Quotes about death

Life is life, and it is infinitely better than the alternative, or so we presume, for nobody returns to dispute it. Such is my motto.

She said she would tell our fortunes from the lines in our palms, if we had coins to cross her palm. I gave the old biddy a clipped lowland groat, and she looked at the palm of my right hand.

She said, “I see death in your past and death in your future.”

“Death waits in all our futures,” I said.

Ah well, she thought. Being dead is probably just like everything else in life: you pick some of it up as you go along, and you just make up the rest.

The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.

"I want to rest now," said Shadow. "That’s what I want. I want nothing. No heaven, no hell, no anything. Just let it end."

"You're certain?" asked Thoth.

"Yes," said Shadow.

Mr. Jacquel opened the last door for Shadow, and behind that door there was nothing. Not darkness. Not even oblivion. Only nothing.

Shadow accepted it, completely and without reservation, and he walked through the door into nothing with a strange fierce joy.

"You people talk about the living and the dead as if they were two mutually exclusive categories. As if you cannot have a river that is also a road, or a song that is also a color."

"You can't," said Shadow. "Can you?" The echoes whispered his words back at him from across the pool.

"What you have to remember," said Mr. Ibis, testily, "is that life and death are different sides of the same coin. Like the heads and tails of a quarter."

"And if I had a double-headed quarter?"

"You don't. They only belong to fools, and gods."

"That," said Wednesday, driving off, "is the eternal folly of man. To be chasing after the sweet flesh, without realizing that it is simply a pretty cover for the bones. Worm food. At night, you're rubbing yourself against worm food. No offense meant."

Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.

And our latest project was Death. It's one of the hard ones—one of the big ones, too, I suspect. Possibly it may even become the attribute that's going to define the Creation for the Created: If not for Death, they'd be content to simply exist, but with Death, well, their lives will have meaning—a boundary beyond which the living cannot cross...

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.

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

The bridal of the earth and sky;

The dew shall weep thy fall tonight,

For thou must die.

Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease,

And layes the soul to sleepe in quiet grave?

Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,

Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.