All Quotes By Tag: Death

“A man begins dying at the moment of his birth. Most People live in denial of Death’s patient courtship until, late in life and deep in sickness, they become aware of him sitting bedside.”

“Cyrano: The leaves—Roxane: What color—Perfect Venetian red! Look at them fall.Cyrano: Yes—they know how to die. A little wayFrom the branch to the earth, a little fearOf mingling with the common dust—and yetThey go down gracefully—a fall that seemsLike flying!”

“Do you want to know something about tyrants? When faced with death, they weep and they beg just like the rest of us.”

“If men only felt about death as they do about sleep, all terrors would cease. . . Men sleep contentedly, assured that they will wake the following morning. They should feel the same about their lives.”

“Give me liberty or give me death.”[From a speech given at Saint John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia on March 23, 1775 to the Virginia House of Burgesses; as first published in print in 1817 in William Wirt’s Life and Character of Patrick Henry.]”

“The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of starsLetting in the light, peephole after peephole— A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.”

“She Dwelt Among the Untrodden WaysShe dwelt among the untrodden waysBeside the springs of Dove,A Maid whom there were none to praiseAnd very few to love:A violet by a mossy stoneHalf hidden from the eye!—Fair as a star, when only oneIs shining in the sky.She lived unknown, and few could knowWhen Lucy ceased to be;But she is in her grave, and, oh,The difference to me!”

“But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near”

“Just when it seemed my mother couldn’t bearone more needle, one more insane orange pill,my sister, in silence, stood at the endof the bed and slowly rubbed her feet,which were scratchy with hard, yellow skin,and dirt cramped beneath the broken nails,which changed nothing in time exceptthe way my mother was lost in it for a whileas if with a kind of relief that doesn’t relieve.And then, with her eyes closed, my mother saidthe one or two words the living have for gratefulness,which is a kind of forgetting, with a senseof what it means to be alive long enoughto love someone. Thank you, she said. As for me,I didn’t care how her voice suddenly seemed lowand kind, or what failures and triumphsof the body and spirit brought her to that point—just that it sounded like hope, stupid hope.”

“Death seemed to lose its terrors and to borrow a grace and dignity in sublime keeping with the life that was ebbing away.”

“Death is the true inspiring genius, or the muse of philosophy, wherefore Socrates has defined the latter as θανάτου μελέτη. Indeed without death men would scarcely philosophise.”

“When my trust was suspended from the fragile thread of justice and in the whole city they were chopping up my heart’s lanterns when they would blindfold me with the dark handkerchief of Law and from my anxious temples of desire fountains of blood would squirt out when my life had become nothing nothing but the tic-tac of a clock, I discovered I must must must love, insanely.”

“There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.”

“I can’t do anything to death, doctor’s orders.”

“The problems of today’s youth were no longer a Sunday supplement, or a news broadcast, or anything so remote and intangible. They were suddenly become a dirty, shivering boy, who told us that in this world we had built for him with our sweat and our blood, he was not only tired of living, but so unscared of dying that he did it daily, sometimes for recreation.”