quotations about death
A death-blow is a life-blow to some
Who, till they died, did not alive become;
Who, had they lived, had died, but
when They died, vitality begun.
EMILY DICKINSON
"A Death blow is a Life blow to Some"
Death is not a checkmate ... it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
We no longer have death in our culture: the dead become abstractions, statistics, companies will take charge of the relationship that we can have to our own dead. In 2, 3 days the cremation is done, we can forget, the question is settled and the dead is only a memory. This is problematic, because we risk falling first into what Freud calls melancholy, that is to say the impossibility of mourning because we no longer have an object to mourn.
BRUCE BEGOUT
Postap Mag, July 31, 2017
To be human is inevitably, to hate oneself sometimes, to hunger for the perfect stability and in a way the perfect justice -- or at least perfect punishment for our numerous imperfections -- called death.
JOHN GARDNER
In the Suicide Mountains
In the whole course of our observation there is not so misrepresented and abused a personage as death. Some have styled him the king of terrors, when he might with less impropriety have been termed the terror of kings; others have dreaded him as an evil without end, although it was in their own power to make him the end of all evil. He has been vilified as the cause of anguish, consternation, and despair; but these, alas, are things that appertain not unto death, but unto life. How strange a paradox is this, we love the distemper and loathe the remedy, preferring the fiercest buffetings of the hurricane to the tranquility of the harbour.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
The distance that the dead have gone
Does not at first appear;
Their coming back seems possible
For many an ardent year.
And then, that we have followed them
We more than half suspect,
So intimate have we become
With their dear retrospect.
EMILY DICKINSON
"The distance that the dead have gone"
What happens when the thought of death occurs, this very simple and basic thought about death, that I will most certainly die, and that you will most certainly die, is that all these other questions are stripped down to basic, that the very basis for knowledge and existence is shivering, whether one is trembling in tears for another or oneself shivering in anxiety and awe. Hence, at the end we return to the place where we began, at the graveside.
MARIUS TIMMANN MJAALAND
Autopsia
There's nothing like a deadline to get the old blood flowing. All the juices, really. It doesn't follow, if you think about it. You'd assume certain things ... certain activities ... would become unimportant. Certain betrayals would become unbearable. But they don't really. In fact, quite the opposite. Everything takes on a new light. The impossible becomes possible, desirable even. It's quite remarkable.
WALTER WYKES
The Salmon Tribunal
In death itself there can be nothing terrible, for the act of death annihilates sensation; but there are many roads to death, and some of them justly formidable, even to the bravest.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.
E. L. DOCTOROW
Homer & Langley
You can only go into mourning by transfiguration or disfigurement. There is no rational form of the absorption of death.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
Look out, Death: I am coming.
Art thou not glad? what talks we'll have.
What memories of old battles.
Come, bring the bowl, Death; I am thirsty.
SIDNEY LANIER
Songs Against Death
Death aims only once, but never misses.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
We go to the grave of a friend, saying, "A man is dead;" but angels throng about him, saying, "A man is born."
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Death is God's way of telling you not to be such a wise guy.
GRENVILLE KLEISER
Dictionary of Proverbs
A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Call of Cthulhu"
Only where there are graves are there resurrections.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Even dead,
we bony creatures do our best
to leave a mark--
if not a mask of beaten gold
or a casket engraved with feathers, perhaps
a richer concentration of fungus,
a patch where grass is younger and thicker,
a sunken place in a field.
SARAH LINDSAY
"Ritual Sandwich", Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower
Death lieth still in the way of life,
Like as a stone in the way of a brook;
I will sing against thee, Death, as the brook does,
I will make thee into music which does not die.
SIDNEY LANIER
Songs Against Death