Quotes About Death

it was quite uncanny to watch them, pressing on to their fate, all unsuspicious a very river of death. Our friends were not poetical, and the sight suggested to them no metaphors of human destiny;

Blut und Boden—blood and soil—was the slogan. The ancient German warrier who died in battle was carried off to Valhalla, and that was a glorious death, whereas to die in bed was ignoble and disgraceful. The Führer was reviving all these ancient barbaric emotions, and his marching legions chanted incessantly about blood and iron and war. "Rise up in arms to battle, for to battle we are born!

The year began with the hanging of one man and ended with the drowning of another.

True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?

The weeks before he died, Mr Mohun Biswas, a journalist of Sikkim Street, St James , Port of Spain, was sacked. He had been ill for some time. In less than a year he had spent more than nine weeks at the Colonial Hospital and convalesced at home for even longer. When the doctor advised him to take a complete rest the 'Trinidad Sentinel' had no choice. It gave Mr Biswas three months' notice and continued, up to the time of his death, to supply him every morning with a free copy of the paper.

Misir's first story was about a man who had been out of work for months and was starving. His five children were starving; his wife was having another baby. It was December and the shops were full of food and toys. On Christmas eve the man got a job. Going home that evening, he was knocked down and killed by a motorcar that didn't stop. 'Helluva thing, Mr Biswas said. 'I like the part about the car not stopping.

desert place! Here let us all for death prepare, Or on the last great journey fare;320 Of Ráma our dear lord bereft, What profit in our lives is left? Huge trunks of trees around us lie, With roots and branches sere and dry, Come let us set these logs on fire And throw our bodies on the pyre.

The discipline is based on one grisly fact: a corpse makes a good lunch.

To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death.' Michel de Montaigne, Essais (1580)

Alas, poor James is dead. / We see his face no more. / For what he thought was H2O / Was H2SO4

Plath had gassed herself, but that was back before the days of natural gas. Then, stoves and household fires were fuelled by poisonous coal gas. People put their heads in the oven and turned on the gas and they died.

Only later we learned that by fainting Peter was protecting himself from the awareness of his wish that the mother of his early childhood would die.

There is a much that a man should not see, should not know, and if he should see it, it is better for him to die.

Trees in the north die lying down – like people.

I believed a person could consider himself a human being as long as he felt totally prepared to kill himself, to interfere in his own biography. It was this awareness that gave me the will to live. I checked myself — frequently — and felt I had the strength to die, and thus remained alive.

Le poète se mourait depuis si longtemps qu'il avait cessé de comprendre que c'était la mort. Parfois, une idée simple et forte se frayait un chemin à travers son cerveau, douloureuse et presque palpable : qu'on lui avait volé le pain qu'il avait mis sous sa tête.

Thousands of people are being buried and no one attends the funerals,' said one of the soldiers. 'In peacetime it's the other way round: one coffin and a hundred people carrying flowers.

He sensed Death with a depth and clarity of which only small children or great philosophers are capable, philosophers who are themselves almost childlike in the power and simplicity of their thinking.

A mountain had died, its skeleton had been scattered over the ground. Time had aged the mountain; time had killed the mountain-and here lay the mountain's bones.

At war a Russian man puts on a white shirt. He may live in sin, but he dies like a saint.

The magic of the revolution had joined with people's fear of death, their horror of torture, their anguish when the first breath of the camps blew on their faces.

One objective fact is that in 1939 there were 28 million Ukrainians, compared with 31 million in 1926, at a time when (barring famine) the birth rate was often twice the death rate. Deaths are calculated on this basis at anywhere between 2.4 and 4 million. More sophisticated studies give a figure nearer to 5 million. OGPU's tally from December 1932 to mid-April 1933 give a figure of 2.4 million deaths from famine and cannibalism; by extrapolating these

The whole city seemed to be pinned down, fascinated by the glassy stare of the Lubyanka. Krymov had thought about various people he knew. Their distance from him was something that couldn't even be measured in space -they existed in another dimension. No power on earth or in heaven could bridge this abyss, an abyss as profound as death itself. But these people weren't yet lying under a nailed-down coffin-lid – they were here beside him, alive and breathing, thinking, weeping.

And toward the evening of the same day, all the world's teletypes received a communication: Death was a result of natural causes. It wasn't said whose death, but the world surmised.