13,737 Quotes About Death

Death, like God, is still much too big for us. If this book were bare as a clean-picked bone, each syllable would point to that desolate beauty. But a book is built of words, and words imply a Great Struggling to Understand. Death laughs outside the boundaries of human understanding. While we huddle in libraries and houses, apartments and churches, parks andcafés, Struggling to Understand, death chomps sedately on our bones, lazy with victory.

A living corpse. A phrase which has hatched behind my eyes (seemingly without thought) and now lives as a hot pulsation in my brain as I walk, write, and sleep. I have been told that there is a miniature death in every breath: the millisecond after inhale and before exhale, when we hang in the hollow spaceless. This is another way of saying that we are all of us resurrected beings, and all of us not, our corpses sliding tight behind us in the vernix of birth.

And for the past year, I’ve told myself I should have died with them. I tell myself that every day. But my heart stubbornly keeps on beating. And I’m still alive. Utterly miserable and still alive.

The dead teach us to live.

The day before she died, she called me to her and said, "Botchan, when I die, please, for mercy's sake, let me be buried in your family temple. Then I can wait happily for you to come". So Kiyo's grave is in the Yōgenji temple at Kobinata.

As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relationships with this best and truest friend of mankind that death's image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling.

This is the secret that none dares tell who fights for a cause. Dying, we are all alike.

Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same...They can be neither separated, nor mixed.

Wherever you are afraid, try to explore, and you will find death hiding somewhere behind. All fear is of death. Death is the only fear source.