quotations about death
O the anguish of that thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the light answers we returned to their plaints or their pleadings, for the little reverence we showed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God had given us to know!
GEORGE ELIOT
Amos Barton
I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Selected Writings
Death is the loss of everything all at once.
JULIE SALAMON
Hospital
Death has no need to be cruel, taking people's lives is more than enough.
JOSé SARAMAGO
Death with Interruptions
Better to live or die, once and for all, than die by inches.
HOMER
The Iliad
Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
Death, lonely death,
Beneath the withered leaves.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
Blood Wedding
Any guy afraid to die was a guy who was afraid to live.
JOANN ROSS
No Safe Place
Whatever it is that occurs at death, I believe it deserves to be called a miracle. The miracle, ironically, is that we don't die. The cessation of the body is an illusion, and like a magician sweeping aside a curtain, the soul reveals what lies beyond.
DEEPAK CHOPRA
Life After Death
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
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
O, the one happiness, when, out of breath,
Our feet slip, and we stumble upon death!
ARTHUR SYMONS
"The Beggars"
I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome, Pandora's box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
IRVIN D. YALOM
interview, Wise Counsel
How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Queen Mab
Death! great proprietor of all! 'tis thine
To tread out empire, and to quench the stars.
EDWARD YOUNG
Night Thoughts
Death will come and it will have your eyes.
CESARE PAVESE
Death Will Come and It Will Have Your Eyes
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
Think what you like. There are people who die by remaining alive and others who gain life by dying.
EIJI YOSHIKAWA
Musashi
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"
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