Quotes about death

“So you’re trying to get me prepared for one of my crew dying?”

“Historically speaking, humans are pretty much at a hundred percent on that.”

Dead’s not good, but at least it’s simple.

Sit here, now, and look. The water, the surf, the colors on the shore. You think they make the beauty of the tropical sea, aye, lad? They do not. 'Tis the knowledge of what lurks below the surface of it, that awful-looking thing, as you call it, that carries death with every move that it makes. So it is, so it is with all beauty. So it is with Mexico. I hope you never forget it.

I am fearing because I am seeing that the only way not to be fighting is to die. I am not wanting to die.

To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.

Death must take place in the heart to be believed in. After love dies man believes in his death.

It was the sound of death, the ultimate irreversible.

There was a lot to do. Death was an existential catastrophe, a rip in the soft upholstery with which humanity padded over a hard uncaring universe, but it turned out there were an amazing number of people whose job it was to deal with it for you, and all they asked in return were huge quantities of time and money.

The First World War inaugurated the manufacture of mass deaths that the Second brought to a pitiless consummation.

I'm a trespasser in the Kingdom of Death. This is his private domain, his empire, where he rules with absolute power. I feel like an astronaut floating in space, a thousand miles from earth. The slightest tear in his spacesuit and he’s lost. The slightest tear in mine, just like him, I’m lost too.

It will take years for us to recover from what we've lived through. And also to forget. I tell myself that life is incomprehensible. We need death to bring us back together. (VI)

In contrast to mourning and burial, it is the deep-seated conception that some part of a person does not vanish forever that separates us absolutely from the whole animal kingdom. No gorilla or bald-headed eagle ever had an inkling of their inner self finishing up somewhere once the proud body had collapsed into chemicals. It is only the early human mind that grew to strive against the prospect of the final annihilation of self, a hallmark rebellion that became hard-wired into, and always an essential element of, human nature. It is the incalculable antiquity of the first stirrings towards post-mortem existence that explains the enduring and universal belief in ghosts. Ghosts have waited in the wings from the beginning and have fluttered persistently as part of human cultural, religious or philosophical baggage ever since. Practically speaking, as a result, they are inexpungible.