Quotes About Death

The glory is forever. Those were Aginisi's last words to her in Cherokee. Her death words. It was a done thing now.

You don't forget the feeling of stepping through a door and understanding in some unexplainable way that death has walked in before you.

Did the dead still want things? Or was death simply a letting go of all that is held so tightly in life—an understanding of the temporal and shallow nature of the human matters of possession, greed, desire, justice?

I write horror because I enjoy it. I'm endlessly fascinated by the supernatural, by death, by darkness. And, to be honest, I don't have much choice. This is the way my mind works.

There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Sometimes my love is melancholy and I hold her head in my hands. Sometimes I recall our hair grows after death. Then, I must grab handfuls of her hair, and, I tell you, there are apples, walnuts, ships sailing, ships docking, and men taking off their boots, their hearts breaking, not knowing which they love more, the water, or their women's hair, sprouting from the head, rushing toward the feet.

My belief is that when you die, that's it. As a mature person, one should accept that. But despite the total absence of concrete evidence, billions on this planet are convinced there is more. Most curious.

Oscar Wilde suggested that every portrait painted with feeling is of the artist not the sitter. The artist reveals himself through the coloured canvas. The self-portrait is therefore a consultation of what the artist wishes to say about their art, a physical rendering that aims to included a psychoanalytical evaluation. It may offer and insight into the essence of their creative unconscious, their ambitions and desires. Yet the act of painting a self portrait is also implicitly about death.

What did it matter what she wrote about a dead Swedish girl, when people in other parts of the world did nothing but kill each other?

I do not fear the unknown. I do not even fear death--in the event that I've lived a good life. What I fear is a life of mediocrity.

The Pestilence recurred at intervals throughout the fourteenth century, in 1361, 1369, 1375 and 1390, at times when the country was already under the stress of the French War. Cities were emptied of population, the countryside was desolate. Life did not begin to return to normal until about the time of Chaucer's death in 1400.

A servant who killed his master, a wife who killed her husband, a clergyman who killed his prelate were all guilty of 'petty treason', for which the penalty was death but without the gruesome quartering.

Life is like canvas and when you die you have to sign the bottom corner. Will you be happy with what the painting looks like?

I only suggest to you: Will you dwell on killing this man? You wish for revenge? If you do, he has already killed you by slow poison. So, let it go. Why waste your time? His life will see to his death.

Lumea nu merit? sacrificiul de a tr?i pentru ea, cu atât mai pu?in de a muri.

The locus of the modern struggle with its enemy of death is clearly the body (not mind, society, or the afterworld). The body is the site of tragedy, the ultimate unresolvable paradox, for it is at once the source of life and of death.

Life is too transcendentally humorous for a man not to take it seriously. Compared with it, Death is but a shallow jest.

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know

Maybe knowledge is power, but it's damned hard to think a burglar to death.

Don't be afraid. The dead cannot hurt you. They give you no pain, except that of seeing your own death in their faces. And one can face that, I find.

The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present — they are real.

Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at ease before his own hearth.

This is the reality if you take a stand against the government in Iran.' He looked me in the eye. 'Would you take that risk?' It was a difficult question. I liked to think I was the kind of person who would make a stand, but it was easy for me to say, coming from a democratic country with its unarmed policemen and the reassuring notion of habeas corpus enshrined in law. Taking a stand in Iran was a life or death decision.

The effect of civilization is to impose human law upon environment until it becomes machine-like in its regularity. The objectionable is eliminated, the inevitable is foreseen. One is not even made wet by the rain nor cold by the frost; while death, instead of stalking about gruesome and accidental, becomes a prearranged pageant, moving along a well-oiled groove to the family vault, where the hinges are kept from rusting and the dust from the air is swept continually away.