Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

I've dealt with losing close ones before, and I've been around friends that have lost friends at a young age. I think it's important to think about - not necessarily death, but about life and think about where you're going and how you want to be remembered and the legacy you want to leave.

Now all my teachers are dead except silence.

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.

Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die; it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is not what I seek. Beloved boy, so willful and brooding, your sacrifice will have enriched not my life but my death. ... Centuries as yet unborn within the dark womb of time would pass by thousands over that tomb without restoring life to him, but likewise without adding to his death, and without changing the fact that he had been.

I'm not sure I've learned anything new about life; but I've had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.

When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity - but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story.

The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.

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.

When I am dead and opened, you shall find Calais lying in my heart.

They are not dead who live in the hearts they leave behind.

Death is not only a passing on but a time for everyone else to truthfully reflect on one's life.

Rain in the graveyard, and the world puddled into blurred reflections.

To us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year--in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life--there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.

People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.

Perhaps people don't come into their true maturity until a parent dies.

It's too late to fall in love with Sharon Tate / But it's too soon to ask me for the words I want carved on my tomb.

The dead sit at our tables long after they have gone.

Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.

Death, vicious death, Leave a green branch for love.

"When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things," Franny said. "What about the dead?" I asked. "Where do we go?"

I have come to believe, more strongly than ever, that after people die they really do live on through those who love them.

When you're alive and everything is going fine, why talk about things? Talking's for later, when talking's all there is that's left.

When I die, remember that what you knew of me is with you always. What is buried is only the shell of what was. Do not regret the shell, but remember the man. Remember the father.

What do people fear most about death? I asked the reb. "Fear?" he thought for a moment. 'Well, for one thing, what happens next? Where do we go? Is it what we imagined?" That's big. "Yes. But there's something else." What else? He leaned forward. "Being forgotten," he whispered.