Selected death quotes

1. I bet the worst part about dying is the part where your whole life passes before you.

2. The irrevocable Hand That opes the year's fair gate, doth ope and shut The portals of our earthly destinies; We walk through blindfold, and the noiseless doors Close after us, for ever. Pause, my soul, On these strange words - for ever - whose large sound Breaks flood-like, drowning all the petty noise Our human moans make on the shores of Time. O Thou that openest, and no man shuts; That shut'st, and no man opens - Thee we wait!

3. Immortality alone could teach this mortal how to die.

4. An author departs, he does not die.

5. Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

6. If they had said that the sun or the moon had gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in creation than the words: 'Byron is dead!'

7. And silence sounds no worse than cheers After earth has stopped the ears.

8. Hope lies to mortals And most believe her, But man's deceiver Was never mine.

9. We now to peace and darkness And earth and thee restore Thy creature that thou madest And wilt cast forth no more.

10. Life is an incurable disease.

11. I've been accused of every death except the casualty list of the World War.

12. A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.

13. I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.

14. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.

15. The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.

16. Let us love the passing hour, let us hurry up and enjoy our time.

17. What is our life but a succession of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death?

18. Accordingly, death is a harbor of peace for the just, but is believed a shipwreck for the wicked.

19. Casting the body's vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide.

20. Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details.

21. I always wished I had died, and I still wish that, because I could have gotten the whole thing over with.

22. I never think that people die. They just go to department stores.

23. Any time you are with anyone or think of anyone you must say to yourself: I am dying and this person too is dying, attempting the while to experience the truth of the words you are saying. If every one of you agrees to practice this, bitterness will die out, harmony will arise.

24. Whatever is truly alive must die. Look at the flowers; only plastic flowers never die.

25. The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn from limb from limb. The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off.

26. Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time.

27. Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last.

28. To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice and, while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it not for some noble object but to escape some ill.

29. After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.

30. The task I've been given seems absurd: To wait here on earth until I no longer exist.

31. The entire universe will eventually disintegrate but by then I hope to be in a safer place.

32. Dying is a part of living, but only a very small part.

33. If I can survive death, I can probably survive anything.

34. I've learned to accept birth and death . . . but sometimes I still worry about what lies between.

35. Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.

36. Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.

37. The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

38. So long as there is death there will be sorrow, and so long as there is sorrow it can be no part of the duty of human beings to increase its amount, in spite of the fact that a few rare spirits know how to transmute it.

39. I'm so old they've cancelled my blood type.

40. A man must live like a great brilliant flame and burn as brightly as he can. In the end he burns out. But this is far better than a mean little flame.

41. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

42. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

43. I see myself as a huge fiery comet, a shooting star. Everyone stops, points up and gasps 'Oh look at that!' Then - whoosh, and I'm gone... and they'll never see anything like it ever again... and they won't be able to forget me - ever.

44. The future is uncertain and the end is always near.

45. But O the heavy change, now thou art gone, Now thou art gone and never must return!

46. Alas! what boots it with incessant care To tend the homely slighted shepherd's trade, And strictly meditate the thankless Muse? Were it not better done as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair? Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of noble mind) To scorn delights, and live laborious days; But the fair guerdon when we hope to find, And think to burst out into sudden blaze, Comes the blind Fury with th' abhorred shears, And slits the thin-spun life.

47. For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead, Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor; So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed; And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky. So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high, Through the dear might of him that walked the waves.

48. On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death...Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.

49. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.

50. To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal. (1962)

51. The truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to few on this Earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanaro of the boulevards had died from solitude and want of faith in himself and others.

52. 'Open your eyes, Clevinger. It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.'

53. 'Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably.... It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.'

54. In a wood they call the Rouge Bouquet, There is a new-made grave today, Built by never a spade nor pick, Yet covered with earth ten meteres thick. There lie many fighting men. Dead in their youthful prime Never to laugh nor love again Nor taste the Summertime.

55. Just being alive It can really hurt These moments given Are a gift from time. Just let us try To give these moments back To those we love To those who will survive...

56. He gave a cry. At the last, falling backward, his face appearing to us for a second upside down before he was smothered on the floor by a pile of white uniforms, he let himself cry out: A sound of cornered-animal fear and hate and surrender and defiance, that if you ever trailed coon or cougar or lynx is like the last sound the treed and shot and falling animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn't care any more about anything but himself and his dying.

57. This is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

58. Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

59. But whatever may be the circumstances of my death, I shall die with unshaken faith in the Communist future. This faith in man and in his future gives me even now such power of resistance as cannot be given by any religion . . . I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full.

60. Is all our Life, then but a dream Seen faintly in the goldern gleam Athwart Time's dark resistless stream? Bowed to the earth with bitter woe Or laughing at some raree-show We flutter idly to and fro. Man's little Day in haste we spend, And, from its merry noontide, send No glance to meet the silent end.

