Death Quotes

I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.

~ Samuel Beckett

I would have had to kill him, and Death, you know, keeps secrets better even than a guilty Roman.

~ Hafiz

After breakfast I spent an hour cleaning my revolver and trying my skill at a target. Jane shook her head, probably thinking that bullets were vain against demonic powers. But Perdita was hugely delighted with the shining little instrument and wanted it for a plaything; women of all ages will play with death! (Absolute Evil)

~ Julian Hawthorne

Loneliness is the standard that separates life from death.

~ Sorin Cerin

The belief in death leads meditating about life; meanwhile, the belief in life leads you thinking about death.

~ Sorin Cerin

All things that we ordained festival,Turn from their office to black funeral;Our instruments to melancholy bells,Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast,Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change,Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse,And all things change them to the contrary.

~ William Shakespeare

Samo mislim da su sprovodi vrlo slični smrti. Možeš imati želje i planove, ali na kraju ipak nemaš kontrolu ni nad čim.

~ Gayle Forman

Dying's a fearful popular activity these days so we often double 'em up.

~ John Marsden

Puis il réfléchit: la réalité ne coïncide habituellement pas avec les prévisions; avec une logique perverse, il en déduisit que prévoir un détail circonstanciel, c'est empêcher que celui-ci se réalise. Fidèle à cette faible magie, il inventait, pour les empêcher de se réaliser, des péripéties atroces; naturellement, il finit par craindre que ces péripéties ne fussent prophétiques. Misérable dans la nuit, il essayait de s'affirmer en quelque sorte dans la substance fugitive du temps. Il savait que celui-ci se précipitait vers l'aube du 29; il raisonnait à haute voix; je suis maintenant dans la nuit du 22; tant que durera cette nuit (et six nuits de plus) je suis invulnérable, immortel. Il pensait que les nuits de sommeil étaient des piscines profondes et sombres dans lesquels il pouvait se plonger. Il souhaitait parfois avec impatience la décharge définitive qui le libérerait tant bien que mal de son vain travail d'imagination.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

We tend to get a little information before we off people. It’s not a play by ear sort of deal.

~ Holly Hood

I was afraid, sheer afraid, and wondered at myself. You see, I've no more pluck than any man of my inches but I'd been about a good bit. I'd seen adventure and heard other fellows talk it over, and I knew you're pretty sure to get out of everything with a whole skin till that last particular time that you don't - so what's the use of grizzling? (Golden Baby)

~ Alice Brown

Dead men cannot take effective action; their power of influence on others lasts only till the grave. Deeds and actions that energise others belong only to the living. Well, then, look at the facts in this case. The Saviour is working mightily among men, every day He is invisibly persuading numbers of people all over the world, both within and beyond the Greek-speaking world, to accept His faith and be obedient to His teaching. Can anyone, in face of this, still doubt that He has risen and lives, or rather that He is Himself the Life? Does a dead man prick the consciences of men...?

~ Athanasius Of Alexandria

A 'civilization' that makes such a ridiculous fuss about alleged 'war crimes' - acts of violence against the actual or potential enemies of one's cause - and tolerates slaughterhouses and vivisection laboratories, and circuses and the fur industry (infliction of pain upon creatures that can never be for or against any cause), does not deserve to live.

~ Savitri Devi

Як умру, то поховайте Мене на могилі, Серед степу широкого, На Вкраїні милій, Щоб лани широкополі, І Дніпро, і кручі Було видно, було чути, Як реве ревучий. Як понесе з України У синєє море Кров ворожу... отойді я І лани, і гори — Все покину і полину До самого бога Молитися... а до того Я не знаю бога.

~ Taras Shevchenko

As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.

~ Thomas Pynchon

I could have done even better, miss, and I'd know a lot more, if it wasn't for my destiny ever since childhood. I'd have killed a man in a duel with a pistol for calling me low-born, because I came from Stinking Lizaveta without a father, and they were shoving that in my face in Moscow. It spread there thanks to Grigory Vasilievich. Grigory Vasilievich reproaches me for rebelling against my nativity: 'You opened her matrix,' he says. I don't know about her matrix, but I'd have let them kill me in the womb, so as not to come out into the world at all, miss.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There is a pain – so utter – It swallows substance up – Then covers the Abyss with Trance – So Memory can step Around – across – opon it – As one within a Swoon – Goes safely – where an open eye – Would drop Him – Bone by Bone.

~ Emily Dickinson

Cad é an mhaith dom eagla a bheith orm? Ní shaorfadh eagla duine ón mbás, dar ndóigh.

~ Peig Sayers

As they prepared themselves to go ashore no one doubted in theory that at least a certain percentage of them would remain on the island dead, once they set foot on it. But no one expected to be one of these. Still it was an awesome thought and as the first contingents came struggling up on deck in full gear to form up, all eyes instinctively sought out immediately this island where they were to be put, and left, and which might possibly turn out to be a friend's grave.

~ James Jones

But now, as it is, sorrows, unending sorrows must surge within your heart as well—for your own son’s death. Never again will you embrace him stiding home. My spirit rebels—I’ve lost the will to live, to take my stand in the world of men—

~ Homer

Fife... simply walked off by himself, into the jungle to look at all the things which would continue to exist after he had ceased to. There were a lot of them. Fife looked at them all. They remained singularly unchanged by his scrutiny.

~ James Jones

I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition or to have feared the apparition of a spirit. Darkness had no effect upon my fancy, and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Some years later, long after he and Megadeth parted company, Jay Jones was stabbed to death with a butter knife during-rumor has it-a fight over a bolonga sandwich. That's not funny, of course. But, if you knew Jay, neither is it particularly suprising.

