Quotes About Death

ROS: I want to go home. Which way did we come in? I've lost my sense of direction. GUIL: The only beginning is birth and the only end is death - if you can't count on that, what can you count on?

No, no, no... you've got it all wrong... you can't act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen ---it's not gasps and blood and falling about---that isn't what makes it death. It's just a man failing to reappear, that's all ---now you see him, now you don't, that the only thing that's real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back---an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.

No one gets up after death-there is no applause-there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's death.

Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything ... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more ... the endless time of never coming back ... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound

Do you think death could possibly be a boat? No, no, no...death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat. I've frequently not been on boats. No, no no - what you've been is not on boats.

Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.' Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.

Perhaps that's what all human relationships boil down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?

There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.

It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both. In sorting it all out, he hit on the notion that if one day a year were devoted to it, everybody could get it out of the way and the rest of the year would be safe and free. In this manner he instituted National Suicide Day.

She was fierce in the presence of death, heroic even, as she was at no other time. Its threat gave her direction, clarity, audacity.

People who die bad don't stay in the ground.

Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present—intolerable—and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.

You're in trouble,' she says, yawning. 'Deep, deep trouble. Can't rival the dead for love. Lose every time.

And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life.

In a way she was jealous of death.

Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it.

They did not believe death was accidental—life might be, but death was deliberate.

Nobody counted on Garner dying. Nobody thought he could. How 'bout that? Everything rested on Garner being alive. Without his life each of theirs fell to pieces. Now ain't that slavery or what is it?

Girls can do that. Steer a man away from death or drive him right to it.

Thank God for life, True Belle said, and thank life for death.

You know as well as I do that people who die bad don't stay in the ground.

Well, that's the way it was. Nobody counted on Garner dying. Nobody though he could. How 'bout that? Everything rested on Garner being alive. Without his life each of theirs fell to pieces. Now ain't that slavery or what is it?

It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both.

Don't mistake the fathers' thanks, Fairy had warned her. Men scared of us, always will be. To them we're death's handmaiden standing as between them and the children their wives carry. During those times, Fairy said, the midwife is the interference, the one giving orders, on whose secret skill so much depended, and the dependency irritated them. Especially here in this place where they had come to multiply in peace.