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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
- Dying is an art.
- Like everything else,
- I do it exceptionally well.
- I do it so it feels like hell.
- I do it so it feels real.
- I guess you could say I have a call.
Death is like an old whore in a bar--I'll buy her a drink but I won't go upstairs with her.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY, To Have and Have Not
For 3 days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow but the phone calls taper off.
JOHNNY CARSON, The Tonight Show
Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?
The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life; to regard it, with the understanding and the emotions, as the the inviolable condition of life.
THOMAS MANN, The Magic Mountain
He steps upon death that stirs a foot.
THOMAS DEKKER, Blurt, Master Constable
It used to be I thought of death as a man something like Grandfather a friend of his a kind of private and particular friend like we used to think of Grandfather's desk not to touch it not even to talk loud in the room where it was.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Sound and the Fury
Death commences too early--almost before you're half acquainted with life--you meet the other.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
SYLVIA PLATH, The Bell Jar
Death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.
TRUMAN CAPOTE, Other Voices, Other Rooms
There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Death is the monster we all fear, yet with each day, we walk toward it, and can't help doing so; we can't help but walk toward the one thing we're most trying to avoid.
BILL MAHER, "On Being Over 50," HuffPost, Oct. 3, 2011
I don't necessarily view death as something negative. Death gives meaning to life. Living in fear of death is living in denial. Actually, it's not really living at all, because there is no life without death. It's two sides of the one. You can't pick up one side and say, "I'm just going to use the 'heads' side." No. It doesn't work like that. You have to pick up both sides because nothing is promised to anyone in this world besides death.
50 CENT, From Pieces to Weight
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
THOMAS MANN, The Magic Mountain
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
Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.
MICHEL FOUCAULT, The Birth of the Clinic
All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.
KURT VONNEGUT, The Sirens of Titan
Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose.
CESARE PAVESE, This Business of Living, Jun. 7, 1938
We might remember ... not to fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed.
ROBINSON JEFFERS, "Original Sin"
There is great reason to hope that death is good; for one of two things -- either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man ... even the great king will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this?
The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.
A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.
THOMAS MANN, The Magic Mountain
Death will come and it will have your eyes.
CESARE PAVESE, Death Will Come and It Will Have Your Eyes
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