~ Dave Mustaine

...why can't I stop all the moving and look out over the vast arrangements and find by the contours and colors and qualities of light where my father is, not to solve anything but just simply even to see it again one last time, before what, before it ends, before it stops. But it doesn't stop; it simply ends. It is a final pattern scattered without so much as a pause at the end, at the end of what, at the end of this.

~ P. Harding

That's my town,' Joaquin said. 'What a fine town, but how the buena gente, the good people of that town, have suffered in this war.' Then, his face grave, 'There they shot my father. My mother. My brother-in-law and now my sister.' 'What barbarians,' Robert Jordan said. How many times had he heard this? How many times had he watched people say it with difficulty? How many times had he seen their eyes fill and their throats harden with the difficulty of saying my father, or my brother, or my mother, or my sister? He could not remember how many times he heard them mention their dead in this way. Nearly always they spoke as this boy did now; suddenly and apropos of the mention of the town and always you said, 'What barbarians.

~ Ernest Hemingway

It seems that the people of Oran are like that friend of Flaubert who, on the point of death, casting a last glance at the irreplaceable earth, exclaimed: Close the window, it's too beautiful.

~ Albert Camus

Here is a minute. It may be my love is dead, but here is a minute to kneel over the grave and pray by it.

~ William Makepeace Thackeray

Mostly I couldn't bear... the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead.

~ Gail Caldwell

Zu früh, befürcht ich; denn mein Herz erbangtUnd ahnet ein Verhängnis, welches, nochVerborgen in den Sternen, heute NachtBei dieser Lustbarkeit den furchtbarn ZeitlaufBeginnen und das Ziel des läst'gen Lebens,Das meine Brust verschließt, mir kürzen wirdDurch irgendeinen Frevel frühen Todes.Doch er, der mir zur Fahrt das Steuer lenkt,Richt' auch mein Segel!I fear, too early. For my mind misgivesSome consequence, yet hanging in the stars,Shall bitterly begin his fearful dateWith this night's revels, and expire the termOf a despisèd life, closed in my breast,By some vile forfeit of untimely death.But He that hath the steerage of my courseDirect my sail!Romeo: Act I, Scene 4

~ William Shakespeare

When will the deathOf Death ever come?from The Siege

~ Visar Zhiti

Ah, God, it's barbaric, however you look at it,' he told Ruth.'What, cremation?' she asked.'Death.

~ Anne Tyler

The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

Way far back in the beginning of the world was the whirlwind warning that we could all be blown away like chips and cry- Men with tired eyes realize it now, and wait to deform and decay- with maybe they have the power of love yet in their hearts just the same, I just don't know what that word means anymore- All I want is an ice cream cone

~ Jack Kerouac

Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says 'you're next.' Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries.

~ Christopher Hitchens

My horizon lightened, I see an old woman. Who is she? Where is she from? Bent over, the ends of her boubou tied behind her, she empties into a plastic bag the left-overs of red rice. Her smiling face tells of the pleasant day she has just had. She wants to take back proof of this to her family, living perhaps in Ouakam, Thiaroye or Pikine.Standing upright, her eyes meeting my disapproving look, she mutters between teeth reddened by cola nuts: 'Lady, death is just as beautiful as life has been.

~ Mariama Bâ

I was living my own future and my brother's lost one as well. I represented him here just as he represented me there, in some unguessable other place. His move from life to death might resemble my stepping into the kitchen - into its soft nowhere quality and foggy hum. I breathed the dark air. If I had at that moment a sense of calm kindly death while my heart beat and my lungs expanded, he might know a similar sense of life in the middle of his ongoing death.

~ Michael Cunningham

The plane had lost power in all three engines, dropped from thirty-four thousand feet to twelve thousand feet. Something like four miles. When the steep glide began, people rose, fell, collided, swam in their seats. Then the serious screaming and moaning began. Almost immediately a voice from the flight deck was heard on the intercom: We're falling out of the sky! We're going down! We're a silver gleaming death machine! This outburst struck the passengers as an all but total breakdown of authority, competence and command presence and it brought on a round of fresh and desperate wailing.

~ Don Delillo

THE BARROW In this high field strewn with stones I walk by a green mound, Its edges sheared by the plough. Crumbs of animal bone Lie smashed and scattered round Under the clover leaves And slivers of flint seem to grow Like white leaves among green. In the wind, the chestnut heaves Where a man's grave has been. Whatever the barrow held Once, has been taken away: A hollow of nettles and dock Lies at the centre, filled With rain from a sky so grey It reflects nothing at all. I poke in the crumbled rock For something they left behind But after that funeral There is nothing at all to find. On the map in front of me The gothic letters pick out Dozens of tombs like this, Breached, plundered, left empty, No fragments littered about Of a dead and buried race In the margins of histories. No fragments: these splintered bones Construct no human face, These stones are simply stones. In museums their urns lie Behind glass, and their shaped flints Are labelled like butterflies. All that they did was die, And all that has happened since Means nothing to this place.Above long clouds, the skiesTurn to a brilliant redAnd show in the water's faceOne living, and not these dead. — Anthony Thwaite, from The Owl In The Tree

~ Anthony Thwaite

It was in the reign of George II. that the above-named personages lived and quarrelled ; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now

~ William Makepeace Thackeray

Nothing shall part us in our love till Thanatos (Death) at his appointed hour removed us from the light of day.

~ Apollonius Of Rhodes