Quotes About Death

Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.

Here richly, with ridiculous display,The Politician's corpse was laid away.While all of his acquaintance sneered and slangedI wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.

Loss and possession, death and life are one, There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.

He knows different now. It's the living that chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives. Thomas More had spread the rumor that Little Bilney, chained to the stake, had recanted as the fire was set. It wasn't enough for him to take Bilney's life away; he had to take his death too.

What can you do but, as Cicero says, live hopefully, die bravely?

It's the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives.

this is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash.

You should not desire, he knows, the death of any human creature. Death is your prince, you are not his patron; when you think he is engaged somewhere, he will batter down your door, walks in and wipes his boots on you.

And your man?' He hesitates. 'Long dead too?' It is the most delicate way that can be contrived, to ask a man if he has killed someone.

Interesting how our vocabulary responds, providing us with words we have never needed before, words stacked away for us, neatly folded into our brain and there for our use: like a bride's lifetime supply of linen, or a ducal trove of monogrammed china. Death will overtake us before a fraction of those words are used.

Mirabeau: "If you have been told to clear us from this hall, you must ask for orders to use force. We shall leave our seats only at bayonet point. The King can cause us to be killed; tell him we all await death; but he need not hope that we shall separate until we have made the constitution." Audible only to his neighbor, he adds, "If they come, we bugger off, quick.

Now the elm chest is carried towards the chapel, where the flags have been lifted so she can go in by the corpse of her brother, George Boleyn. "They shared a bed when they were alive," Brandon says, "so it's fitting they share a tomb. Let's see how they like each other now.

the lawyers' saying 'Le mort saisit le vif'? The dead grip the living. The prince dies but his power passes at the moment of his death, there is no lapse, no interregnum

Call no man happy. Call no man happy until he has gone down to his grave in peace.

What for do we nail down the dead?

If a man should live as if every day is his last, he should also die as if there is a day to come, and another after that.

The dead do not negotiate.

The dead are more faithful than the living. For better or worse, they do not leave you. They last out the longest night.

Death stays when the visitors have gone, and the nurses turn a blind eye; he leans back on his portable throne, he crosses his legs, he says, 'Entertain me.

You should not desire, he knows, the death of any human creature. Death is your prince, you are not his patron; when you think he is engaged elsewhere, he will batter down your door, walk in and wipe his boots on you.

At the front, people die for their mistakes. Why should politicians be more gently treated? They made the war. They deserve a dozen deaths, each of them. What can we try them for, except for treason, and how can you punish treason, except by death?

Death is your prince, you are not his patron; when you think he is engaged elsewhere, he will batter down your door, walk in and wipe his boots on you.

A shock will do it, he said, or strong emotion, strong emotion of any sort. It can be horror. Or disgust. But, then again, it doesn't have to be. Sometimes, he said, people die laughing.

Petrarch writes, "between one dip of the pen and the next, the time passes: and I hurry, I drive myself, and I speed toward death. We are always dying—I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or block their ears; they are all dying.