Quotes About Death

Killing was easy. Dying was something else.

In the past, it was known as a massive stroke, and you simply died. But improved resuscitation techniques have now prolonged and refined the agony.

Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without the blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.

No. Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there's no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It's the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It's the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It's the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days.

Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.

The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.

I read that the body remakes itself every seven years. Every cell. Even the bones rebuild themselves like coral. Why then do we remember what should be long gone? What's the point of every scar and humiliation? What is the point of remembering the good times when they are gone? I love you. I miss you. You are dead.

I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad for her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss.

The dead are on their way to work, grey limbs rubbing together in an open grave, stack on stack in the metal containers of car, tube and train. The grisly carriages are painted bright colors, guillotine colors of tumbril and blade, execution-bright. Each man and woman goes to their particular scaffold, kneels, and is killed day after day. Each collects their severed head and catches the train home. Some say that they enjoy their work.

One of us hadn't finished, why did the other one go? And why without warning? Even death after long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. The day before the Wednesday last, this time a year ago, you were here and now you're not. Why not? Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today? And where are you?

Only in death may we be reunited with those we have lost. For myself, I do not seek death but neither do I fear that which will bring me peace.

when the universe exploded like a bomb, it started ticking like a bomb too. we know our sun will die, in another hundred million years or so, then the lights will go out and there will be no light to read by anymore.

Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there's no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It's the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It's the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It's the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days and makes us waver at another mile, another smouldering village.

The dark forest looked on fire. The trees were lit up like funeral pyres. She thought she saw bodies strapped to the trees, burning, burning, burning.

I believe it is each man's task to awaken his own soul. His soul is that part of him not subject to death and decay; that part of him made alive to truth and beauty. If he has no soul he is a brute. And where does this soul go, at death? said Byron. That is unknown, answered Shelley; the becoming of the soul, not its going, should be our concern. The mystery of life is on earth, not elsewhere.

This is the city of uncertainty, where routes and faces look alike and are not. Death will be like that. We will forever be recognizing people we have never met. But darkness and death are not the same. One is temporary, the other is not.

Until we learn to stop dying Tom, we have to live with the consequences. There's no room for the dead unless you treat them as ornamental.

If time is a river then we shall all meet death by water.

He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that the thing which had received such imperfect animation would subside into dead matter, and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench forever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life.

There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our own death bearable.

Byron is an atheist and does not believe in life after death. We are haunted by ourselves, he says, and that is enough for any man.

El amor es tan fuerte como la muerte.

I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad about her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss.

The line between life and death is a couple of inches at most. The width of a door that connects two rooms.