Quotes About Death

He was dying, no matter what his visions had told him, and no slight tender kiss of blood could save him now.

I could smell the catacombs on his garments. I could smell death on him as though he had lain down with his mortal remains. But he was handsome, fine of build and proportion as Avicus had been, not unlike Avicus at all.

There was no time for the old game, the game of drawing out those who wanted to die, those who truly craved my embrace, those in love already with the far country of death of which they knew nothing.

I never knew what life was until it ran out in a red gush over my lips, my hands!

The dead are so close they can hear us, she thought. "Ah, but you see," said the tall white-haired Ryan, as if he'd read her mind, "in New Orleans, we never really leave them out.

matter that we all die, and do not know where we go when we die, or if a justice or explanation awaits us.

Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold.

I who am hard and spare and dedicated to a purpose, felt drawn to her irresistibly; and, knowing it could only culminate in death, I turned away from her at once, wondering if when she gazed into my eyes she found them dead and soulless.

The princess reiterated to Sarah that her faithful Morley . . . will never part with you till she is fast locked in her coffin.

I used to toy with the notion that when we die we find out what our lives have amounted to, finally. I'd never imagined that we could find that out when somebody else dies.

Ah, God, it's barbaric, however you look at it,' he told Ruth. 'What, cremation?' she asked. 'Death.

We live such tangled, fraught lives, he thought, but in the end we die like all the other animals and we're buried in the ground and after a few years we might as well not have existed. This should have depressed him, but instead it made him feel better. The light turned green and he started driving again.

The striking thing about death, she thought, was its eventfulness. It made you see you were leading a real life. Real life at last! you could say. Was that why she read the obituaries each morning, hunting familiar names? Was that why she carried on those hushed, awed conversations with the other workers when one of the nursing home patients was carted away in a hearse?

He had been forty-three years old—too young to think of making funeral plans. So all of that was left to Willa

The trouble with dying is that you don't get to see how everything turns out. You won't know the ending.

She felt guilty about Derek's death, too, because she should have known better than to bring up the sensitive subject of Ian while Derek was driving.

What if heaven is just a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to report on the experiences they collected during their time on earth. The

O dead one, why did you die in the springtime? You haven't yet tasted the squash, or the cucumber salad.

It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death-emotions that appear to have developed upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence. All right then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first.

We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence...

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part.

The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.

To dust is only to forestall burial

What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. I wanted strength, not tea parties. What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live.