DEATH QUOTES XXI

quotations about death

Death makes equal the high and low.

JOHN HEYWOOD

Be Merry Friends


It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

Smiley's People


All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.

KURT VONNEGUT

The Sirens of Titan


About the presence of death and dying I don't remember the society in the 1950s being so skittish as it has since become. People still died at home, among relatives and friends, often in the care of a family physician. Death was still to be seen sitting in the parlor, hanging in a butcher shop, sometimes lying in the street.

LEWIS H. LAPHAM

"Momento Mori", Lapham's Quarterly: Death, fall 2013


Death--a stopping of impressions through the senses, and of the pulling of the cords of motion, and of the ways of thought, and of service to the flesh.

MARCUS AURELIUS

Meditations


Death cannot touch the higher consciousness of man ... it can only separate those who love each other so far as their lower vehicles are concerned; the man living on earth, blinded by matter, feels separated from those who have passed onwards, but ... there is no such thing as Death at all.

ANNIE WOOD BESANT

Death--and After


We're ever making plans for life,
But seldom plans for death,
Though death we know must come to us,
And life is but a breath.

ARDELIA COTTON BARTON

Thoughts


Death
As a dark Shadow
Beckons his prey
Into the unknown
By a soft whisper
In the soul

CINDY CHENEY

"Death"


It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.

DANIEL HANDLER (as Lemony Snicket)

The Reptile Room


Death comes black and hard, rushing down on me from the future, with no possible chance of escape.

DAVID GERROLD

The Man Who Folded Himself


Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man's cottage door and at the palaces of kings.

HORACE

attributed, The Quotable Intellectual


Death is not regarded as a natural affair by primitive man. Death is believed to be due to the intervention of some malevolent or at least not well disposed power. Normally it should not take place. So we have all through history crude explanations of death, as e.g., the influence of the serpent, the devil, sin.

JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON

The Field of Philosophy


Man dies. Come from darkness, into darkness he returns, and is reabsorbed, without a trace left, into the illimitable void of time.

LEONID ANDREYEV

The Life of Man


There are too many poems about death. Death, churchyards, wormy cadavers. Death is really a small part of life, and it's not the part that you want to concentrate on, because life is life and it's full of untold particulars.

NICHOLSON BAKER

The Anthologist


Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

letter to Cecil Spring-Rice, Mar. 12, 1900


Of all the Gods, Death only craves not gifts:
Nor sacrifice, nor yet drink-offering poured
Avails; no altars hath he, nor is soothed
By hymns of praise. From him alone of all
The powers of Heaven Persuasion holds aloof.

AESCHYLUS

fragment


Death is tolerable only when it leads again to life.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Collected Poems


Death is a Pepsi truck with no place to go. Dying is wham, feeling like the world's biggest fuck-up and being jerked up and out of it all. Like a puppy being lifted out of its box by the nape of its neck. Like a chess piece being removed from the board by an angry player. Wham, jerk, gone.

DAN SIMMONS

Lovedeath


Death lies dormant in each of us and will bloom in time.

DEAN KOONTZ

Odd Thomas


Where life is there is death, reasons the vulture, and where there's death there's hope.

EDWARD ABBEY

One Life at a Time