Death is a favor to us,
But our scales have lost their balance.

The impermanence of the body
Should give us great clarity.
Deepening the wonder in our senses and eyes

Of this mysterious existence we share
And are surely just traveling through.
–Hafiz, “Deepening the Wonder”
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Should I die, survive me with a force so pure
that you awaken fury from the pale, chill world,
in all directions raise your indelible eyes,
day in, day out, sound your mouth’s guitar.

I don’t want your footsteps to vacillate
nor your smile wane, I don’t want my bequeathed joy
to die. Don’t come knocking at my chest, I’m away.
Dwell in my absence as you would in my estate.

Absence is such a vast house
that you will walk through its walls
and hang paintings in the air.

Absence is such a transparent house
that without my own life I will watch you live
and if I see you suffer, my love, I will die again.
–Rafael Campo, “XCIV”
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It is difficult
to get bones used
to disappearing,
to teach eyes
to close,
but we do it
unwittingly.
–Pablo Neruda, “Past”

I gulped a glass of sauvignon blanc; it tasted like pickle juice. This was wine without you. The moussaka, its dry, dead hulk: This was food without you. Our loft, rich with the international booty of baskets and carvings, took on the tacky, cluttered aspect of an import outlet. This was our home without you. Objects never seemed so inert, so pugnaciously incompensatory. Your remnants mocked me … –Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin

The rugged old Norsemen spoke of death as Heimgang—“home-going.” So the snow-flowers go home when they melt and flow to the sea, and the rock-ferns, after unrolling their fronds to the light and beautifying the rocks, roll them up close again in the autumn and blend with the soil. Myriads of rejoicing living creatures, daily, hourly, perhaps every moment sink into death’s arms, dust to dust, spirit to spirit—waited on, watched over, noticed only by their Maker, each arriving at its own Heaven-dealt destiny. All the merry dwellers of the trees and streams, and the myriad swarms of the air, called into life by the sunbeam of a summer morning, go home through death, wings folded perhaps in the last red rays of sunset of the day they were first tried. Trees towering in the sky, braving storms of centuries, flowers turning faces to the light for a single day or hour, having enjoyed their share of life’s feast—all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love. Yet all are our brothers and they enjoy life as we do, share Heaven’s blessings with us, die and are buried in hallowed ground, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity. –John Muir, John of the Mountains

How much of the darkness in my soul I would give to get you back,
and how threatening to me seem the names of the months,
and the word winter, what a mournful drum sound it has.
–Pablo Neruda, “The Widower’s Tango”

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
–WS Merwin, “Separation”

I was outraged that the world seemed to go on as it had before. As if nothing had happened. They played the same music on the radio, talked about the same problems in the news. Horns honked, dogs barked, just like they did before. –Gail Blanke, “Remembering a Lost Loved One”

… but death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man’s best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free. –Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth

We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance. –Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

When the time comes to leave, just walk away quietly and don’t make any fuss. –Banksy, Wall and Piece

There goes one, the only one, the last of his kind, the end of a particular strand of DNA. ... The better the obit, the closer it approaches re-creation. It’s an act of reverence, a contemplation of this life that sparked and died, but also an act of defiance, a fist waved at God or the stars. And what else, really, do we have besides the story? –Marilyn Johnson, The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries

In the end, everyone is aware of this:
nobody keeps any of what he has,
and life is only a borrowing of bones.
–Pablo Neruda, “October Fullness”

How many more times do we have to come to terms with death before we find safety? Every time people come at us with the intention of killing us, I close my eyes and wait for death. Even though I am still alive, I feel like each time I accept death, part of me dies. Very soon I will completely die and all that will be left is my empty body walking with you. It will be quieter than I am. –Saidu, quoted in Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn’t be filled? –Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one’s ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone—the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there’s no fairness on earth. –Zinaida Yevdokimovna Kovalenko, in Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices From Chernobyl

