Quotes About Death

Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying.

The thought of retirement set his nerves twitching and straining: he always prayed that death would come first.

They killed him because he was too innocent to live.

Innocence must die young if it isn't to kill the souls of men

The gulls swept over Dover. They sailed out like flakes of the fog, and tacked back towards the hidden town, while the siren mourned with them: other ships replied, a whole wake lifted up their voices—for whose death?

Registration and cremation, they go together.

You kill a man – that is so easy,' Dr Hasselbacher said, 'it needs no skill. You can be certain of what you've done, you can judge death, but to save a man – that takes more than six years of training, and in the end you can never be quite sure that it was you who saved him. Germs are killed by other germs. People just survive.

There are no coroners in Paraguay.

Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look around at the little I would be leaving.

The lieutenant said, 'Have you seen enough?' speaking savagely, almost as though I had been responsible for these deaths. Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.

The vultures group themselves on the roof like pigeons: tiny moron head, long necks, faces like Carnival masks, and dusty plumages, peering this and that attentively for death.

Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death...One is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me that morning to take up our old life together.

Aimer à loisir, Aimer et mourir Au pays qui te ressemble.

All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions.

No shots had been fired; we were alive; death had withdrawn perhaps as far as the next canal.

You are interested in a person, not in life, and people die or leave us... But if you are interested in life it never lets you down. I am interested in the blueness of the cheese.

Don't be too sorry for those who die after some pain. It makes them ready to go. Think of how a death sentence must sound when you are full of health and vigour.

Marcel, I know I'm an old woman and as you say a bit of an actress. But please go on pretending. As long as we pretend we escape. Pretend that I love you like a mistress. Pretend that you love me like a lover. Pretend that I would die for you and that you would die for me.' I read the message again now; I thought it movingly phrased . . . And he had died for her, so perhaps he was no comédien after all. Death is a proof of sincerity.

penalties of the ecclesiastical kind began to seem unreal in a state where the only penalty was the civil one of death.

He saw her fixed in her life like a fly in amber—Maria's hand raised to strike: Pedro talking prematurely in the dusk: and the police beating the forest—violence everywhere. He prayed silently, 'O God, give me any kind of death—without contrition, in a state of sin—only save this child.

Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever.

It wouldn't have done to cable the details of his true career, that before he died he had been responsible for at least fifty deaths

Why is it that the hate of man – even of a man like Franco – dies with his death, and yet love, the love which he had begun to feel for Father Quixote, seemed now to live and grow in spite of the final separation and the final silence – for how long, he wondered with a kind of fear, was it possible for that love of his to continue? And to what end?

Aren't we all better dead? the opium reasoned within me.