Quotes About Death

We are, all of us, wandering about in a state of oblivion, borrowing our time, seizing our days, escaping our fates, slipping through loopholes, unaware of when the axe may fall. As Thomas Hardy writes of Tess Durbeyfield, 'There was another date . . . that of her own death; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it?

Holding my child, I realised my vulnerability to death: I was frightened of it, for the first time. I knew all too well how fine a membrane separates us from that place, and how easily it can be perforated. —

am dead: Thou livest; …draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story —Hamlet, Act V, scene ii

I am dead: Thou livest; …draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story —Hamlet, Act V, scene ii

Do not cry for me, Raven. Dying is part of living, a birth into a new life. You know this.

It is the first day of November and so, today, someone will die.

Perhaps death is a metaphor to remind us of a secret of life we failed to notice.

I prepare my portrait for my woman to hang on a wall when I die. she says: Is there a wall to hang it on? I say: We'll build a room for it. Where? In any house.

I embrace you, until I return to my void, as an eternal visitor. No life and no death in what I sense as a bird passing beyond nature. when I embrace you… from "Maybe, Because Winter Is Late

Yet you love sleep and salute Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, and forget that he is death's brother.

as an eternal visitor. No life and no death in what I sense as a bird passing beyond nature. when I embrace you… — Mahmoud Darwish, from "Maybe, Because Winter Is Late," The Butterfly's Burden . Copper Canyon Press, 2006

we are seized by the urge to weep For one who died for nothing.

Da qualche parte Didi si putrefaceva e moriva in eterno. Giorno dopo giorno. Mese dopo mese. Anno dopo anno.

Sprawled, bloody, holding the pistol, he looked like a police photograph of a suicide. Dart went back to his chair and picked up the Smith and Wesson. Five minutes passed like a year.

It'll be the ballot or the bullet. It'll be liberty or it'll be death.

Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.

If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Hefner.

The problem with Western culture is that it is a show-off culture that intimidates. This is why it is generating so much death, loss and displacement. To perform ritual for show is to generate some kind of death or loss. Concealment of ritual is an act of life preservation because it is only in its concealment that needs are met that cannot be met in any other way. If

It is in my mind that a people faced with death or slavery as their only choices are not readily going to relinquish war. - Longinus Sdapeze

The warmth of hell would be a blessing after this. Do you suppose there is a cold hell for those who died in wintertime? - Fernandez de Anguilar

Lass, the man is already dead," said one of the twins. "You do nae have to pull his head off. 'Tis already twisted around enough on its own.

The highest of all occult orders which exists only in the inner world may be called the "Order of Melchizedek," although among certain nations it has other names. This Order is composed entirely of the graduates of the other Mystery Schools who have actually reached the point where they can give birch to their present selves out of their own natures, like the mysterious phoenix bird which, breaking open at death, permits a new bird to fly forth.

The reaping skeleton physically signifies death but philosophically that irresistible impulse in Nature which causes every being to be ultimately absorbed into the divine condition in which it existed before the illusionary universe had been manifested.

By initiation into the Mysteries and a certain process known as operative theology, this law of birth and death is transcended, and during the course of physical existence that part of the spirit which is asleep in form is awakened without the intervention of death. This is at once the primary purpose and the consummate achievement of the Mysteries: that man shall become aware of and consciously be reunited with the divine source of himself without tasting of physical dissolution.