Quotes About Death

The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them. Strike had felt the living woman behind the words she had written to friends; he had heard her voice on a telephone held to his ear; but now, looking down on the last thing she had ever seen in her life, he felt strangely close to her.

Jacobean revenge tragedies,

Tis a strange mystery, the power of words! Life is in them, and death. A word can send The crimson colour hurrying to the cheek, Hurrying with many meanings, or can turn The current cold and deadly to the heart.

I'm so full of drugs I cant feel anything but I know I love you. I wonder how much they'd have to give me before that went too. Engouh to kill me I suppose.

Id rather die than have more. Actually I'd rather die than most things. But you know that about me. Will I ever see you again? You could come and see me here. Today I imagined you walking in, like I did when your leg. I imagined you telling them to let me go because you loved me and you'd look after me. I cried . . .

It was far from the first time he'd encountered the tendency to believe the dead would have wanted whatever was most convenient to the living.

Trouble is, you're just as dead if you're knifed by a self-dramatizing twat as by a professional.

Papa had no inner life. He was hollow, hollow… profit, acquisition and ticking little social-democratic boxes… his death grew naturally out of his life. Anomic suicide: Durkheim describes it well. Everyone's death is a fulfilment, really.

Why were you born when the snow was falling? You should have come to the cuckoo's calling, Or when grapes are green in the cluster, Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster For their far off flying From summer dying. Why did you die when the lambs were cropping? You should have died at the apples' dropping, When the grasshopper comes to trouble, And the wheat-fields are sodden stubble, And all winds go sighing For sweet things dying.

Women were so petty, mean, dirty and small. Sulky bitches, the lot of them, expecting men to keep them happy. Only when they lay dead and empty in front of you did they become purified, mysterious and even wonderful.

The only other funeral she'd attended had been four years previously, when she and Strike had attended the cremation of a murdered girl in the course of their first murder investigation,

ordered him to execute this mission. If death was

History is the geology of human experience, a study, as it were, of tragedy and comedy laid down in the strata of past lives. In death there are no winners or losers, merely people who once lived but can never live again. What they thought, what they believed, what they hoped, is largely lost. That which remains is history.

I know that it's easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible.

Time will tell if sorry is enough. I don't think it is. If you died tonight, I wouldn't come to your funeral." "You'd

They who stand with breaking hearts around this little grave, need have no fear. The larger and the nobler faith in all that is, and is to be, tells us that death, even at its worst, is only perfect rest ... The dead do not suffer.

In the night of death, hope sees a star, and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing.

Dido, heartbroken, decides to do what any operatic heroine would do at such a moment: sing an aria, then kill herself.

Life is but a moment, death also is but another.

To Sycamores I'm sick of Love; O let me lie Under your shades, to sleep or die! Either is welcome; so I have Or here my Bed, or here my Grave. Why do you sigh, and sob, and keep Time with the tears, that I do weep? Say, have ye sence, or do you prove What Crucifixions are in Love? I know ye do; and that's the why, You sigh for Love, as well as I

To deprive the Aborigines of their territory, therefore, was to condemn them to spiritual death—a destruction of their past, their future and their opportunities of transcendence.

In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.

In our era, just as in every transitional age, God seems dead, but it is really our Enlightenment culture that has died.

Is there a Mrs. Garret?" Charley asked. "They're all three dead," said Phillip. "Dead and buried and gone to hell, likely." "Why do you say that?" Charley asked. "They must have all been terrible sinners to have married our father," said Keenan.