quotations about death
He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.
JACK LONDON
White Fang
Remember the coffin where men
All must to dust be returning.
HENRI CAZALIS
"Always"
Dying is like coming to the end of a long novel--you only regret it if the ride was enjoyable and left you wanting more.
JEROME P. CRABB
Death Quotes and Quibbles
I ... shall die, I do suppose, with a full consciousness of my being and with a great fear in my eyes. And though many die decrepit and senile, that is not the normal death of men, for men have in them something of a self-creative power, which pushes them on to the further realization of themselves, right up to the edge of their doom.
HILAIRE BELLOC
On Nothing & Kindred Subjects
Dying is strange and hard if it is not our death, but a death that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
The Book of Hours
No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Heartbreak House
The longest-lived and the shortest-lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
When do the dead die? When they are forgotten.
LAURA ESQUIVEL
The Law of Love
Birds of Hell awaiting
With the wings on fire
Insane old Phoenix, baby
It's your death desire
The birds of Hell awaiting
With the wings on fire
MARILYN MANSON
"Birds of Hell Awaiting", The Pale Emperor
Death is like an old whore in a bar--I'll buy her a drink but I won't go upstairs with her.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
To Have and Have Not
Now death is death! and yet is not one death
Another death? Stabbing is not the same
As shooting! Would you say a strangled man
Was drown'd? The end is one, the means are many,
And there the difference lies!
SHERIDAN KNOWLES
True Unto Death
O Death, the Consecrator!
Nothing so sanctifies a name
As to be written--Dead.
Nothing so wins a life from blame,
So covers it from wrath and shame,
As doth the burial-bed.
CAROLINE SPENCER
"Death the Consecrator"
There is no Death! What seems so is transition;
This life of mortal breath
Is but a suburb of the life elysian,
Whose portal we call Death.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"Resignation"
So long as men die, life will reassert its tragic interest from time to time with fresh energy, and to this interest Christianity alone can respond. If the scientific people could rid us of death, they might indeed hope to win over the heart and conscience of the world, permanently, to some form of non-theistic speculation. As it is, the tide ebbs, as I believe, only that it may flow again.
HENRY PARRY LIDDON
letter to C. T. Redington, June 27, 1877
Life was to these a dream fulfilled,
And death a starry night.
HERMAN MELVILLE
"Chattanooga"
Living, the nearest claim them; but the dear
Great dead belong to any humble heart.
KARLE WILSON BAKER
"W. V. M.", Blue Smoke
He steps upon death that stirs a foot.
THOMAS DEKKER
Blurt
Most of us were not afraid of death, only of the act of dying; and there were times when we overcame even this fear. At such moments we were free--men without shadows, dismissed from the ranks of the mortal; it was the most complete experience of freedom that can be granted a man.
ARTHUR KOESTLER
Dialogue with Death
Death is the monster we all fear, yet with each day, we walk toward it, and can't help doing so; we can't help but walk toward the one thing we're most trying to avoid.
BILL MAHER
"On Being Over 50", HuffPost, Oct. 3, 2011