Quotes About Death

O starry night, This is how I want to die

I know that I have died before—once in November.

Take your foot out of the graveyard, they are busy being dead.

Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.

We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

There once was a miller with a daughter as lovely as a grape. He told the king that she could spin gold out of common straw. The king summoned the girl and locked her in a room full of straw and told her to spin it into gold or she would die like a criminal. Poor grape with no one to pick. Luscious and round and sleek. Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn. (Rumpelstiltskin)

She suffers according to the digits of my hate. I hear the filaments of alabaster. I would lie down with them and lift my madness off like a wig. I would lie outside in a room of wool and let the snow cover me. Paris white or flake white or argentine, all in the washbasin of my mouth, calling "Oh." I am empty. I am witless. Death is here. There is no other settlement.

One thing I know about death is that it touches my psyche and mumbles in her magnificently unknown words; it floats within me and wanders through my bones every day.

It is snowing and death bugs me as stubborn as insomnia.

For God was as large as a sunlamp and laughed his heat at us and therefore we did not cringe at the death hole.

I refuse to remember the dead. And the dead are bored with the whole thing. But you - you go ahead, go on, go back down, into the graveyard, lie down where you think their faces are; talk back to your old bad dreams.

Death, with one-eyed jack in his hand, makes a promise to the thirteenth child.

Someone is dead.  Even the trees know it

I do a death dance, I lay a snake skin…

To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.

Death's a sad bone; bruised, you'd say, and yet she waits for me, year after year, to so delicately undo an old wound

And so she danced until she was dead, a subterranean figure, her tongue flicking in and out like a gas jet.

Well, death's been here for a long time -- it has a hell of a lot to do with hell and suspicion of the eye and the religious objects and how I mourned them when they were made obscene by my dwarf-heart's doodle.

We are America. We are the coffin fillers. We are the grocers of death. We pack them in crates like cauliflowers. The bomb opens like a shoebox. And the child? The child is certainly not yawning. And the woman? The woman is bathing her heart. It has been torn out of her and as a last act she is rinsing it off in the river. This is the death market. America, where are your credentials?

I have come back but disorder is not what it was. I have lost the trick of it! The innocence of it!… Anne, Anne, flee on your donkey, flee this sad hotel, ride out on some hairy beast, gallop backward pressing your buttocks to his withers, sit to his clumsy gait somehow. Ride out any old way you please! In this place everyone talks to his own mouth. That's what it means to be crazy. Those I loved best died of it— the fool's disease.

I know that I have died before—once in November, once in June. How strange to choose June again

God shined his laughter down upon us like a giant heat lamp and therefore we did not cringe at the death hole

Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.