quotations about death
Death is a process, not an event, despite medical and legal imperatives to give it a date and hour.
JAMES W. GREEN
Beyond the Good Death
Death fosters life that life may suckle death.
SRI AUROBINDO
Vasavadutta
Death is the greatest evil; because it cuts off hope.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
In a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown. This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.
IRVIN D. YALOM
interview, Salon Magazine
If thou hadst a good conscience thou wouldst not greatly fear death.
THOMAS A. KEMPIS
The Imitation of Christ
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"The Present"
The thought of death deceives us; for it causes us to neglect to live.
LUC DE CLAPIERS
MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES, Reflections and Maxims
In every cradle decked with rosy wreath
Lurk germs of death.
VICTOR HUGO
"Hope"
Death ... was the only kept promise out of all life's false starts and switchbacks, all there was at the end of the dusty road.
WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night
Death had a curious way of ennobling people. Of washing away their flaws and elevating their reputations to a new purity. Sinners became saints once their bodies were lowered into the ground.
JOANNA CAMPBELL SLAN
Paper
It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Flirting with death is the spice of life.
MARGARET LOCK
Twice Dead
Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
Pale Horse
My only fear of death is reincarnation.
TUPAC SHAKUR
"No More Pain"
As I grow older, and come nearer to death, I look upon it more and more with complacent joy, and out of every longing I hear God say, "O thirsting, hungering one, come to me." What the other life will bring I know not, only that I shall awake in God's likeness, and see him as he is. If a child had been born and spent all his life in the Mammoth Cave, how impossible would it be for him to comprehend the upper world! His parents might tell him of its life, and light, and beauty, and its sounds of joy; they might heap the sand into mounds, and try to show him by pointing to stalactites how grass, and flowers, and trees grow out of the ground, till at length, with laborious thinking, the child would fancy he had gained a true idea of the unknown land. And yet, though he longed to behold it, when the day came that he was to go forth, it would be with regret for the familiar crystals, and the rock-hewn rooms, and the quiet that reigned therein. But when he came up, some May morning, with ten thousand birds singing in the trees, and the heavens bright, and blue, and full of sunlight, and the wind blowing softly through the young leaves, all a-glitter with dew, and the landscape stretching away green and beautiful to the horizon, with what rapture would he gaze about him, and see how poor were all the fancyings and the interpretations which were made within the cave, of the things which grew and lived without; and how would he wonder that he could have regretted to leave the silence and the dreary darkness of his old abode! So, when we emerge from this cave of earth into that land where spring growths are, and where is summer, and not that miserable travesty which we call summer here, how shall we wonder that we could have clung so fondly to this dark and barren life!
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Man dies, his white bones are dumb without a word
When the green pines feel the coming of spring.
Looking back, I sigh; looking before, I sigh again.
What is there to prize in the life's vaporous glory?
LI BAI
"The Old Dust"
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
There are always potential rogues who, seeing an opportunity, will flirt with death and then, at the very last moment, will be surprised to have met with it so easily.
PIERRE MAGNAN
The Messengers of Death
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.
DON DELILLO
White Noise
My years have limped; but I
Have tried so hard to fly!
And now, suppose Death brings
Gulls' wings
At last, for me to keep?
KARLE WILSON BAKER
"Alternatives", Burning Bush