quotations about death
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
Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a strange feeling when a day of our life comes and we say, "Tomorrow, success or failure won't matter much: and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Vanity Fair
Whatever it is that occurs at death, I believe it deserves to be called a miracle. The miracle, ironically, is that we don't die. The cessation of the body is an illusion, and like a magician sweeping aside a curtain, the soul reveals what lies beyond.
DEEPAK CHOPRA
Life After Death
O, the one happiness, when, out of breath,
Our feet slip, and we stumble upon death!
ARTHUR SYMONS
"The Beggars"
Death is the liberator of him whom freedom cannot release, the physician of him whom medicine cannot cure, and the comforter of him whom time cannot console.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
O the anguish of that thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the light answers we returned to their plaints or their pleadings, for the little reverence we showed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God had given us to know!
GEORGE ELIOT
Amos Barton
The death for the driver was egregiously bad: being impaled is never anyone's exit of choice.
JEFF ABBOTT
The Last Minute
As the woodpecker taps in a spiral quest
From the root to the top of the tree,
Then flies to another tree,
So have I bored into life to find what lay therein,
And now it is time to die,
And I will fly to another tree.
SIDNEY LANIER
Songs Against Death
Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
Pale Horse
Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
When I think of the joy awaiting,
Beyond the bier and the shroud,
Death seems but a transient shadow,
A passing Summer cloud.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"Summer Clouds"
When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
We must die alone. To the very verge of the stream our friends may accompany us; they may bend over us, they may cling to us there; but that one long wave from the sea of eternity washes up to the lips, sweeps us from the shore, and we go forth alone! In that untried and utter solitude, then, what can there be for us but the pulsation of that assurance, "I am not alone, because the Father is with me!"
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Premature Burial"
There was that feeling one gets in a ride to a cemetery trailing a body in a coffin -- an impatience with the dead, a longing to be back home where one could get on with the illusion that not death but daily life is the permanent condition.
E. L. DOCTOROW
Homer & Langley
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
Life is hard, but death is even harder.
PETER KREEFT
Between Heaven and Hell
For a single path leads to the house of Hades.
AESCHYLUS
fragment, Telephos
While life could be evaded, death could not.
DEAN KOONTZ
Velocity
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"The Present"