Quotes About Death

We cannot really love the dead. We love a fantasm that secretly consoles. What love sometimes mistakes for death is a kind of intense suffering, a pain that can be endured and absorbed. But the idea of a real ending, that cannot be envisaged . . . Indeed, in the language of love the concept of an ending is devoid of sense. (So we must go beyond love or utterly change it.)

The only cure here was death. They were both gone out of my life.

Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.

Every night is an imitation of death. Without that I would have killed myself long ago.' She

But he was surrendered, they had surrendered him, into the power of death.

She thought, I shall die of misery and pain.

O death, rock me asleep, bring me to quiet rest. Let pass my weary guilty ghost out of my careful breast.

I must return to my freedom which I now realise is something so essential that it makes my love for you seem like death.

One morning, one day, perhaps soon, she would come to him and find him gone; and she knew how much she did not want to see him die, and yet how much she also wished that he might die holding her hand. These thoughts induced tears, which he must not see; and she tried not to think too much about the terrible mystery which was to be enacted . . .

Could she endure it, the long vigil of death made visible?

Death drives away what rules everywhere else, the aesthetic.

Eros and Thanatos: a false pair and a true pair.

I am going mad, she thought, I am in some sort of silent raging grief of which I shall die, everything has gone.

It ceased at last, as everything dreadful has to cease, even if it ceases only by death.

There are those who, even if valued, remain sinister witnesses from the past. James is for me such a witness. It is not even clear whether we like each other. If I were told today that James was dead my first emotion might be pleasurable; though how much does this prove?

Guilt is one way of attaching a meaning to a death. We want to find a meaning. It lessens the pain.

The room had the rather sinister tedium which some bedrooms have, a sort of weary banality which is a reminder of death. A dressing table can be a terrible thing.

This then was love, to look and look until one exists no more, this was the love which was the same as death.

I have been struck down before my life begins. I have already died in the war.

Let him die peacefully in his sleep and not know. Only not tonight, not tonight.

Mortality itself was my philosophical robe.

Sham dead,' I said. 'Dead! Dead dog!' I hoped that this word was in his vocabulary. It was. In a moment Mars's legs sagged and his body became limp and he slid to the ground, his eyes turning back and his mouth hanging open. It was terribly convincing. I was quite upset.

Basically, we live a short, disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up oor lives wi shite, things like careers and relationships tae delude oorsels that it isnae aw totally pointless.

Ah realise now thit death is usually a process, rather than an event. People generally die by degrees, incrementally. They rot away slowly in homes and hoespitals, or places like this.