DEATH QUOTES XIX

quotations about death

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


Death hath this also; that it openeth the gate to good fame, and extinguisheth envy.

FRANCIS BACON

Essays


Nowadays, we have technology that's improved so that we can bring people back to life. In fact, there are drugs being developed right now -- who knows if they'll ever make it to the market -- that may actually slow down the process of brain-cell injury and death. Imagine, you fast-forward to ten years down the line and you've given a patient whose heart has just stopped this amazing drug, and actually what it does is it slows everything down so that the things that would've happened over an hour, now happen over two days. As medicine progresses, we will end up with lots and lots of ethical questions.

SAM PARNIA

interview, Time, Sep. 18, 2008


Death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life.

E. H. CHAPIN

Living Words


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


There is a Reaper, whose name is Death,
And, with his sickle keen,
He reaps the bearded grain at a breath,
And the flowers that grow between.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

"The Reaper and the Flowers"


Who knows but life be that which men call death,
And death what men call life?

EURIPIDES

Phrixus [fragment]


Certain, when I was born, so long ago,
Death drew the tap of life and let it flow;
And ever since the tap has done its task,
And now there's little but an empty cask.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

The Canterbury Tales


Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

letter to W. von Hulewicz, The Duino Elegies


We give our dead
To the orchards
And the groves.
We give our dead
To life.

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER

Parable of the Talents


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 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


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


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


Now that you are dead,
You are splendid.
Photographs of people who have just died
Are worth twenty percent more,
And for suicides
There is an additional five percent.
Now that you are dead
You are much in demand.

KOBO ABE

The Ghost is Here


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


The living is a passing traveler;
The dead, a man come home.

LI BAI

"The Old Dust"


Death augments distance and dulls the memory. Death reconciles.

LEONID ANDREYEV

He Who Gets Slapped


Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force.

YODA

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith


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"