quotations about death
One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
JAMES JOYCE
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"The Dead", Dubliners
Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.
J. D. SALINGER
The Catcher in the Rye
No intellect is needed to see those figures who wait beyond the void of death -- every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, wrapped in authority older than the universe. They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions. Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them, the builders of the unimaginable, the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence.
GENE WOLFE
The Shadow of the Torturer
The day of death ... is one of the five mysteries, the key of which God holds in his own hands.
éDOUARD RENé DE LABOULAYE
Abdallah
A dead man's shroud has no pockets.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
Death! the deep, sublime and unsubdued fiat!
The licensed liberator of imprisoned souls!
The conqueror of conquerors! th' inexorable,
Unfathomed and unfathomable fate! Arch foe,
And dread antagonist of life! Its armed and fierce
Invader, horror, and dismay! whose naked sword,
In trembling balance hung, is over all its joys,
And banquets of delight, ready to pierce the heart
That with fond ardour beats! Oh! who can turn its point?
Or its swift aim arrest?
C. B. LANGSTON
"Death"
Each heart has its graveyard, each household its dead,
And knells ring around us wherever we tread,
And the feet that awhile made our pathway so bright
Pass on to a land that is out of our sight.
MARY T. LATHRAP
"Unfinished Lines"
Death walks behind you.
ATOMIC ROOSTER
"Death Walks Behind You"
Death is the end of those who have done nothing to cause their names to live after them.
XENOPHON
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.
WOODY ALLEN
Death: A Comedy in One Act
There are some dead who are more alive than the living.
ROMAIN ROLLAND
Jean-Christophe
Face your faith
Remove all the lace
You love me to death
But death my love you more
HOOVERPHONIC
"You Love Me to Death", No More Sweet Music
Death is the only sovereign whom no partiality can warp, and no price corrupt.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Always be thou prepared, and so live that death may never find thee unprepared.
THOMAS A. KEMPIS
The Imitation of Christ
Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
Could the best and kindest of us who depart from the earth have an opportunity of revisiting it, I suppose he or she (assuming that any Vanity Fair feelings subsist in the sphere whither we are bound) would have a pang of mortification at finding how soon our survivors were consoled.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Vanity Fair
Death fosters life that life may suckle death.
SRI AUROBINDO
Vasavadutta
Into the chilly, artificial air, death slipped and snuck--the god of all thieves.
J. D. ROBB
Salvation in Death
Death is a child of stone.
EVELYN SCOTT
"Immortality"