Patti Smith Quotes

There are few of us but who have been touched somehow by death. Some may not have been touched closely by it nor yet have kept vigil with it, but somewhere along our lives, most of us are sorely bereft of someone near and deeply cherished - and all of us will some day meet it face to face.

Going through an illness and then death of a close friend has changed my attitudes to friendship enormously.

The Tiger Rising is, again, about a motherless child. His name is Rob Horton. He is dealing with the death of his mother, when he and his father move to a new town. And two things happen the same day that Rob gets sent home. One is he meets a girl named Sistine Bailey, who is what my mother would call "a piece of work," and he finds a real tiger in a cage in the woods behind the motel where he lives with his dad. And that's the story: what happens with the Sistine tiger, the real tiger and Rob's grief.

I know what it's like to see one's mother go through the agony of death and be unable to help; there is no consolation. We all have to bear such heavy burdens, for they are unalterably linked to life.

Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.

Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.

In life, there's a lot that I'm afraid of. Death is always scary. My sister passed away. I'm not scared to die, so much as I was scared to not have her in my life, and it took a long time for me to reconcile that. There are fears everyday, and things that I'm afraid of. I fear everything, but I keep going.

Death was a big part of my life growing up. I went to lots of funerals.

With every friend I love who has been taken into the brown bosom of the earth a part of me has been buried there; but their contribution to my being of happiness, strength and understanding remains to sustain me in an altered world.

All of my best friends are dead people. Someday I've got to figure out how that happened.

Every loss which we incur leaves behind it vexation in the memory, save the greatest loss of all, that is, death, which annihilates the memory, together with life.

To how many is the death of the beloved the parent of faith!

Losing my homies in a hurry, they're relocating to the cemetery.

Every life is punctuated by deaths and departures, and each one causes great suffering that it is better to endure rather than forgo the pleasure of having known the person who has passed away. Somehow our world rebuilds itself after every death, and in any case we know that none of us will last forever. So you might say that life and death lead us by the hand, firmly but tenderly.

Death is hacking away at my address book and party lists.

This has been harder for my friends. I know I'm going to die.

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

There is no harm in patience, and no profit in lamentation. Death is easier to bear (than) that which precedes it, and more severe than that which comes after it. Remember the death of the Apostle of God, and your sorrow will be lessened.

We die as often as we lose a friend.

I miss all of my old friends who have passed away. Sometimes you just don't understand why they were taken so soon. I loved and miss Johnny Cash. I miss my old buddy Johnny Paycheck, who happens to be buried in an area of the cemetery that I bought for my family.

They which have no hope of a life to come, may extend their griefs for the loss of this, and equal the days of their mourning with the years of the life of man.

Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.

The only way to take sorrow out of death is to take love out of life.

The name Downhere comes from a song I wrote after a friend of mine died in college, and it was kind of the first time I was dealing with loss and, you know, real mortality, and it was a song of how down here on Earth, we don't have the big picture.

The dead they sleep a long, long sleep; The dead they rest, and their rest is deep; The dead have peace, but the living weep.