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. –Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. –Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing when you look at the sky of night. –Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Relatively speaking, having sex is so easy. People do it all the time. It’s so pedestrian; fantasies about making love are rarely necessary and usually contrived. However, dying is always original. It’s always a onetime limited engagement, and (depending on your theology) it’s either the defining moment of existence or the final corporeal sensation in the universe’s most remarkable coincidence. How can anyone not be consumed by that? I’m constantly thinking about how bullets would burn into my lungs, or if my eyes would remain open if my skull shattered a windshield, or if cancer cells itch, or how it will sound if and when I drown. I cannot shake the notion of my head being swatted off by a grizzly bear, or of my rib cage being pulverized by a madman with a ballpeen hammer, or of being buried alive. There has never been a day in my life when I didn’t daydream about having both my collarbones crushed into powder. And these are not things I necessary want to happen; these are just things that warrant consideration (certainly more consideration than how I’d most prefer to orgasm). In all likelihood, you don’t think about dying enough. –Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

There are people in this world who cut such a grotesque figure that even death renders them ridiculous. And the more horrible the death the more ridiculous they seem. It’s no use trying to invest the end with a little dignity—you have to be a liar and a hypocrite to discover anything tragic in their going. –Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

In any man who dies, there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight … No people die but worlds die in them. –Yevgeny Yevtushenko

There is no death. Only a change of worlds. –Duwamish proverb

To love something you know will die is holy. –Kaddish, AIDS memorial, New York, 1987

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity. –Edvard Munch

It is hard to have patience with people who say “There is no death” or “Death doesn’t matter.” There is death. And whatever is, matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter. –CS Lewis, A Grief Observed

When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed. Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter. The body is an old crock that nobody will miss. I have never known a man to think of himself when dying. Never. –Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras

When she died, his kinetic joy and energy evaporated. When she died, his life seemed to collapse like a black hole, creating the density the encyclopedia calls singularity, a force from which nothing can escape, a negativity that devours even light. –Jean Hegland, Into the Forest

The Zen monk Bassui wrote a letter to one of his disciples who was about to die, and in it he said: “Your end which is endless is as a snowflake dissolving in the pure air.” The snowflake, which was once very much a discernible subsystem of the universe, now dissolves into the larger system which once held it. Though it is no longer present as a distinct subsystem, its essence is somehow present, and will remain so. It floats in Tumbolia, along with hiccups that are not being hiccupped and characters in stories that are not being read. –Douglas Hofstader

We ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning. –Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Remember your loves by keeping their spirit alive in you and you will not need sadness. Idolize them only a little. Make peace with their devils, and you will do the same with yours. All will collect dust together. –from a 1996 issue of Dark’s Art Parlour

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death. –Nathaniel Hawthorne, Journal, October 25, 1836

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern—why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be? –William Hazlitt, Table Talk

Between the lips and the voice something goes dying.
Something with the wings of a bird, something of anguish and oblivion.
The way nets cannot hold water.
–Pablo Neruda, “Twenty Love Poems: XIII”

___________________________________________________________

To resonance comes death
like a shoe without a foot, like a suit without a man,
she comes to knock with a stoneless and fingerless ring,
she comes to shout without mouth, without tongue, without throat.
Yet her steps sound
and her dress sounds silent, like a tree.

I know little, I am not well acquainted, I can scarcely see,
but I think that her song has the color of moist violets,
of violets accustomed to the earth,
because the face of death is green,
and the gaze of death is green,
with the sharp dampness of a violet leaf
and its dark color of exasperated winter.
–Pablo Neruda, “Only Death”

___________________________________________________________

Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order. This is what life has taught me. –Katherine Mansfield, in her journal, January 29, 1922

Ah! it is but a little thing, death! I shall fall asleep and all will be over. –Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
–William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

The tide recedes
but leaves behind
bright seashells on the sand.
The sun goes down,
but gentle warmth
still lingers on the land.
The music stops,
And yet it echoes on
in sweet refrains.
For every joy that passes,
something beautiful remains.
–MD Hughes, “Poem”

Although many of us avoid the subject, death is a potent element in our everyday life. We’re not necessarily aware of it all the time, but it has infused our language. –Michael Largo, Final Exits: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of How We Die

Contemplation of our mortality can give a new persepctive, and keep the importance of trivial things...trivial. Every day is truly a gift we must embrace with everything we have. Hug someone, smell a flower, kiss a tree. Sure, we all know we’re going to die—it’s in the contract—and in a healthy way we shouldn’t overtly dwell on it. –ditto

