Quotes about death

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“It was only after her death that I realized who she was: the apparently magical force at the center of our family who'd kept us all invisibly spinning in the powerful orbit around her.”

“Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all.”

“Only fanatics — in religion as well as in politics — can find a meaning in someone else’s death.”

“If you go to your death rather than do everything you might to prevent what is happening, you are merely committing suicide and trying to make yourself feel better about it. That is the act of a coward. It is beneath contempt.”

“Death is not such a bad thing. What would be a bad thing would be living without challenges. Without knowing defeat, we cannot know what victory is. There is no life without death.”

“If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there… When nothing new can get in, that's death.”

“Death row is a nightmare to serial killers and ax murderers. For an innocent man, it's a life of mental torture that the human spirit is not equipped to survive.”

“Death is the number two fear that people have and public speaking is the first!”

“there is no ascent to the heights without prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death.”

“The only cure for a real hangover is death.”

“The day I went into physics class it was death.”

“Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death”

“After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts – like a Chinese nest of boxes – oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front – in our ancestors, back and back until…”

“Joe" I said. "It's Stephanie."
"Does this involve death?"
"Not yet."
"Does this involve sex?"
"Not yet."
"I can't imagine why else you'd be calling me.”

“I want us to be doing things, prolonging life's duties as much as we can. I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.”

“You don't know how easy death is. It's - it's like a door. A person simply walks through it, and she's lost to you forever.”

“Life and death were so unpredictable. So close to each other. We existed moment to moment, never knowing who would be the next to leave this world.”

“Writing is a deeper sleep than death.
Just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave,
I can't be dragged from my desk at night.”

“everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death”

“And thus we all are nighing
The truth we fear to know:
Death will end our crying
For friends that come and go.”

“the very fact of the death of someone close to them aroused in all who heard about it, as always, a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn't.”

“Michael could never remember his father ever having uttered a word about death, as if the Don respected death too much to philosophize about it.”

“Though lovers be lost, love shall not; And death shall have no dominion.”

“Death is the Graduation of the Soul”

“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence.
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you always open petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously)her first rose or if it be your wish to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly
as the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending; nothing we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries
rendering death and forever with each breathing”

“It takes so little to change everything. If you really thought about it, it would scare you to death.”

“Life is a movie; death is a photograph.”

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies. To be in the window and watch people being sent to concentration camps or being attacked in the street and do nothing, that's being dead.”

“Whither thou goest, I will go;
Where thou diest, will I die
And there will I be buried:
The Angel do so to me, and more also,
If aught but death part thee and me.”

“He smiled at me… fondly. ʺAh, my daughter,ʺ
he said. ʺEighteen, and already youʹve been accused of murder, aided felons, and acquired a death count higher than most guardians
will ever see.ʺ He paused. ʺI couldnʹt be prouder.ʺ”

“You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.”

“Do-gooding is like treating hemophilia - the real cure is to let hemophiliacs bleed to death… before they breed more hemophiliacs.”

“Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud…”

“Do you have any coffee?'…'It stunts my growth, and I'm afraid of death.”

“Capital T-truth is about life before death.”

“What makes you so certain?"
"But I am not certain," I told him. "Nothing is certain. You want certainty?"
"Yes!"
"Then you want death.”

“I do not cling to life sufficiently to fear death.”

“And the moment you care that much, a man has you. He owns a little piece of your soul, and he can beat you to death with it.”

“I'm not afraid of death. Death's afraid of me.”

“For I have seen it and I have felt it and it is love, not death, that undoes us.”

“Fairness doesn't govern life and death. If it did, no good man would ever die young.”

“How could you not want to draw breath one more day? How could your own life be such a cheap commodity? But then I started to understand: when your existence is hell, death must be heaven.”

“Merciful death. How you love your precious guilt”

“Death is an inevitability, isn't it? You become more aware of that when you get to my age. I don't worry about it. I'm ready for it. When I go, I want to go doing what I do best. If I died tomorrow, I couldn't complain. It's been good.”

