Quotes About Death

Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.

This is how we celebrate the Day of the Dead in America: by turning up our collars against the scent of earthworms calling us home.

The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill.

Two dead wasps lay on the sill with their heads close together like a tiny murder-suicide.

The Pueblo story is that everyone started out underground. People and animals, everything. And then the badger dug a hole and let everybody out. They climbed out the hole and from then on they lived on top of the ground. When they die they go back under. […] 'I always try to think of it that way,' he said, after a minute. "He had a big adventure up here, and then went home.

A red-tailed hawk rose high on an air current, calling out shrill, sequential rasps of raptor joy. She scanned the sky for another one. Usually when they spoke like that, they were mating. Once she'd seen a pair of them coupling on the wing, grappling and clutching each other and tumbling curve-winged through the air in hundred-foot death dives that made her gasp, though always they uncoupled and sailed outward and up again just before they were bashed to death in senseless passion.

The whole idea of the sermon was how people connect up in various ways, seen and unseen, and that Mr. Peg had tied a lot of knots in the big minnow seine that keeps us all together. Dead but still here, in other words. That's what killed me the worst.

El tiempo cura y nos mata. Time cures you first, and then it kills you.

A life was a life. She'd been orphaned at an age to internalize death as poor material for a joke. And likewise, salvation.

We felt tired to our bones but anointed by life in a durable, companionable way, for at least the present moment. We the living take every step in tandem with death, naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven, whether we can see that or not. We bear it by the grace of friendship, good mels, and if we need them, talking turkey heads.

The Peggots were stuck, not able to move forward with the normal death matters of cooking and drinking. It was all just loose ends and talk. Like if they hashed through it enough times, they might get to a different ending.

Alive, nobody matters much in the long run. But dead, some men matter more than others.

There's no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed.

It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born. Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed. A lightning that cannot strike twice, our lesson learned in the hateful speed of light. A bite at light at Ruth a truth a sky-blue presentiment and oh how dear we are to ourselves when it comes, it comes, that long, long shadow in the grass.

being dead seemed a lot like not being born yet, and I hadn't especially minded that.

The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill.

My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive. There's no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed.

At the first sign of winter the trees began to die. Leaves and aborted fruits fell in thick, brittle handfuls like the hair of a cancer patient. The abundance of sun and warmth, which we thought would never end, had led the trees on too, promising the impossible. But now the daylight grew thin and they showed no will to live. A dead sea of leaves drifted deep and undisturbed on the orchard floors. No children played there. I spent a lot of time considering the mystery of my family tree.

The sun is all you wait for, the light, guardian saint of all the children who lie like death on the wake of the household crime. You stop your heart like a clock: these hours are not your own. You hide your life away, the lucky coin tucked quickly in the shoe from the burglar, when he Comes. Because he will, as sure as shoes.

Dead men don't bleed. A thriller title if ever there was one.

It's right funny, when yer think about it. First Polly died, then me mam, and now Mrs Fairley. All in just a few months of each other.' Cook returned Emma's concentrated stare. 'It's said, in these parts, that everything goes in threes.

Nos ocultaron que era tan difícil. Por tanto trazamos vírgenes imperfectas, sorprendidos al no hallar al final aquellos ojos vacíos —sino, por el contrario, dolor y remordimiento. Por eso nos herimos, por eso morimos. Pero se trata tan sólo de una cuestión de paciencia. De ejercicio.

I will kill you, and I shall do so in such a way, this world will cease its wars. The world shall be unified in its mourning, not because it misses you, but because of the atrocities which I, alone, will have wrought upon your mangled corpse. And even after the cannons fall silent, I will never be caught. New monsters will be born into folklore to explain what I have done to you.

Had I not known that I was dead already I would have mourned my loss of life. —last words of Ota Dokan, scholar of military arts and poet, 1486