Quotes About Death

We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us.

We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us. —William H. Gass, "Mr. Gaddis and His Goddamn Books" (2006)

Jesus didn't die as a frustrated failed revolutionary. His death was the revolution.

Whenever anybody whom we love dies, we discover that although death is commonplace it is terribly original. We may have thought about it all our lives, but if it comes close to us, it is quite a new, strange thing to us, for which we are entirely unprepared. It may, perhaps, not be the bare loss so much as the strength of the bond which is broken that is the surprise, and we are debtors in a way to death for revealing something in us which ordinary life disguises.

Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.

No young man ever thinks he shall die.

When a man is dead, they put money in his coffin, erect monuments to his memory, and celebrate the anniversary of his birthday in set speeches. Would they take any notice of him if he were living? No!

Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was time when we were not this gives us no concern -- why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be

Nature breeds a vast oversupply of experiments and then sterilizes the failures by murdering them.

Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but it serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment; therefore the principle inherent in the clause that prohibits pointless infliction of excessive punishment when less severe punishment can adequately achieve the same purposes invalidates the punishment.

All the pirates, and Lord Pitch's mercy, were dead in less time than it takes to sing a song.

Sometimes I wonder what if I run off or dropped dead," Francis said. "Helen'd probably go crazy." "Why if you dropped dead she'd bury you before you started stinkin'," Jack said. "That's all'd happen." "What a heart you have," Francis said. "You gotta bury your dead," Jack said.

The dead. No more'n a breath. You let that last one go and you're with them again.

Sam's Place had never felt so empty. He suspected the emptiness was not in the old Quonset hut; it was in him. There was nothing in him now, nothing but the great emptiness of death, which he seemed to carry with him like a virus.

There are two kinds of people in the world, Norman. People who have things and people who want the things other people have. A day don't go by that there's not war somewhere in this world. A war to end all wars? That's like saying a disease to end all diseases. Only way that'll happen is when every human being on this earth is dead.

He was no stranger to brutal death. Both as sheriff and as a cop on Chicago's south side, he'd seen his share of dying. Murder, accident, overdose - it happened in many ways, but the end was the same. Something sad and confusing left behind. Only the shape of life, only the empty outline.

His father had been murdered fifteen hundred miles away. He was just gone. He became the emptiness of the cabin, and that's how Ren had thought of death. Emptiness. A grabbing at air. A conversation stopped in mid-sentence. A body from which the soul had simply departed.

The dead are} "somewhere else. Beyond pain. Beyond fear. Beyond anger. Beyond caring. These are the burdens of the living. From Heaven's Keep

I had been to visitations before and have been to many since and I've come to understand that there's a good deal of value in the ritual accompanying death. It's hard to say good-bye and almost impossible to accomplish this alone and ritual is the railing we hold to, all of us together, that keeps us upright and connected until the worst is past.

Life is a blessing and death a deliverance. Both are gifts, and neither is in our hands.

There was spirit in all things, Cork believed, knowledge in every molecule of creation. Nothing ever went truly unnoticed, from the fall of a single leaf to the death of a child.

Studies have shown that fathers of murdered children often die within a few years of the murder, often of heart failure. Really, they die of grief.

But Ben Rifkin lay in a refrigerated drawer in the M.E.'s office while my son lay in his warm bed, with nothing but luck to separate the one from the other.