A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumour. Aldous Huxley
Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young. A E Housman
One always dies too soon – or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are – your life. And nothing else. Jean-Paul Sartre
Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees. Jean-Paul Sartre
Death is a continuation of my life without me. Jean-Paul Sartre
One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death; one dies one’s life. Jean-Paul Sartre
The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole –
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things. Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems
Dying is an art.
Like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I have a call. Sylvia Plath
They always want to get in on the act they sell you. I don’t think they’ve done anything effective in their lives ... Butt out. This is my life and this is my death. It’s been sanctioned by the courts that I die, and I accept that. Gary Gilmore
Sleep; and if life was bitter to thee, pardon,
If sweet, give thanks; thou hast no more to live;
And to give thanks is good, and to forgive. Algernon Charles Swinburne, Ave atque Vale
For the crown of our life as it closes
Is darkness, the fruit thereof dust;
No thorns go as deep as the rose’s,
And love is more cruel than lust. Algernon Charles Swinburne, Delores
Death and taxes and childbirth! There’s never any convenient time for any of them. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind 1936
Teach him how to live,
And, oh! Still harder lesson! How to die. Beilby Porteus, Death, 1759
Government and cooperation are in all things the laws of life; anarchy and competition the laws of death. John Ruskin, Unto this Last, 1862
Life itself is but a shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living: all things fall under this name. The sun itself is but the dark simulacrum, and light but the shadow of God. Lew Brown
Human life ... a process of filling in time until the arrival of death. Eric Berne, 1910-1970, Games People Play 1964
What good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, as if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer? Sigmund Freud
Living is an illness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It’s a palliative. The remedy is death. Nicolas-Sebastien Chamfort
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, 1962
The Meaning of Life is that it stops. Franz Kafka
The shock of her death froze something in me. The child I loved had gone. But I kept looking for her long after I left my own childhood behind. The poison was in the wound, you see, and the wound wouldn’t heal. Lolita 1997 starring Dominique Swain & Jeremy Irons & Frank Langella & Suzanne Shepherd & Melanie Griffith & Keith Reddin & Erin J Dean & Joan Glover & Pat Pierre Perkins & Ed Grady & Michael Goodwin & Angela Paton & Ben Silverstone et al, director Adrian Lyne; viz Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die. Alfred Lord Tennyson
Death is the end of life; ah, why
Should life all labour be? Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Lotus-Eaters, 1832
‘So this is it,’ said Arthur, ‘We are going to die.’
‘Yes,’ said Ford, ‘except... no! Wait a minute!’ He suddenly lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur’s line of vision.
‘What’s this switch?’ he cried.
‘What? Where?’ cried Arthur, twisting round.
‘No, I was only fooling,’ said Ford, ‘we are going to die after all.’ Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
They understand death, they stand there in the church under the skies that have a beginningless past and go into the never-ending future, waiting themselves for death, at the foot of the dead, in a holy temple. – I get a vision of myself and the two little boys hung up in a great endless universe with nothing overhead and nothing under but the Infinite Nothingness, the Enormousness of it, the dead without number in all directions of existence whether inward into the atom-worlds of your own body or outward to the universe which may only be one atom in an infinity of atom-worlds and each atom-world only a figure of speech – inward, outward, up and down, nothing but emptiness and divine majesty and silence for the two little boys and me. Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler
The sun that warmed our stooping backs and
Withered the weeds uprooted –
We shall not feel it again
We shall die in darkness and be buried in the rain. Edna St Vincent Millay, Justice Denied in Massachusetts, re execution of Sacco & Vanetti
I shall die, but
That is all that I shall do for Death. Edna St Vincent Millay, Conscientious Objector
Our new Constitution is now established and has the appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes. Benjamin Franklin
Fear not death for the sooner we die, the longer we shall be immortal. Benjamin Franklin
This world that was our home for a brief spell never brought us anything but pain and grief; it’s a shame that not one of our problems was ever solved. We depart with a thousand regrets in our hearts. Omar Khayyam
The best of men cannot suspend their fate: The good die early, and the bad die late. Daniel Defoe, 1660-1731
If we must die, we die defending our rights. Sitting Bull
If it means my death, I don’t care, because even death will be a sort of freedom. Catherine Fisher, Incarceron
Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time? John Updike, Self-Consciousness
For billions of people around the world death still acts as a gateway to heaven. Ancient Aliens s3e5: Aliens and Mysterious Rituals, History 2011
Arthur: A child wants to see. It always begins like this, and it began like that then. A child wanted to see ... What he saw there became his first memory ... A small boy and a corpse ... An encounter in a curtained room. A small boy and a corpse. Julian Barnes, Arthur & George: Beginnings ch1
Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death. Socrates