“Death? Why all this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition to life, not an evil.”

“Death’s favorites don’t die.”

“A man doesn't say I will starve myself to death to keep from starving, or that he'd spend all of his money to save money. Why should he be willing to die for the privilege of living?”

“There is a legitimate argument over whether the death penalty effectively deters violent crime, although my personal observation is that not one of the criminals who have been executed over the years has ever killed again.”

“I know beginnings, I know endings too,
and life-in-death, and something else
I'd rather not recall just now.”

“Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.”

“Death alone gives meaning to life, and you will never fully live until you know you must die. And make your peace with that knowledge.”

“Not if we blow it up," Gale says brusquely. His intent, his full intent, becomes clear. Gale has no interest in preserving the lives of those in the Nut. No interest in caging the pray for later use.
This is one of his death traps.”

“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.”

“Every day when I wake I tell myself that it will be my last. If you are not trying to hold on to time, you are not so afraid of losing it… And then, if you make it to bedtime, you feel the joy of cheating death out of one more day.”

“Honey, I plan to marry you the moment the ink is dry on that death certificate.”

“Don't think of death as an ending. Think of it as a really effective way of cutting down your expenses.”

“Black is the color of night. White is the true color of death”

“Punch any of mine, and I’ll break your arm off and beat you to death with it.”

“Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It's no coincidence we call them 'deadlines.”

“I am not a fate worse than death, dammit!”

“Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again.”

“Weave the circle, tightly sewn,
Let nothing evil or unknown
Enter within. Stay without
On pain of death, we cast you out.”

“There’s an old Ritadarion saying. You’re never more alive than when you walk hand in hand with death. (Syn)”

“Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, And yet a third of life is passed in sleep.”

“She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.”

“That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.”

“My death will not be penciled on someone's calendar.”

“What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?”

“Only in death will we have our own names since only in death are we no longer part of the effort. In death we become heroes.”

“Life is a banquet and most poor s. o. b.'s are starving to death." Auntie Mame”

“Soulmates. That was the word. Maggie could sense what it meant. Two people connected, bound to each other forever, soul to soul, in a way that even death couldn't break. Two souls that were destined for each other.”

“Everything that happens before Death is what counts.”

“I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.”

“I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part.”

“Most conservatives also believe in the death penalty, but not abortion, which proves they like to procrastinate.”

“Most men fear getting laughed at or humiliated by a romantic prospect while most women fear rape and death.”

“Time and death sleep side by side.”

“Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.”

“A man falling off a cliff to certain death will stretch out a hand even to his worst enemy.”

“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”

“The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one had ever been put to death in Socrates' name. And that is because Socrates' ideas were never made law. Law, in whatever name, protects privilege.”

“Philosophy leads to death, sociology leads to suicide.”

“By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be.”

“Will we ever stop being afraid of nights and death?

When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.”

“Let's have a good clean three-legged death race.”

“We look into each other's eyes as we shake. His are still full of death and horror, but in them I see my face reflected, and inside my tiny eyes inside his, I think I see some hope.”

“It's lovely. If only you could frost someone to death."

"Don't be so superior. You can never tell what you will find in the arena. Say it's a gigantic cake-”

“Man’s wants remain unsatisfied till death.
Then, when his soul is naked, is he one
With the man in the wind, and the west moon,
With the harmonious thunder of the sun”

“My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. I wanted my death to be something the people could relate to, a basis for further mobilization of the community.”

“Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.”

“A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?”

“There are any number of magical creatures, mostly female, whose singing can bring about horror and death. Sirens, undines, banshees, Bananarama tribute bands…”

“Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;
If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!”

“Psychologically, the choice "to think or not" is the choice "to focus or not." Existentially, the choice "to focus or not" is the choice "to be conscious or not." Metaphysically, the choice "to be conscious or not" is the choice of life or death.”

“I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.”

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”

“The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom.”

“Because death is the only thing that could have ever kept him from you.”

“The leading cause of death among fashion models is falling through street grates.”