quotations about death
Graves are for the living, not the dead. It gives us something to concentrate on instead of the fact that our loved one is rotting under the ground. The dead don't care about pretty flowers and carved marble statues.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Guilty Pleasures
When one existentially awakens from within, the relation of birth-and-death is not seen as a sequential change from the former to the latter. Rather, living as it is, is no more than dying, and at the same time there is no living separate from dying. This means that life itself is death and death itself is life. That is, we do not shift sequentially from birth to death, but undergo living-dying in each and every moment.
MASAO ABE
A Study of Dogen: His Philosophy and Religion
This flesh and the other will be consumed,
the flower will doubtless perish without residue,
when death--sterile dawn, desiccated dust--
comes one day into the girdle of the haughty island,
and you, statue, daughter of man, will remain
gazing with the empty eyes that rose
up through one and another hand of the absent immortals.
PABLO NERUDA
"The Builders of Statues"
If a man should wanton walk with crime ... he shall find in death no great deliverance.
AESCHYLUS
The Eumenides
Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.
CHARLES FROHMAN
his last words before going down on the Lusitania
I don't mean to imply that I'm afraid of Death. I'm just not ready to go out on a date with him.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Thomas
It is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realise the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
My spirit is too weak--mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
JOHN KEATS
"On Seeing the Elgin Marbles"
When do the dead die? When they are forgotten.
LAURA ESQUIVEL
The Law of Love
Oh the grave!--the grave!--It buries every error--covers every defect--extinguishes every resentment! From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections. Who can look down upon the grave even of an enemy, and not feel a compunctious throb, that he should ever have warred with the poor handful of earth that lies mouldering before him!
WASHINGTON IRVING
"Rural Funerals", The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon
People walk along the streets the day after our deaths just as they did before, and the crowd is not diminished. While we were living, the world seemed in a manner to exist only for us, for our delight and amusement, because it contributed to them. But our hearts cease to beat, and it goes on as usual, and thinks no more about us than it did in our lifetime.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners
Dying is strange and hard if it is not our death, but a death that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
The Book of Hours
He steps upon death that stirs a foot.
THOMAS DEKKER
Blurt
Life is a waste of woes,
And Death a river deep,
That ever onward flows,
Troubled, yet asleep.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
"Lines To --", Imogen and Other Poems
People living deeply have no fear of death.
ANAIS NIN
The Diary of Anais Nin
Most of us were not afraid of death, only of the act of dying; and there were times when we overcame even this fear. At such moments we were free--men without shadows, dismissed from the ranks of the mortal; it was the most complete experience of freedom that can be granted a man.
ARTHUR KOESTLER
Dialogue with Death
I don't know what's waiting for us when we die--something better, something worse. I only know I'm not ready to find out yet.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
We live as we die, and die as we live.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Death is just--to the just.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Heartbreak House