quotations about death
Death is not a self-evident phenomenon. The margins between life and death are socially and culturally constructed, mobile, multiple, and open to dispute and reformulation.
MARGARET LOCK
Twice Dead
To die for others is the highest purpose a person may achieve.
CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN & NANCY HOLDER
Ghost Roads
To death we owe our life; the passing of one generation opens a way for another.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death--who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace 'We must all die' transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness 'I must die--and soon,' then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
Every deceased friend is a magnet drawing us into another world.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Death stands above me, whispering low
I know not what into my ear:
Of his strange language all I know
Is, there is not a word of fear.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Death Stands above Me
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
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
When you're Dead ... you stay up all night long.
KELLY LINK
"The Specialist's Hat", Stranger Things Happen
I don't want to die. Damn death. Long live life!
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
It was mad, but I just couldn't shake it. I was Death, Destroyer of Life, and all I wanted was a cottage by a stream, a pot of hot soup on the stove, and someone to love me.
GEORGE PENDLE
Death: A Life
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
As soon as one is born, one starts dying.
LUIGI PIRANDELLO
Henry IV
Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?
PLATO
Phaedo
Death or glory, death or glory
March forever in the sound and fury
MOTORHEAD
"Death or Glory"
Death has a hundred hands and walks by a thousand ways.
T.S. ELIOT
Murder in the Cathedral
When you look at a corpse you can always sense your own breath better.
ZONA GALE
"Miggy"
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
Death, vicious death,
Leave a green branch for love.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
Blood Wedding
That's life. Still the best alternative to death.
CODY MCFADYEN
The Face of Death