Quotes About Death

It was Muriel Spark, in her novel Memento Mori: "If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

poster of Santa Muerte, Holy Death, a skeleton in a hooded cloak, with a grinning skull, her bony hand wrapped around the shaft of a scythe.

Why see death as a hangman when it is truer to see it as a harvester leveling the earth with its scythe? Oddly, we take hope from the seasons — the rebirth of spring after the death of winter — or from the rising and setting of the sun. But no spring, no dawn beyond death, has ever been proven. Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

Why not?" "Because I'm not a broken branch. Dead things go downstream. That's a funeral procession on that creek. If we surrender to the current, we're doomed." He pointed his finger stump in the direction of the coast. "Everything tends that way. But we've got to fight it, because down there is death.

Octavio Paz when he writes, "The Mexican chases after death, mocks it, courts it, hugs it, and sleeps with it. He thinks of it as his favorite plaything and his most lasting love.

All these Mexican speculations seem true to me—death as a party, a plaything, a protest, a somber ritual.

in 1990, a fifteen-year-old boy was climbing the fence, and when he got to the top, a Border Patrol agent shot him. He fell back onto the Mexico side and he died.

I said that. "A veces, las personas—los paracaidistas—mueren." Sometimes the skydivers die. Dieter seemed pleased that I had challenged him

Adventure is the unexpected experience of discovery, of course; but it is also a kind of death, an end of innocence.

They ought to bury people in hospitals and let sick people get well in the cemeteries.

she lost herself in a delirious absence from herself which restored her to love and, perhaps, brought her to the edge of death.

Death is our constant companion, and it is death that gives each person's life its true meaning.

When night comes and no one is watching, I feel afraid of everything: life, death, love or the lack of it; the fact that all novelties quickly become habits; the feeling that I'm wasting the best years of my life in a pattern that will be repeated over and over until I die; and sheer panic at facing the unknown, however exciting and adventurous that might be.

I think that, with age, people come to realize that death is inevitable. And we need to learn to face it with serenity, wisdom and resignation. Death often frees us from a lot of senseless sufferings.

What good is money to you if you're going to die? It's not often that money can save someone's life.

In a world where everyone struggles to survive whatever the cost, how could one judge those who decide to die?

That is why embittered people find heroes and madmen a perennial source of fascination, for they have no fear of life or death. Both heroes and madmen are indifferent to danger and will forge ahead regardless of what other people say.

They say that in the second before our death, each of us understands the real reason for our existence, and out of that moment, heaven or hell is born.

Our contradictions. We are in such a hurry to grow up, and then we long for our lost childhood. We make ourselves ill earning money, and then spend all our money on getting well again. We think so much about the future that we neglect the present, and thus experience neither the present nor the future. We live as if we were never going to die, and die as if we had never lived.

An awareness of death encourages us to live more intensely.

Our life is a constant journey, from birth to death. The landscape changes, the people change, our needs change, but the train keeps moving. Life is the train, not the station.

We must love because we are loved by God. We must be conscious of death if we are to have a proper understanding of life. We must struggle in order to grow, but without falling into the trap of the power we gain through that struggle, because we know that power is worthless. Finally, we must accept that our eternal soul is, at this moment, caught in the web of time with all its opportunities and its limitations.

Our soul is governed by four invisible forces: love, death, power and time.

Life is one long training session, in preparation for what will come. Life and death lose their meaning, there are only challenges to be met with joy and overcome with tranquility.