quotations about death
Death is release, if you've lived all right.
EDWARD ALBEE
Seascape
As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relationships with this best and truest friend of mankind that death's image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling, and I thank my God for graciously granting me the opportunity...of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness. I never lie down at night without reflecting that --- young as I am -- I may not live to see another day. Yet no one of all my acquaintances could say that in company I am morose or disgruntled.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
letter to Leopold Mozart, Apr. 4, 1787
The dead's dead ... get 'em in the ground and look to the live ones.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
To will the obligatory in relation to death is to fall in line with the major immutable cycles of Nature, especially human nature, and to understand that (whether or not there is a purpose or meaning to life or a life of the spirit beyond the life of the body) no one, absolutely no one, escapes being finite and mortal. And knowing this, and then to accept it, to will it, and not to be in an unnecessary state of angst or rebellion or terror over it.
EDWIN SHNEIDMAN
A Commonsense Book of Death
So when the friends we love the best lie in their churchyard bed, we must not cry too bitterly over the happy dead; because, for our dear Saviour's sake, our sins are all forgiven; and Christians only fall asleep to wake again in Heaven.
CECIL FRANCES ALEXANDER
"Child's Funeral"
They say death comes like a thief in the night, where is he? I'll hug his neck.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Suttree
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"
Oh! that "eternal shore,"
When Death shall be no more!
How widely differing from this mortal state,
Where we but draw our earliest breath
To yield it up again in death,
Obedient to the unchanging laws of fate!
ANNE S. BUSHBY
"Easter Morning"
When you look at a corpse you can always sense your own breath better.
ZONA GALE
"Miggy"
Death is a great revealer of what is in a man, and in its solemn shadow appear the naked lineaments of the soul.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
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
There is no god but death.
MAXWELL ANDERSON
Elizabeth the Queen
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
You feel sorry for yourself. You think you're missing something and you don't know what it is. You're lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died.
MACKEY MILLER
Mouse Attack 5!!!
Death is the stone into which our oblivion hardens.
PABLO NERUDA
Evening LXXVIII
Unjustly men hate death, which is the greatest defence against their many ills.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
Death is the only god that comes when you call.
ROGER ZELAZNY
"24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai"
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
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