quotations about death
Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
Every deceased friend is a magnet drawing us into another world.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
There was that feeling one gets in a ride to a cemetery trailing a body in a coffin -- an impatience with the dead, a longing to be back home where one could get on with the illusion that not death but daily life is the permanent condition.
E. L. DOCTOROW
Homer & Langley
Death happens but once, yet we feel it every moment of our lives; it is worse to dread it than to suffer it.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Mankind", Les Caractères
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
To die for others is the highest purpose a person may achieve.
CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN & NANCY HOLDER
Ghost Roads
There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives ... their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them.... Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
That's life. Still the best alternative to death.
CODY MCFADYEN
The Face of Death
Death joins us to the great majority.
EDWARD YOUNG
The Revenge
Death, vicious death,
Leave a green branch for love.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
Blood Wedding
Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?
PLATO
Phaedo
I don't want to die. Damn death. Long live life!
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
To death we owe our life; the passing of one generation opens a way for another.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Death is the veil which those who live call life;
They sleep, and it is lifted.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Prometheus Unbound
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
Feeling funny in my mind, Lord
I believe I'm fixing to die
Well, I don't mind dying
But I hate to leave my children crying
Well, I look over yonder to that burying ground
Look over yonder to that burying ground
Sure seems lonesome, Lord, when the sun goes down
BOB DYLAN
"Fixin' To Die"
The fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
Maxims
Death and the sun can't be looked at steadily.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Moral Maxims
As the woodpecker taps in a spiral quest
From the root to the top of the tree,
Then flies to another tree,
So have I bored into life to find what lay therein,
And now it is time to die,
And I will fly to another tree.
SIDNEY LANIER
Songs Against Death
In literature and in art, alike, this gloomy fashion of regarding Death has been characteristic of Christianity. Death has been painted as a skeleton grasping a scythe, a grinning skull, a threatening figure with terrible face and uplifted dart, a bony scarecrow shaking an hour-glass--all that could alarm and repel has been gathered round this rightly-named King of Terrors.
ANNIE WOOD BESANT
Death--and After