Quotes about death

785 quotes · 317 authors

Quotes

  1. Not dead. Why had he thought that every life must end in death, and never in anything else? Not dead, but vanished as a single note vanishes, never to reappear, when it becomes an indistinguishable and inseparable part of some extemporized melody.

  2. “There’s a great deal said against Death. I mean by the people that has to die, drawin’ her picture like a crone with a sack, and all that. But she’s a good friend to birds, Death is. Wherever there’s dead men and quiet, you'll find a good many birds, that’s been my experience.”

    Recalling how the thrushes sang in our necropolis, I nodded.

  3. I’ve always thought thinking about how to live was more important than thinking about after we die. One likes to assume death will take care of itself. It’s just a bit disconcerting to see so many other people putting so much energy into taking care of it for you. Life has always been such a surprise, death, I expect—even if it’s nothing—will be one too.

    p. 199

  4. Half dead’s a lot worse than dead, when you know you’re gonna die in another three, six days no matter what anyone else does.

    p. 166

  5. Look, if he’s alive, there’s nothing we have to do about it. If he’s dead, there’s nothing we can do.

    p. 192

  6. “All life is a rhythm,” she said as I sat up. “All death is rhythm suspended, a syncopation before life resumes.”

  7. All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.

    p. 622

  8. Lives loss through an ‘act of God’ are regretted, perhaps deeply regretted, but they do not arouse our wildest passions. It is otherwise with lives that are forfeited through deliberate human agency. The word ‘deliberate’ is important here. One deliberate murder can produce a sharper reaction than ten thousand deaths on the roads.

    p. 173

  9. "Life is Motion toward Knowledge. If God is Complete Knowledge then He is Complete Non-Motion, which is Non-Life, which is Death. Therefore, if there is such a God of Fullness of Being, we would worship Death, the Father."

  10. Soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

  11. Even gentle people recognize that sometimes the decision not to kill is a decision to die.

  12. Life is a suicide mission.