61. I cannot forgive my friends for dying; I do not find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.

62. Who track the steps of glory to the grave.

63. If this is dying, then I don't think much of it.

64. Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. The bridge was being repaired: she went right through the Danger sign. The car fell a hundred feet into the ravine, smashing through the treetops feathery with new leaves, then burst into flames and rolled down into the shallow creek at the bottom. Chunks of the bridge fell on top of it. Nothing much was left but charred smithereens.

65. In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men's bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches.

66. Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron's struggle cease.

67. I answer the heroic question 'Death, where is thy sting?' with 'It is here in my heart and mind and memories.'

68. 'Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal - there's the trick!'

69. You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more.

70. It is said the warrior's is the twofold Way of pen and sword, and he should have a taste for both Ways. Even if a man has no natural ability he can be a warrior by sticking assiduously to both divisions of the Way. Generally speaking, the Way of the warrior is resolute acceptance of death.

71. We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream: it may be so the moment after death.

72. Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one - none, certainly, of anything like a similar importance - to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.

73. We live in a world in which the only utopian visions arrive in commercial breaks: magical visions of an impossibly hospitable world, peopled by bright-eyed attractive men, women, children... Where nobody dies... In my worlds people died. And I thought that was honest. I thought I was being honest.

74. Sometimes I think: I am older than this tree, older than this bench, older than the rain. And yet. I'm not older than the rain. It's been falling for years and after I go it will keep on falling.

75. We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life. As soon as we are born the return begins, at once the setting forth and the coming back; we die in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of life is death! But as soon as we are born we begin the struggle to create, to compose, to turn matter into life; we are born in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of ephemeral life is immortality! In the temporary living organism these two streams collide ... both opposing forces are holy. It is our duty, therefore, to grasp that vision which can embrace and harmonize these two enormous, timeless, and indestructible forces, and with this vision to modulate our thinking and our action.

76. Never acknowledge the limitations of man. Smash all boundaries! Deny whatever your eyes see. Die every moment, but say: 'Death does not exist.'

77. Life is the beginning of death. Life is for the sake of death. Death is at once the end and the beginning - at once separation and closer union of the self. Through death the reduction is complete.

78. Sickness and healing are in every heart. Death and deliverance are in every hand.

79. I carry the seeds of death with me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love. My parents died so others could live; now I live, so others must die.

80. God made us with death inside, and also with intelligence. We have our seventy years or so - perhaps ninety, with care - in the mountains of GA, a 130 is not unheard of, though I personally believe they are all liars. They would claim to be immortal if they thought they could get away with it. We could live forever, if we were willing to be stupid the whole time. Surely you're not saying that god had to choose between long life and intelligence for human beings! It's there in your own bible, Carlotta. Two trees of knowledge and life. You eat of the tree of knowledge, and you will surely die. You eat of the tree of life, and you remain a child in the garden forever, undying.

81. But the fear of death in the one place was not as strong as another kind of fear, the fear of a world gone crazy, a place where anything could happen, where nothing could be trusted, where nothing was certain. A terrible place.

82. Everybody dies. What matters is what you do between now and when it happens to you. (Treasure Box)

83. Many days later another caravan was passing and a man saw something on top of the highest dune there. And when they went up to see, they found Outka, Mimouna and Aicha; they were still there, lying the same way as when they had gone to sleep. And all three of the glasses... were full of sand. That was how they had their tea in the Sahara.

84. Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustable well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply part of your being that you, that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.

85. God will. Like he waters the flowers on your window sill. Take me. I'm an ordinary player in the key of C. And my will was broken by my pride and my vanity. Who's gonna love you when your looks are gone? God will. Like he waters the flowers on your window sill.

86. O lift me from the grass! I die! I faint! I fail! Let thy love in kisses rain On my lips and eyelids pale. My cheek is cold and white, alas! My heart beats loud and fast: O press it to thine own again, Where it will break at last!

87. Alas! that all we loved of him should be, But for our grief, as if it had not been, And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me! Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene The actors or spectators?

88. The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.

89. Either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. ...Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is to gain; for eternity is then only a single night.

90. The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways - I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.

91. In the dualism of death and life there is a harmony. We know that the life of a soul, which is finite in its expression and infinite in its principle, must go through the portals of death in its journey to realise the infinite. It is death which is monistic, it has no life in it. But life is dualistic; it has an appearance as well as truth; and death is that appearance, that maya, which is an inseparable companion to life.

92. Death is the dies of life which is turned away from us.

93. When you go to bed, don't leave bread or milk on the table: it attracts the dead.

94. From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

95. Death's a debt; his mandamus binds all alike-no bail, no demurrer.

96. So when or you or I are made A fable, song, or fleeting shade, All love, all liking, all delight Lies drowned with us in endless night.

97. I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.

98. If one permits an infidel to continue in his role as a corrupter of the earth, his moral suffering will be all the worse. If one kills the infidel, and this stops him from perpetrating his misdeeds, his death will be a blessing to him.

99. Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, The Night-Mare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold.

100. An orphan's curse would drag to Hell A spirit from on high; But oh! more horrible than that Is a curse in a dead man's eye! Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse, And yet I could not die.