quotations about death
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
Why is a door-knob deader than anything else?
D. H. LAWRENCE
Sons and Lovers
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
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
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
Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
For a single path leads to the house of Hades.
AESCHYLUS
fragment, Telephos
How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Queen Mab
The dead are too much with us.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Isle of the Dead
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"
The thorn of death falls from heaven, and its myriad forms leave us no room to move.
KOBO ABE
The Woman in the Dunes
While life could be evaded, death could not.
DEAN KOONTZ
Velocity
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
You cannot avoid mortality. But you can choose your way of meeting it. And that is the most that any man can hope for.
DAVID GERROLD
The Man Who Folded Himself
Death is the veil which those who live call life;
They sleep, and it is lifted.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Prometheus Unbound
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
"Summer Clouds"
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
Are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards the "seamy side" of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, and which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man's place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
"What I Believe"