Quotes About Death

Relationships are like a dance, with visible energy racing back and forth between the partners. Some relationships are the slow, dark dance of death.

Those in the North Caucasus hang vacant, since 'our people', an old caretaker tells me, 'are still dying there', and deaths in Syria stand at four. I wonder bleakly if these scrupulous slabs will one day confess to casualties in Ukraine.

A tired man is already in the grip of death and insanity ... A sane man is a man who is fully awake. As he grows tired, he loses his ability to rise above dreams and delusions, and life becomes steadily more chaotic.

he has explored life from end to end and found it all hollow, when actually he is only constipated with his own worthless-ness. He fails to apply his intellect to the question, Why do all living things prefer life to death?

someone condemned to death says, or thinks an hour before his death, that if he had to live on a high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only have room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than die at once. Only to live, to live and live. Life, whatever it may be...

Ask the Outsider what he ultimately wants and he will admit he doesn't know. Why? Because he wants it instinctively, and it is not always possible to tell what your instincts are driving towards. Young W.B. Yeats wanted a fairy land where 'the lonely of heart is withered away.' Dowson and Thompson and Beddoes were 'half in love with easeful death': They are not long, the days of wine and roses Out of a misty dream Our path emerges for a while, then closes Within a dream.

New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.

There were plenty of things in the world that deserved to stay dead, yet they walked.

In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal.

Spoiler: I didn't win the Main Event. You had suspicions, you say? For one thing, the subtitle of this book would be The Amazing Life-Affirming Story of an Unremarkable Jerk Who Won the World Series of Poker! instead of having the word Death in it. For another, do these sound like the words of a motherfucker who won a million goddamn dollars?

In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal. On

The nervous talk was understandable; for most, this was their first visit with a doctor. On the Randall plantation, the doctor was only called when the slave remedies, the roots and salves, had failed and a valued hand was near death.

Even in death the boys were trouble..............Now they had to start a new inquiry, establish the identities of the deceased and the manner of death, and there was no telling when the whole damned place could be razed, cleared, and neatly erased from history, which everyone agreed was long overdue.

That was Sea Island cotton the slaver had ordered for his rows, but scattered among the seeds were those of violence and death, and that crop grew fast. The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood. An insurrection of one. She smiled for a moment, before the facts of her latest cell reasserted themselves. Scrabbling in the walls like a rat. Whether in the fields or underground or in an attic room, America remained her warden.

It was the sound of the god of death from one of the forgotten religions, the one that got it right, upstaging the pretenders with their billions of duped faithful. Every god ever manufactured by the light of cave fires to explain the thunder or calling forth the fashionable supplications in far-flung temples was the wrong one. He had come around after all this time, preening as he toured the necropolis, his kingdom risen at last.

Even in death the boys were trouble.

The Monday vise clenched. Here was that end-of-weekend despair, the death of amusement and the winnowing of the reprieve.

New York City in death was very much like New York City in life. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.

The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn't look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. Was was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple--hate your enemy, know nothing of him.

When you divide death by life you find a circle.

Gloria laughed at them and said that she'd overtaken grief a long time ago, that she was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

death by drowning, death by snakebite ... death by memory loss, death by claymore ... death by paper cuts, death by whoreknife, death by poker game ... death by authority, death by isolation, death by genocide, death by Kennedy ... death by signature, death by silence ... death by performance

They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick'll be able to reach in and grab his heart.

only when a man dies can his life acquire a beginning, middle, and an end: up until then we are constantly unfinished, even the midpoint cannot be located. So only the final word finds the middle word and this, in a way becomes a verse--one's death explains oneself.