quotations about death
Taunting Death ... means pitting oneself against a wily enemy who cannot lose.
J. K. ROWLING
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
A Soviet Heretic
Give me to die like a beast, afar, alone
With but the hawk and crow
To watch beside me while I cast my soul,
And but the sky to know
What my racked lips have uttered, what last groan,
Or curse or prayer, I breathed to heaven above.
KENNETH RAND
"Straw-Death"
Death is the stone into which our oblivion hardens.
PABLO NERUDA
Evening LXXVIII
Death is the only god that comes when you call.
ROGER ZELAZNY
"24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai"
Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force.
YODA
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Who knows but life be that which men call death,
And death what men call life?
EURIPIDES
Phrixus [fragment]
When you look at a corpse you can always sense your own breath better.
ZONA GALE
"Miggy"
The living is a passing traveler;
The dead, a man come home.
LI BAI
"The Old Dust"
Scientists have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is life after death -- though they say it's virtually impossible to get decent Chinese food.
DAVID LETTERMAN
Late Show with David Letterman, October 13, 2014
Dying makes what is left of living seem precious. The dying, and those about to die, feel that these last moments must be made beautiful. The cannot be permitted to include the bitterness and the enmities of the living that seem so inexhaustible. So often we hear people who, in dying, resign the old enmities and ask and grant forgiveness. Through such forgiveness they help to make dying beautiful. And, incidentally, they offer a lesson to those who go on living the apparently inexhaustibel life.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"The Dead", Reactions and Other Essays
Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Honorary Consul
Death is simply the soul's change of residence.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
JAMES BALDWIN
"Letter from a Region of My Mind", The New Yorker, November 17, 1962
It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
Smiley's People
Death was everywhere,
In the air
And in the sounds
Coming off the mounds
Of Bolton's Ridge.
Death's anchorage.
When you rolled a smoke
Or told a joke,
It was in the laughter
And drinking water
It approached the beach
As strings of cutters,
Dropped in the sea and lay around us.
PJ HARVEY
"All and Everyone", Let England Shake
After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we think of that hour as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time; it does not occur to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned and can mean that death -- or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again -- may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon whose time-table, hour by hour, has been settled in advance.
MARCEL PROUST
The Guermantes Way
Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.
ELLEN GILCHRIST
Good Housekeeping, May 2011
Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.
MARY SHELLEY
Frankenstein