door, you know? Walking through the door marked "Death": It's the beginning of a new part of our journey.
ROSEMARY ALTEA
interview, Larry King Live, Mar. 15, 2000
Man dies. Come from darkness, into darkness he returns, and is reabsorbed, without a trace left, into the illimitable void of time.
LEONID ANDREYEV
The Life of Man
Odd thing about death ... it reaffirms life.
RITA MAE BROWN
Hounded to Death
Nowadays, we have technology that's improved so that we can bring people back to life. In fact, there are drugs being developed right now -- who knows if they'll ever make it to the market -- that may actually slow down the process of brain-cell injury and death. Imagine, you fast-forward to ten years down the line and you've given a patient whose heart has just stopped this amazing drug, and actually what it does is it slows everything down so that the things that would've happened over an hour, now happen over two days. As medicine progresses, we will end up with lots and lots of ethical questions.
SAM PARNIA
interview, Time, Sep. 18, 2008
I don't necessarily view death as something negative. Death gives meaning to life. Living in fear of death is living in denial. Actually, it's not really living at all, because there is no life without death. It's two sides of the one. You can't pick up one side and say, "I'm just going to use the 'heads' side." No. It doesn't work like that. You have to pick up both sides because nothing is promised to anyone in this world besides death.
50 CENT
From Pieces to Weight
People living deeply have no fear of death.
ANAIS NIN
The Diary of Anais Nin
There is a time in a patient's life when the pain ceases to be, when the mind slips off into a dreamless state, when the need for food becomes minimal and the awareness of the environment all but disappears into darkness. This is the time when the relatives walk up and down the hospital hallways, tormented by the waiting, not knowing if they should leave to attend the living or stay to be around for the moment of death. This is the time when it is too late for words, and yet the time when the relatives cry the loudest for help--with out without words.... It is the hardest time for the next of kin as he either wishes to take off, to get it over with; or he desperately clings to something that he is in the process of losing forever.
ELISABETH KUBLER-ROSS
On Death and Dying
It seemeth such a little way to me
Across to that strange country -- the Beyond;
And yet, not strange, for it has grown to be
The home of those of whom I am so fond,
They make it seem familiar and most dear,
As journeying friends bring distant regions near.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Beyond"