quotations about death
My only fear of death is reincarnation.
TUPAC SHAKUR
"No More Pain"
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
Death has no need to be cruel, taking people's lives is more than enough.
JOSé SARAMAGO
Death with Interruptions
Death is everywhere
The more I look
The more I see
The more I feel
A sense of urgency
Tonight
DEPECHE MODE
"Fly on the Windscreen"
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
My years have limped; but I
Have tried so hard to fly!
And now, suppose Death brings
Gulls' wings
At last, for me to keep?
KARLE WILSON BAKER
"Alternatives", Burning Bush
When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
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
No matter who you are, you will be put abed at last with a shovel.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
There are always potential rogues who, seeing an opportunity, will flirt with death and then, at the very last moment, will be surprised to have met with it so easily.
PIERRE MAGNAN
The Messengers of Death
Always the idea of unbroken quiet broods around the grave. It is a port where the storms of life never beat, and the forms that have been tossed on its chafing waves lie quiet forevermore. There the child nestles peacefully as ever it lay in its mother's arms, and the workman's hands lie still by his side, and the thinker's brain is pillowed in silent mystery, and the poor girl's broken heart is steeped in a balm that extracts its secret woe, and is in the keeping of a charity that covers all blame.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
For a single path leads to the house of Hades.
AESCHYLUS
fragment, Telephos
I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Selected Writings
Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
The Birth of the Clinic
The thorn of death falls from heaven, and its myriad forms leave us no room to move.
KOBO ABE
The Woman in the Dunes
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
Death will come and it will have your eyes.
CESARE PAVESE
Death Will Come and It Will Have Your Eyes
The death for the driver was egregiously bad: being impaled is never anyone's exit of choice.
JEFF ABBOTT
The Last Minute
Think what you like. There are people who die by remaining alive and others who gain life by dying.
EIJI YOSHIKAWA
Musashi
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