quotations about death
Death is the end of those who have done nothing to cause their names to live after them.
XENOPHON
attributed, Day's Collacon
Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.
WOODY ALLEN
Death: A Comedy in One Act
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love! -- then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
JOHN KEATS
"When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be"
The day of death ... is one of the five mysteries, the key of which God holds in his own hands.
éDOUARD RENé DE LABOULAYE
Abdallah
Face your faith
Remove all the lace
You love me to death
But death my love you more
HOOVERPHONIC
"You Love Me to Death", No More Sweet Music
For soon, very soon do men forget
Their friends upon whom Death's seal is set.
ISAAC MCLELLAN
"The Last Night of the Year"
Into the chilly, artificial air, death slipped and snuck--the god of all thieves.
J. D. ROBB
Salvation in Death
The rabbi intones that today is the day that God will put your name in the Book of Life ... or the Book of DEATH. I'm five, and I'm going, "Uhhh, what the f*** is that? The book of WHAT?!?" Death? Death was not anything that had ever occurred to me. My greatest fear was that my parents were going to leave me in a grocery store.
LEWIS BLACK
The Carnegie Hall Performance
When among the graves of thy fellows, walk with circumspection; thine own is open at thy feet.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
A dead man's shroud has no pockets.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
Death walks behind you.
ATOMIC ROOSTER
"Death Walks Behind You"
In each thing there is an insinuation of death. Stillness, silence, serenity are all apprenticeships.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
attributed, Only Mystery: Federico García Lorca's Poetry in Word and Image
There are some dead who are more alive than the living.
ROMAIN ROLLAND
Jean-Christophe
Death is the greatest evil; because it cuts off hope.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
Could the best and kindest of us who depart from the earth have an opportunity of revisiting it, I suppose he or she (assuming that any Vanity Fair feelings subsist in the sphere whither we are bound) would have a pang of mortification at finding how soon our survivors were consoled.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Vanity Fair
Death is a child of stone.
EVELYN SCOTT
"Immortality"
Death submits to no one.
HOMER
The Iliad
Death is a process, not an event, despite medical and legal imperatives to give it a date and hour.
JAMES W. GREEN
Beyond the Good Death
O Death the Healer, scorn thou not, I pray,
To come to me; of cureless ills thou art
The one physician. Pain lays not its touch
Upon a corpse.
AESCHYLUS
fragment