Quotes About Death

Only teasing', Death seemed to be saying over his shoulder with a rictus smile, with good humor and an oddly paternal affection. 'Take care of yourself, okay? We'll play again.

You see, cancer is simply nature's way of making you want to die.' Tatsu.

My mother would have wanted me to say a prayer, crossing myself at its conclusion, and had this been her grave, I would have done so. But such a western ritual would have been an insult to my father in his life, and why would I do something to offend him now? I smiled. It was hard to avoid that kind of thinking. My father was dead. Still, I offered no prayer.

His eyes were still on me, but they no longer perceived. I stepped back, out of their sightless ambit, and paused to observe the scene. It looked like what it almost was: a weightlifting addict, alone and late at night, tries to handle more than he can, gets caught under the bar, suffocates and dies there. A bizarre accident.

some traveler from the undiscovered country. I know as well as I know anything the dead are simply dead.

Death catches everyone eventually, and I had never harbored any illusions about its ability to catch me. That it had hesitated so long to do so seemed born more of a desire to mock me than of any real inclination to wait. Death had tired of that game, and had finally moved in to collect what we all owe.

I wouldn't want to try to take this guy out with anything less than a scoped rifle. Which is something that's hard to confuse with expiration by natural causes. The hell with it, I thought. Risks are one thing. This looks like suicide. If Tatsu wanted him dead that much, I'd recommend a six-man squad and firearms. Much as I would have liked to do something to buy Tatsu's continued goodwill, this one wasn't worth it.

Murakami liked to fight. Hell, Pride wasn't enough for him. He needed more. And it wasn't the money. Pride, with promotions and pay-per-view, would pay a lot more, to the winners and losers. No. It wasn't the money for this guy. It was the excitement. The proximity to death. The high you can only get from killing a man who's simultaneously doing everything in his power to kill you. I know the sensation. It both fascinates and repulses me.

Men cannot come any closer to immortality without going insane.

He was almost gone. The abbot knelt and placed a small jade Buddha in the pawnbroker's hands and began to pray for his miserable soul. Fang's eyes opened one last time, and he looked blindly down at the jade Buddha, and he made a truly heroic effort. "Cheap, very cheap," he sneered. "No more than two hundred…." Then he too was dead.

We desire to keep the dying and the newly dead close before our eyes so as to give them full need of pity. Our Lord was brought down to be pitied, on the Cross He was too far away.

The Sibyl informs him that it is, in fact, quite simple to get to the world of the dead. The problem is getting back:

Look back at the eternity that passed before we were born, and mark how utterly it counts to us as nothing. This is a mirror that nature holds up to us, in which we may see the time that shall be after we are dead.

This is how readers over the years have come up with the famous "seven last words of the dying Jesus"—by taking what he says at his death in all four Gospels, mixing them together, and imagining that in their combination they now have the full story. This interpretive move does not give the full story. It gives a fifth story, a story that is completely unlike any of the canonical four, a fifth story that in effect rewrites the Gospels, producing a fifth Gospel. This

How awful is it to be dead? It would be better to be the lowest, most impoverished, slave-driven nobody on earth than to be the king of the dead in gloomy Hades. And there is no turning back and no way to improve one's lot. That is the fate of virtually all who die.

The fear of death in antiquity differed from the terrors of torment or horrors of actual nonexistence experienced by so many in the West today. It was instead the dread of losing out on everything a full life has to offer, everything that makes living pleasant.

Probably most people who read the Bible think of Sheol as a Jewish kind of Hades, a shadowy place where everyone goes and all are treated the same, a banal and uninteresting netherworld where nothing really happens and people are, in effect, bored for all eternity. But in fact, in most passages of the Bible where Sheol is mentioned, it may well simply be an alternative technical term for the place where an individual is buried—that is, their grave or a pit.

Hebrew anthropology was not dualistic (body and soul) but unitary. Nephesh means something like life force or even breath. It is not a substance that can leave a person and exist independently of the body. It is the thing that makes bodies live. When the body stops breathing, it becomes dead matter. In modern terms, when you stop breathing, your breath doesn't go somewhere. It just stops. So too with the Hebrew nephesh . The person is then dead.

the rivers Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus flow into the Acheron.

If salvation could come by belonging to the covenantal community of the chosen people, or by keeping the Law of Moses, there would be no reason for God's messiah to have suffered an excruciating death. Following the law thus must have no bearing on how a person stands in a right relationship with God.

God was saving this world. He had destroyed the power of sin by the death of Jesus; he had destroyed the power of death by the resurrection of Jesus; and he would destroy the power of evil by the return of Jesus.

No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus! By god, I'd rather slave on earth for another man—

Death shows that the summum bonum of life is to continue living it.

whoever finds me finds life,                  And obtains favor from the Lord;            But those who miss me injure themselves;                  All who hate me love death.