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There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
EUGENE IONESCO, Rhinoceros
To die will be an awfully big adventure.
A man dies ... only a few circles in the water prove that he was ever there. And even they quickly disappear. And when they're gone, he's forgotten, without a trace, as if he'd never even existed. And that's all.
WOLFGANG BORCHERT, The Outsider
Dying is like getting audited by the IRS--something that only happens to other people ... until it happens to you.
JEROME P. CRABB, Death Quotes and Quibbles
The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he’s dying don’t give him pity for others, no sir.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
- Cowards die many times before their deaths
- The valiant never taste of death but once.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Julius Caesar
We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE, Religio Medici
- Death, in itself, is nothing; but we fear,
- To be we know not what, we know not where.
Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
VICTOR HUGO, Intellectual Autobiography
You only live twice. Once when you are born and once when you look death in the face.
IAN FLEMING, You Only Live Twice
Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, thre is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, The House of the Seven Gables
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
Death will be a great relief. No more interviews.
KATHARINE HEPBURN, The Mammoth Book of Zingers, Quips, and One-Liners
The world's an inn, and death the journey's end.
JOHN DRYDEN, Palamon and Arcite
As soon as one is born, one starts dying.
LUIGI PIRANDELLO, Henry IV
Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.
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
Those who think about death, carrying with them their existing ideas and emotions, usually assume that they will have, during their last hours, ideas and emotions of like vividness ... but they do not fully recognize the implication that the feeling faculty, too, is almost gone. The imagine the state to be one in which they can have emotions such as they now have on contemplating the cessation of life. But at the last all the mental powers simultaneously ebb, as do the bodily powers, and with them goes the capacity for emotion in general. It is, indeed, possible that in its last stages consciousness is occupied by a not displeasurable sense of rest.
HERBERT SPENCER, Facts and Comments
It seems a strange and repugnant conclusion that with the cessation of consciousness at death, there ceases to be any knowledge of having existed. With his last breath it becomes to each the same thing as though he had never lived. And then the consciousness itself -- what is it during the time that it continues? And what becomes of it when it ends? We can only infer that it is a specialized and individualized form of that Infinite and Eternal Energy which transcends both our knowledge and our imagination; and that at death its elements lapse into the Infinite and Eternal Energy whence they were derived.
HERBERT SPENCER, Facts and Comments
It hath been often said, that it is not death, but dying, which is terrible.
- Death
- As a dark Shadow
- Beckons his prey
- Into the unknown
- By a soft whisper
- In the soul
CINDY CHENEY, "Death"
We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream: it may be so the moment after death.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, American Note-Books, 1836
Death doesn't bargain.
AUGUST STRINDBERG, The Dance of Death
Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.
BERTRAND RUSSELL, Philosophical Essays
With death comes honesty.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, The Satanic Verses
Death is when the monsters get you.
STEPHEN KING, Salem's Lot
- Death makes angels of us all
- & gives us wings
- where we had shoulders
- smooth as raven's
- claws
JIM MORRISON, An American Prayer
Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life.
BERTOLT BRECHT, The Mother
- Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture,
- A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.
JOHN ASHBERY, "A Last World"
No one on his deathbed ever said, "I wish I had spent more time on my business."
PAUL E. TSONGAS, New York Times, Jan. 14, 1987
- Who knows but life be that which men call death,
- And death what men call life?
EURIPIDES, Phrixus [fragment]
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