13,737 Quotes About Death

It came to Mary now that her mother had been right, after all; Mary had been born for this. In sixteen years she'd shot along the shortest route she could find between life and death, as the crow flew.

This concern, feebly called 'love of nature', seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.

He brooded on how close destruction always was to all creatures, animals as well as humans, and he realized that there is nothing we can predict or know for certain in this world except death.

I believe that there is something connecting us ... Something that was here before we got here and will still be here after we're gone. I've begun to believe that all of our consciousnesses are bound up in that greater consciousness. ...An animating presence .... [pp. 205-206]

Besides, the story is ambivalent and mysterious in its ending. Is this Alkestis returning from down below? Why does she have a veil over her face? Could it be that when we forcefully bring back to life what has been lost through love what we get is only a shate of its former reality? Maybe we can never succeed fully in restoring the soul to life. Maybe she will always be veiled and at least partially shielded from the rigors of actual life. Love demands a submission that is total.

I'd suffered many losses in recent years after my father mother uncle aunt and cousin had all passed away. In her final years my mother often lamented that there was no one alive who had known her as a girl and I was starting to understand how spooked she'd felt. I wasn't sure I could take any more abandonments. One succumbs so easily to mind spasms, worry spasms. [p. 95]

الموت، أقسى الموت، أن تَنْحلَّ طينًا فى يد الخزّاف يعجنُهُ ويُبدئُهُ وينفخ فيه منأهوائِهِ وكأنه ما كان ذا شكلٍ ولا معنى.

Her favourite song was 'God Has Blotted Them Out,' which was meant to be about sins, but really was about anyone who had ever annoyed her, which was everyone. She just didn't like anyone and she just didn't like life. Life was a burden to be carried as far as the grave and then dumped. Life was a Vale of Tears. Life was a pre-death experience.

If you are distant and misanthropic, selfish or cruel, you will find yourself alone in life and death.