If I had my life over again I would form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs. –Muriel Spark, Memento Mori

From nowhere we come, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. –last words of Chief Isapwo Muksika Crowfoot, as quoted in John Peter Turner’s The North-West Mounted Police

There is no feast on earth which does not end in parting. –Chinese proverb

Death is not the enemy; living in constant fear of it is. –Norman Cousins, The Healing Heart

Loss grew as you did, without your consent … No willpower could prevent someone’s dying. –Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

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. –Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying

To be blessed in death, one must learn to live. To be blessed in life, one must learn to die. –Jesuit verse

We watch things pass by in order to forget that they are watching us die. –Robbe-Grillet

Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live. –Jean Cocteau

I wonder if, before we were born, we were as afraid of life as we are now of death. –Jay Williams

Die in your thoughts every morning and you will no longer fear death. –Hagakure

Tell them that death is absolutely safe. It’s like taking off a tight shoe. –Pat Rodegast, in contact with a disembodied being named Emmanuel

This is the way to die: beauty keeps laying its sharp knife against me. –Hafiz

___________________________________________________________

Let me at least collect your smells
as specimens: your armpits, wollen sweater,
fingers yellow from smoke. I’d need
to take an imprint of your foot
and make recordings of your laugh.

These archives I shall carry into exile;
my body a St. Helena where ships no longer dock,
a rock in the ocean, an outpost where the wind howls
and polar bears beat down the door.
–Annabelle Despard, “Should You Die First”

___________________________________________________________

Every breath you take is because something has died. Something or someone lived and died so you could have this life. This mountain of dead, they lift you into daylight. … How will it find you? How will you enjoy their gift? Leather shoes and fried chicken and dead soldiers are only a tragedy if you waste their gift sitting in front of the television. Or stuck in traffic. Or stranded at some airport. How will you show all the creatures of history? … How will you show their birth and work and death were worthwhile? –Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

someone is dressing up for death today, a change of skirt or tie
eating a final feast of buttered sliced pan, tea
scarcely having noticed the erection that was his last
shaving his face to marble for the icy laying out
spraying with deodorant her coarse armpit grass
someone today is leaving home on business
saluting, terminally, the neighbours who will join in the cortège
someone is trimming his nails for the last time, a precious moment
someone’s thighs will not be streaked with elastic in the future
someone is putting out milkbottles for a day that will not come
someone’s fresh breath is about to be taken clean away
someone is writing a cheque that will be marked “drawer deceased”
someone is circling posthumous dates on a calendar
someone is listening to an irrelevant weather forecast
someone is making rash promises to friends
someone’s coffin is being sanded, laminated, shined
who feels this morning quite as well as ever
someone if asked would find nothing remarkable in today’s date
perfume and goodbyes her final will and testament
someone today is seeing the world for the last time
as innocently as he had seen it first
–Dennis O’Driscoll, “Someone”

For what is it to die,
But to stand in the sun and melt into the wind?
–Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

I hate graveside ceremonies. Not because someone has died, since as it happens I’ve never had to bury anyone I was close to. And to anyone else I’m indifferent. Still, I hate funerals. Against the background of someone’s death, any movement seems immoral. I hate funerals for their tone of beautiful, convincing sorrow. For the tears from people who are really strangers, alien mourners. For the suppressed feeling of gladness: “You didn’t die, it was somebody else.” For the secret excitement about the drinking that will follow. For the exaggerated compliments addressed to the deceased. (I have always wanted to shout, “He couldn’t care less! Be more tolerant of the living. Of me, for example.”) –Sergei Dovlatov, The Compromise

I hate to admit it, but even after years of religious training I really don’t believe in the afterlife. I still think that human beings, even our beautiful and wretched souls, are just biology, are just a series of chemical and physical reactions that one day stop, and so do we, and that is that. But I’m looking forward to this blank peace, this oblivion, this nothing, this not being me anymore. –Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

It’s the thought of death that is horrifying; the phenomenon itself always comes as naturally as a sunset. –Peter Høeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!–Mother Jones, The Autobiography of Mother Jones

... we didn’t want to be reminded of how little we counted, how quickly, simply and anonymously death came. Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn’t know, nor how, except by taking a look around at the little I would be leaving. –Graham Greene, The Quiet American

They say one must keep your standards and your values of life alive. But how can I, when I only kept them for you? Everything was for you. I loved life just because you made it so perfect, and now there is no one left to make jokes with, or to talk about Racine and Molière and talk about plans and work and people. I dreamt of you again last night. And when I woke up it was as if you had died afresh. Every day I find it harder to bear. For what point is there in life now? … I look at our favourites, I try and read them, but without you they give me no pleasure. I only remember the evenings when you read them to me aloud and then I cry. I feel as if we had collected all our wheat into a barn to make bread and beer for the rest of our lives and now our barn has been burnt down and we stand on a cold winter morning looking at the charred ruins. For this little room was the gleanings of our life together. All our happiness was over this fire and with these books. With Voltaire blessing us with upraised hand on the wall … It is impossible to think that I shall never sit with you again and hear your laugh. That every day for the rest of my life you will be away. –Carrington, Diaries, February 12-17, 1932 (Lytton Strachey died in January 1932 and Carrington killed herself in March of that year)

If someone is tired and has gone to lie down, we do not pursue him with shouting and bawling. She whom I have lost has lain down to sleep for a while in the Great Inner Room. To break in upon her rest with the noise of lamentation would but show that I knew nothing of nature’s Sovereign Law. That is why I ceased to mourn. –Chuang Tzu

We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love. –Madame de Stael

It is a fearful thing
to love what death can touch.
–Unknown

Death ends a life, not a relationship. –Jack Lemmon

There are so many little dyings that it doesn’t matter which of them is death. –Kenneth Patchen

To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that is is the greatest of evils. And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know. –Plato, The Apology

Married people became interested in each other’s frailties, when no one else was. When one went down, they took the file and case history of each other. This was what death was; not what happened when the heart gave out, for if one believed, then that was the start of life. Death was what happened to those who were left behind. –Clare Boylan, Beloved Stranger

When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness ... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever ... I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it. –H.L. Mencken

Perhaps the place we go to at the end of life is not the primordial ooze but ice—layers and layers of rod-and-cone-shaking beauty. –Gretel Ehrlich, This Cold Heaven

A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist. –Stewart Alsop

I find myself preoccupied with thoughts of death. In some moment of emptiness or pain, an image of dying comes to me: a car accident, a heart attack, a vicious and quick-killing disease. In the psychiatric vernacular these are called “passive thoughts of death.” But in my mind these thoughts are quite active. Rather than feeling the revulsion and fear that would have resulted from thinking about these things several months ago, I find them strangely comforting. –Martha Manning, Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface

O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! … Thou has drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words: Hic jacet! [Here lies] –Sir Walter Raleigh, The History of the World

I am become death, shatterer of worlds. –Robert J. Oppenheimer, upon seeing the first nuclear explosion, which he created

At his passing, there was not even an eddy in the snow, neither the briefest glimpse of the occluded moon nor the faintest stirring through the trees. In this regard, her death, when sooner or later it came, would be like his: the world indifferent, turning smoothly onward toward the fascination of another dawn. – Dean Koontz, False Memory

But of course it had hurt. It had hurt before, in the worst, rupturing way, knowing there would be no more you but the universe would roll on just the same, unharmed and unhampered. –Stephen King, “The Long Walk”

We must have felt what it is to die, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life. –Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Crisco

We talked of death, and this was life to us. –Anne Sexton, describing her friendship with Sylvia Plath

There is…no death…There is only…me…me…who is going to die… –André Malraux, The Royal Way

In the long run we are all dead. –John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform

Death is the only inescapable, unavoidable, sure thing. We are sentenced to die the day we’re born. –Gary Mark Gilmore

I do not know how death will come to me, though once I thought I did. How I will greet it will depend on how hard or easy it comes in. I am very sure that any pain that might accompany my going could not be as bad or worse than some I’ve known within my life. I am resolved that, if I can, I will view the end as the writer does the blank page just in front of him, a beginning. –Rod McKuen, Alone

Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty five years and you pay it back and then one day you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then one day you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe. –Denis Leary

Death: to stop sinning suddenly. –Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

The good die young—because they see it’s no use living if you’ve got to be good. –John Barrymore

Whom the gods love dies young. –Menander, Dis Exapaton

It’s not that we’re afraid, far from it, it’s just that death—it just isn’t us. –John Candy, in Spaceballs

Boy, when you are dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddamn cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you are dead? Nobody. –JD Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

God made death so we’d know when to stop. –Steven Stiles

Everyone dies. Some die because they deserve to; others die simply because they come from Minneapolis. It’s random and it’s meaningless. –John Malkovich, in In the Line of Fire

You may think me shallow or even callous for seeking the laughter in loss, the fun in funerals, but we can honor the dead with laughter and love, which is how we honored them in life. –Dean Koontz, Seize the Night

It’s not, as I thought, that death
creates love. More that love knows death. Therefore
tears, therefore poems, therefore the long stone sobs of cathedrals
that speak to no ferret or fox, that prevent no massacre.
–Anne Stevenson, “Himalayan Balsam”

I give you this
one thought to keep.
I am with you still,
I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sunlight on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken
in the morning’s hush,
I am the swift, uplifting rush
of quiet birds in circled flight,
I am the soft stars
That shine at night.
Do not think of me as gone—
I am with you still,
in each new dawn.

–Native American prayer

Perhaps they are not stars in the sky, but rather openings where our loved ones shine down to let us know they are happy. –Eskimo legend

If only I could feel
me pulling back
again
& feel embraced
by reality
again
I would die
Gladly die.
–Jim Morrison, “If Only I”

It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens. –Woody Allen, in Without Feathers

I’d run home and play dead. The next day, I would call all the newspapers and make sure they wrote about me in all the dead columns. –Craig, age 9, when asked what he would do on a first date that was turning sour

Is death the last sleep? No, it is the last and final awakening. –Walter Scott

Life is a journey, but we all end up in the same place—dead. –(?)

The difference between sex and death is that with death you can do it alone and no one is going to make fun of you. –Woody Allen

I wouldn’t mind dying. It’s the business of having to stay dead that scares the shit out of me. –R. Geis

We who are about to die are going to take one hell of a lot of the bastards with us. –Joel Rosenberg, The Silver Crown (a nice play on “We who are about to die salute you.”)

[death is] the best asylum for pains and sorrows and troubles and the injustices of life. –Sadiq Hidayat, The Blind Owl

I am afraid of dying—but being dead, oh yes, that to me is often an appealing prospect. –Kathe Kollwitz

People living deeply have no fear of death. –Anaïs Nin, Diary

Those who cling to life die, and those who defy death live. –Uyesugi Kenshin

Every man before he dies shall see the devil. –English proverb

Would that I might die all at once, but mine is a soul that withers day by day. –Imru’al-Qays

When you die, you don’t go to hell. You’re released from it. –Tai Ambler

We call it death to leave this world, but were we once out of it, and instated into the happiness of the next, we should think it were dying indeed to come back to it again. –(?)

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men. –Jorge Luis Borges

The promise of death is the only thing keeping some people alive. –Fang

Embracing death and the catharsis of “oh my God, I’m going to die” helped me to live. –Tim Burton, in an interview

Before I sink into the big sleep, I want to hear…the scream of the butterfly. –Jim Morrison, “When the Music’s Over”

I wish a storm would come and blow this shit away. Or a bomb to burn the town and scour the sea. I wish clean death would come to me. –Jim Morrison, “Hurricane & Eclipse”

If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride and hug it in my arms. –William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily. –La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

Death is not an evil, for it liberates from all evils… –Giacomo Leopardi, Operette morali

My thoughts are crowded with death
and it draws so oddly on the sexual
that I am confused
confused to be attracted
by, in effect, my own annihilation.
–Thom Gunn, “In Time of Plague”

Even beauty must die! –Friedrich von Schiller, “Lament”

Death was more interesting to him.
Life could not get his attention.
So he died
–Ted Hughes, “Sheep”

