quotations about 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
Death was an accident like any other, and, moreover, one as certain as hunger or as sleep.
HILAIRE BELLOC
On Nothing & Kindred Subjects
Death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
To live in hearts we leave behind
Is not to die.
THOMAS CAMPBELL
Hallowed Ground
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Fight Club
Alone in a room
needless I sit
I close my eyes
and try to forget
Death is calling
get in line
JAY REATARD
"Death Is Forming", Blood Visions
Far happier he, who, young and full of pride
And radiant with the glory of the sun,
Leaves earth before his singing time is done.
All wounds of Time the graveyard flowers hide,
His beauty lives, as fresh as when he died.
JOYCE KILMER
"The Clouded Sun"
Death is a Dialogue between
The Spirit and the Dust.
EMILY DICKINSON
"Death is a Dialogue"
Death's gang is bigger and tougher than anyone else's. Always has been and always will be. Death's the man.
MICHAEL MARSHALL
The Upright Man
Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man's cottage door and at the palaces of kings.
HORACE
attributed, The Quotable Intellectual
When a house has just lost its soul, a stricken silence falls over the sudden emptiness that no one will fill again. And all the noises that may be made later in that house will be like a scandalous din, ugly echoes from one room to another, from one corridor to another, sharp and discordant as if the walls are no longer able to absorb any music once the source of harmony has been taken away. But this strange detail about the power of death can only be picked up by ears that are very attentive to the smallest murmurs of life. Rational people go through these empty spaces with the serenity of a lawyer, and their indulgent smiles categorise you if you decide to point out in their presence that there is something lacking in the atmosphere.
PIERRE MAGNAN
The Messengers of Death
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--a stopping of impressions through the senses, and of the pulling of the cords of motion, and of the ways of thought, and of service to the flesh.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
If death turned out to be a lack of being rather than a lack of consciousness, well, then, that sucked.
LINDA HOWARD
Death Angel
The dead can't come to us. We can only go to them.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
I cannot tell you if the dead,
Who loved us fondly when on earth,
Walk by our side, sit at our hearth,
By ties of old affection led....
But this I know--in many dreams
They come to us from realms afar,
And leave the golden gates ajar
Through which immortal glory streams.
ALBERT LAIGHTON
"The Dead"
Because I could not stop for Death --
He kindly stopped for me --
The Carriage held but just Ourselves --
And Immortality.
EMILY DICKINSON
"Because I could not stop for Death"
All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.
KURT VONNEGUT
The Sirens of Titan
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
For though Death be a dark passage, it leads to immortality, and that is recompence enough for suffering of it.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude