Katherine Mansfield Quotes

What's going to happen when I die? I may be buried, or I may be cremated, I may give my body to science. I haven't decided yet.

If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

To neglect at any time preparation for death is to sleep on our post at a siege; to omit it in old age is to sleep at an attack.

I don't want to die in a car accident. When I die it'll be a glorious day. It'll probably be a waterfall.

In your teens and twenties, death doesn't exist. In your thirties, you glance down the road occasionally. But then in your forties, it becomes a full-time job looking the other way.

I've been running from, and toward, death all my life, more aware of it than a person should be.

Some people hate funerals. I find them comforting. They hit the pause button on life and remind us that it has an end. Every eulogy reminds me to deepen my dash, that place on the tombstone between our birth and our death.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

I have great luck. I'm used to people dying and going away. Not used to it exactly - but I expect it. Like, whenever people go off on a trip, I save their phone messages because I think they might die.

You can't choreograph death, but you can choreograph your funeral.

I don't think most people know what's going to be in their obituary, but I do.

Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details.

I have made my will; I have been tormented to do it. I have bought repose; I know the powerlessness and inutility of it.

This getting old is something. I think I envy my dog, because my dog is sixteen, and she's limping, and she's still living, but she doesn't look at me like she knows. She's not thinking what I'm thinking. It's a cruel trick that we all know the ending.

I think of dying every day... At a certain age, you should be prepared to go at any time.

My grandma, Nai Nai, has had the clothes she wants to be buried prepared since she was like 60. I guess there is an openness to discussing. It's part of life. It's part of the every day.

Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins. Do not forget to make proper arrangements for your last will and testament: speaking personally, I ask that I be taken to the cemetery in a moving van. May my friends destroy every last copy of the printing of the Speech concerning the Modicum of Reality.

So Now You're Death: Here's What You'll Need

It is not dying, but living, that is a preparation for Death.

Preparing for the worst is an activity I have taken up since I turned thirty-five, and the worst actually began to happen.

We really feel the fact of our mortality after we turn forty years old.

A brush with death always helps us to live our lives better.

To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.

Always be ready; always live in such a way that death can never find you unprepared.

I do not intend to spare myself, not to avoid emotions or difficulties. I don't care much whether I live a longer or shorter time... the world concerns me only in so far as I feel a certain debt toward it, because I have walked on this earth for thirty years, and out of gratitude I want to leave some souvenir.