Sometimes I think the only thing ready to accept me is death. –Jack Kerouac

The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and fragrant drop of levity—and now you strange apothecary souls have turned it into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive. –Friedrich Nietzsche, 75 Aphorisms

The sole equality on Earth is death. –Philip J. Bailey

Living, I was your plague–
Dying, I’ll be your death.
–Martin Luther

We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying
and our strength leaves us,
and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood
cowering in the last braches of the tree of our life.
–DH Lawrence, “The Ship of Death”

We make love and death at the same time. It is literally possible to die of love. –Carol Muske

Never knock on Death’s door; ring the bell and run away! Death really hates that! –Matt Frewer, in Doctor, Doctor

In spite of it all, I am going to sleep. –Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Go away, I’m all right. –HG Wells

My friend, I am cold. –Jean Sylvain Bailly, at the guillotine

Mother, I’m smothering. –matador Jose Gomez, after being gored by a bull

Let me go, let me go. –Clara Barton

Take me home. I must go home! –composer Phillips Brooks

Let us go in; the fog is rising. –Emily Dickinson

Woe is me, I think I am becoming a god. –Emperor Vespasian

Does nobody understand? –James Joyce

What shall I do next? –Goronwy Rees

Bhikshus, never forget it: decay is inherent in all component things. –Buddha (one version)

The earth is suffocating…swear to make them cut me open, so that I won’t be buried alive. –last request of Frederic Chopin, written on his deathbed

I feel nothing except a certain difficulty in continuing to exist. –Bernard de Fontenelle

Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life. –Charles Frohman (on the sinking Lusitania)

I am seeing things that you know nothing of. –William Allingham

Don’t weep. What I have done was best for all of us. No use. I shall never be rid of this depression. –one version of Vincent van Gogh’s last words

Now I want to go home. –second version of Van Gogh’s last words

Now comes the mystery. –Henry Ward Beecher

Friends applaud: the comedy is over. –Ludwig von Beethoven

Drink to me. –Pablo Picasso

More light! –Johann von Göethe

Codeine . . . bourbon. –Tallulah Bankhead

I can’t sleep. –James M. Barrie

Is everybody happy? I want everybody to be happy. I know I’m happy. –Ethel Barrymore

I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis. –Humphrey Bogart

Josephine... –Napoleon Bonaparte

I am about to—or I am going to—die: either expression is correct. –French grammarian Dominique Bouhours

Ah, that tastes nice. Thank you. –Johannes Brahms

Oh, I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy. – Charlotte Bronte, spoken to her husband of nine months

Beautiful. –Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in reply to her husband who had asked how she felt

Now I shall go to sleep. Goodnight. –Lord Byron

I am dying. I haven’t drunk champagne for a long time. –Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

I’m bored with it all. –Winston Churchill, before slipping into a coma (he died 9 days later)

Goodnight my darlings, I’'ll see you tomorrow. –Noel Coward

Damn it ... Don’t you dare ask God to help me. – Joan Crawford, to her housekeeper, who had begun to pray aloud.

I am not the least afraid to die. –Charles Darwin

My God. What’s happened? –Diana (Spencer), Princess of Wales

Do you hear the rain? Do you hear the rain? –Jessica Dubroff, seven-year-old pilot, minutes before her plane crashed.

Farewell, my friends! I go to glory! –Isadora Duncan

It is very beautiful over there. –lThomas Alva Edison

I’ve had a hell of a lot of fun and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. –Errol Flynn

Turn up the lights, I don’t want to go home in the dark. –O. Henry

I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark. –Thomas Hobbes

I see black light. –Victor Hugo

Let us cross over the river and sit in the shade of the trees. –General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson (killed in error by his own troops at the battle of Chancellorsville during the US Civil War)

Why not? Yeah. –Timothy Leary

Why do you weep. Did you think I was immortal? –Louis XIV

Nothing matters. Nothing matters. –Louis B. Mayer

It’s all been very interesting. –Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Good-bye ... why am I hemorrhaging? –Boris Pasternak

Put out the light. –Theodore Roosevelt

God bless, God damn. –James Thurber