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Quotes About Death

The human mind is so limited it can only build an arbitrary heaven — and usually the physical comforts they endow it with are naively the kind that can be perceived as we humans perceive — nothing more. No: perhaps I will awake to find myself burning in hell. I think not. I think I will be snuffed out. Black is sleep; black is a fainting spell; and black is death, with no light, no waking.
~ Sylvia Plath
Antoine St. Exupery once mourned the loss of a man and the secret treasures that he held inside him. I loved Exupery; I will read him again, and he will talk to me, not being dead, or gone. Is that life after death — mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring? Maybe. I do not know.
~ Sylvia Plath
It was like the first time i saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.
~ Sylvia Plath
A time of darkness, despair, disillusion-so black only the inferno of the human mind can be-symbolic death, and numb shock-then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration
~ Sylvia Plath
My flesh winced, in cowardice, from such a death.
~ Sylvia Plath
In this particular tub, two knees jut up like icebergs, while minute brown hairs rise on arms and legs in a fringe of kelp; green soap navigates the tidal slosh of seas breaking on legendary beaches; in faith we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real. --from Tale of a Tub, written 1956
~ Sylvia Plath
love knows not of death nor calculus above the simple sum of heart plus heart.
~ Sylvia Plath
Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within.
~ Sylvia Plath
Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don't want to die.
~ Sylvia Plath
You are twenty. You are not dead, although you were dead. The girl who died. And was resurrected. Children. Witches. Magic. Symbols. Remember the illogic of the fantasy.
~ Sylvia Plath
White Godiva, I unpeel -- Dead hands, dead stringencies.
~ Sylvia Plath
This month is fit for little. The dead ripen in the grapeleaves. A red tongue is among us. Mother, keep out of my barnyard, I am becoming another. Dog-head, devourer: Feed me the berries of dark. The lids won't shut. Time Unwinds from the great umbilicus of the sun its endless glitter. I must swallow it all. Lady, who are those others in the moons' vat- Sleepdrunk, their limbs at odds? In this light the blood is black. Tell me my name.
~ Sylvia Plath
I had hoped to make her strong and healthy, and now she may be too weak herself after this slow death, like my father's slow long death, to come to me. and I am here, futile, cut off from the ritual of family love and neighborhood and from giving strength and love to my dear brave grandmother's dying whom I loved above thought. and my mother will go, and there is the terror of having no parents, no older seasoned beings, to advise and love me in this world.
~ Sylvia Plath
Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call. It's easy enough to do it in a cell. It's easy enough to do it and stay put. It's the theatrical
~ Sylvia Plath
I needed experience. How Could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die?
~ Sylvia Plath
Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.   I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.
~ Sylvia Plath
I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.
~ Sylvia Plath
The day I went into physics class is was death.
~ Sylvia Plath
I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died
~ Sylvia Plath
Is that life after death — mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring?
~ Sylvia Plath
Semmi sem valódi, csak a jelen, és én máris érzem, századok súlya fojtogat. Élt egy lány száz évvel ezelÅ'tt is, mint ahogy én most. ? halott. Én vagyok a jelen, de tudom, hogy egyszer én is elt?nök. A nagy pillanat, a lángcsóva, jön és megy, véghetetlen futóhomok. Nem akarok meghalni, nem.
~ Sylvia Plath
Once they'd even brought the minister of the Unitarian church, whom I'd never really liked at all. He was terribly nervous the whole time, and I could tell he thought I was crazy as a loon, because I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.
~ Sylvia Plath
You are twenty. You are not dead, although you were dead. The girl who died. And was resurrected. Children. Witches. Magic. Symbols. Remember the illogic of the fantasy. The strange tableau in the closet behind the bathroom: the feast, the beast, and the jelly-bean. Recall, remember: please do not die again.
~ Sylvia Plath
What I fear most I think, is the death of the imagination.
~ Sylvia Plath