Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

The difference between art about death and actual death is that one's a celebration and the other's a dull fact.

The exact time of death, I think, is not something that matters so much at this moment for we will be reliving John Paul's life for many days and weeks and even years and decades and centuries to come.

When I'm dead I don't want a funeral. I want people to remember me alive.

Odd thing about death ... it reaffirms life.

Dying is an integral part of life, as natural and predictable as being born. But whereas birth is cause for celebration, death has become a dreaded and unspeakable issue to be avoided by every means possible in our modern society. Perhaps it is that.

I should like to abolish funerals; the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.

Life, the permission to know death.

So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.

In greatness, life and death merge.

What if it is for life's sake that we must die? In truth we are not individuals; and it is because we think ourselves such that death seems unforgivable. We are temporary organs of the race, cells in the body of life; we die and drop away that life may remain young and strong. If we were to live forever, growth would be stifled, and youth would find no room on earth. Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the circumcision of the superfluous. In the midst of death life renews itself immortally.

Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.

Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.

Is life a pregnancy? That would make death a birth.

She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and oh The difference to me!

A funeral isn't for the dead. You'll simply be a stage set for a kind of festival maybe. And besides, you won't even be there.

The earth, that is nature's mother, is her tomb.

It's only life. We all get through it.

Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

Joy, shipmate, joy! (Pleased to my soul at death I cry), Our life is closed, our life begins, The long, long anchorage we leave, The ship is clear at last, she leaps! She swiftly courses from the shore, Joy, shipmate, joy!

That's what life is all about: Let's have a party. Let's have it tonight.

The mortal experience . . . is not like a college course which we can passively audit. Instead, we are taking life's course for credit and there are no summers off - not even semester breaks.

In the midst of death we are in life. Life is the only reality; what men call death is but a shadow.

Let every birthday be a festival, a time when the gladness of the house finds expression in flowers, in gifts, in a little fête. Never should a birthday be passed over without note, or as if it were a common day, never should it cease to be a garlanded milestone in the road of life.

[Death is] a gimmick. It's the time-birth-death gimmick. Can't go on much longer, too many people are wising up.

Black is like the silence of the body after death, the close of life.