Often in winter the end of the day is like the final metaphor in a poem celebrating death: there is no way out.

It's an unavoidable truth. Fear of life closes off more opportunities for us than fear of death ever does.

Meditation is a dress rehearsal for death.

I think death has a right to its own courage and dignity and self-respect.

For good undone, and gifts misspent, and resolutions vain

Let us not doubt that God has a father's pity towards us, and that in the removal of that which is dearest to us He is still loving and kind. Death separates, but it also unites. It reunites whom it separates.

Death is a black camel, which kneels at the gates of all.

We like to see death as an unfair conspiracy, and what we want is a magic practitioner, a combination of Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes.

My father was a film-maker. He always said he wanted to go like Humphrey Jennings, the legendary director who stepped backwards over a cliff while framing a better shot.

The living all find death unpleasant; men mourn over it. And yet, what is death, but the unbending of the bow and its return to its case?