quotations about death
When I think of the joy awaiting,
Beyond the bier and the shroud,
Death seems but a transient shadow,
A passing Summer cloud.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
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"Summer Clouds"
The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Premature Burial"
To die for others is the highest purpose a person may achieve.
CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN & NANCY HOLDER
Ghost Roads
Death is the liberator of him whom freedom cannot release, the physician of him whom medicine cannot cure, and the comforter of him whom time cannot console.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern--why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners
Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a strange feeling when a day of our life comes and we say, "Tomorrow, success or failure won't matter much: and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Vanity Fair
Ah! hear the dirge that all mankind must learn:
Place not on earth thy trust,
For dust thou art, to dust shalt thou return,
Dust unto dust.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"Fame"
Death is everywhere
The more I look
The more I see
The more I feel
A sense of urgency
Tonight
DEPECHE MODE
"Fly on the Windscreen"
When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
We're all embers from the same fire. Our ember winks out, we're ashes, we go back to the fire.
WILLIAM SHATNER
Esquire Magazine, May 2012
Could we draw back the covering of the tomb; could we see, what those are now, who once were mortals, oh! how would it surprise and grieve us! Surprise us, to behold the prodigious transformation that has taken place on every individual; grieve us, to observe the dishonor done to our nature in general, within these subterraneous lodgments!
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Death, lonely death,
Beneath the withered leaves.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
Blood Wedding
Death has this much to be said for it:
You don't have to get out of bed for it.
KINGSLEY AMIS
"Delivery Guaranteed", Collected Poems
They say death comes like a thief in the night, where is he? I'll hug his neck.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Suttree
Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret to life is to "die before you die"--and find that there is no death.
ECKHART TOLLE
The Power of Now
Death or glory, death or glory
March forever in the sound and fury
MOTORHEAD
"Death or Glory"
From too much love of living
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
"The Garden of Proserpine"
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
Why is a door-knob deader than anything else?
D. H. LAWRENCE
Sons and Lovers
There is a strange sense of uplifting--a kind of new-found feeling of benediction--that arises in the hearts of those who lay themselves open to learn the lessons that death will teach. How many have borne witness to this, to a fulness and richness which has entered their life after the departure (it almost seems because of the departure) of those they love!
ARTHUR FOLEY WINNINGTON-INGRAM
"The Silence of the Grave", Thoughts on Love and Death