Quotes About Death

I read in a magazine the other day that Hindu Indians do not mourn their dead; instead they rejoice, believing that the loved one has gone to a better place. I cannot imagine that, myself, for how can the heart not ache with the sorrow of that terrible finality? Do these people have no feelings?

And all the beautiful words of the poets, Cornelius, can say nothing, I swear to you, of the fifty thousand ways to die like a dog, within a few hours.

God has created too few unmixed evils to warrant the belief that death is one of them. In all things else in nature, goodness so abounds that we are authorized to infer that it does not stop even at the grave. It is only that her footprints have become invisible.

It is easier to die bravely than to live so.

Without death in the world, existence in it would soon become, through over-population, the most frightful of curses.

He that shrinks from the grave with too great a dread, has an invisible fear behind him pushing him into it.

To death we owe our life; the passing of one generation opens a way for another.

Whatever your main struggle is, it is insignificant in the face of your death; it is petty and unimportant and has no meaning at all. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

She'd observed this before: how -- ironically -- it took death to make one feel momentarily alive, truly present, minute to minute.

The dead are always available to us, just not how we'd prefer.

Perhaps we don't need these religious concoctions to pillow the fear of death. Just the fact that there is an unknown, and something greater, can bring a feeling of peace. That's enough for me.

Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger. Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions. There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not. —T. S. Eliot

Death teaches you that. You would give anything, forgive anything, for just one more second. . . .

The not knowing—the hope—has become more painful than death. And that just makes the tragedy all the more obscene. It is horrible enough that you make a mother suffer like

Many believe that I am infallible in such matters, that I am so professional and dangerous that death itself gives me a wide berth. I confess that I do all I can to encourage, amplify, and intensify this reputation. I want you to fear me. I want you to cringe every time I enter a room because you do not know what I might do next. But I am not naïve enough to buy my own press, if you will. No matter how good you are, a sniper can take you out. As

There's a Shakespeare quote," she said. "From Hamlet. He says that death is—and I think I have the quote right—an undiscovered country from whose borne no traveler returns." He

She's dying, Win. Cancer. She has maybe a week or two." "I know." Myron sat back. His throat felt dry. "Is that the entire message?" "She wanted you to know that it's your last chance to talk to her," Myron said. "Well, yes, that's true. It would be very difficult for us to chat after she's dead." Myron

It's the cruelest thing in the world. Death is better. When you're dead, the pain stops. But hope keeps raising you way up high, only to drop you to the hard ground. Hope cradles your heart in its hand and then it crushes it with a fist. Over and over. It never stops. That's what hope does.

Surrounded by madness, surrounded by hunger, surrounded by everything but death, I knew death was our only way out.

To see an almost certain horrible death--you know how crowds all sit at the edge of their seats, /praying/ subconsciously for a spectacular accident--and then to be whisked away from it so suddenly--brought to the edge of tragedy, and then to have their better natures win out, showing them how much nicer they always /knew/ they were--that was the supreme thrill.

The city lay cool and dim beneath a vaulting sky of high-scudding gray clouds. A gray shroud that covered the corpses of buildings, stiff in brick-and-steel rigor mortis, pale in their eternity of sooty death.

He was furious. He wouldn't let me bury them. It didn't matter. There was no way to dig up the deckplates. He dried up the snow. He brought the night. He roared and sent locusts. It didn't do a thing; they stayed dead. I'd had him.

could hear AM draw in his breath. His toys had been taken from him. Three of them were dead, could not be revived. He could keep us alive, by his strength and talent, but he was not God. He could not bring them back.

We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors of literature happily have joined in proclaiming its death. A substantial number of Americans who believe they worship God actually worship three major literary characters: the Yahweh of the J Writer (earliest author of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers), the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark, and Allah of the Koran.