Quotes About Death

Can life be counted upon to limit itself? No. It is the mindless striving of two to become infinity. Can death be counted upon to limit itself? Never. It is the equally mindless effort of zero to encompass infinity.

It is said that the dead forget the dead in the house of Hades, Cassandra, but I hoped it was not so.

There, in the worlds of the Life and the Death, the worlds that she used to know. Now, some say her name is Mercy, and others say it's Lust. Her secret name is Isis. Her secret soul is Dust.

But look around you...  Death and Light are everywhere, always, and they begin, end, strive, attend, into and upon the Dream of the Nameless that is the world, burning words within Samsara, perhaps to create a thing of beauty.

You ever kill yourself, Corwin?" "Not recently. How'd you manage it?

and while I had often said that I wanted to die in bed, what I really meant was that in my old age I wanted to be stepped on by an elephant while making love.

He felt her cold lips touch his eyes, like coins for Charon. After a time he heard her singing... The song was a piece of forever.

In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

Suicide How would I know I don't suffer any more, if I'm dead?

All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.

For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life. Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death.

What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: She is going to die: I shudder… over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

There is a time when death is an event, an ad-venture, and as such mobilizes, interests, activates, tetanizes. And then one day it is no longer an event, it is another duration, compressed, insignificant, not narrated, grim, without recourse: true mourning not susceptible to any narrative dialectic.

As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.

Mourning. At the death of the loved being, acute phase of narcissism: one emerges from sickness, from servitude. Then, gradually, freedom takes on a leaden hue, desolation settles in, narcissism gives way to a sad egoism, an absence of generosity.

To be engulfed: outburst of annihilation which affects the amorous subject in despair or fulfillment. At its best, when it's fulfillment, it's a kind of disappearance at will. An easeful death. Death liberated from dying.

We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

I myself cannot construct my love story to the end. I am its poet (its bard) only for the beginning; the end, like my own death, belongs to others; it is up to them to write the fiction, the external, mythic narrative.

Dreamed of maman again. She was telling me—O cruelty!—that I didn't really love her. But I took it calmly, because I was so sure it wasn't true. The idea that death would be a kind of sleep. But it would be horrible if we had to dream eternally. (And this morning, her birthday. I always gave her a rose. Bought two at the little market of Mers Sultan and put them on my desk)

The true act of mourning is not to suffer from the loss of the loved object; it is to discern one day, on the skin of the relationship, a certain tiny stain, appearing there as the symptom of a certain death : for the first time I am doing harm to the one I love, involuntarily, of course, but without panic.

The crisis of engulfment can come from a wound but also from a fusion: we die together from loving each other: an open death, by dilution into the ether, a closed death of the shared grave.

Photographs thrust home the fact of our mortality. We look at faces and limbs warm or tense with life, knowing full well that they are now dust. Sound haunts me even more. I can look at a photo of Maria Callas and accept the fact that she is dead, but I am bewildered when I hear her voice coming out of my CD player. For that voice, quivering with immediacy and passion, is the quintessence of life-of what it means to be fully alive.