I don't fear death. I'm not obsessed with it the way everybody else seems to be.
It has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something tantamount to intrinsic dignity. Of course I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to love and a time to die - and when my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For most situations, however, I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.
Frankly, I'm not much for funerals unless it's absolutely an obligation. I don't feel it serves much of a purpose to go and see my friends just lying there, dead. I try to pay my respects to my friends when they're alive.
Even death is wonderful because, as Woody Allen says, we're not going to know when it happens.
If this is dying, I don't think much of it.
I don't jog, if I die I want to be sick.
Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards.
It's a wonderful way to live, and not a bad way to go, either. The average Frenchman is still smiling three months after he's dead.
In Paris, AIDS was dismissed as an American phobia until French people started dying; then everyone said, 'Well, you have to die some way or another.' If Americans were hysterical and pragmatic, the French were fatalistic: depressed but determined to keep the party going.
Death. It doesn't have to be boring.
Death would not be called bad, o people, if one knew how to truly die.
You can't be a crazy rebel in the face of death, it's not a fitting attitude.
Dead bodies are such trouble,” Evie said with a little sigh, and Mabel had to turn her head away so as not to laugh.
Maybe I haven't been tested, but I have no fear of death at all. I was with Allen Ginsberg during the last year of his life, and he called all his friends and said, 'I'm on my way out, and it's kind of exciting.' I see it as kind of exciting, too.
If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive.
The Grim Reaper, Gloria corrected herself - if anyone deserved capital letters it was surely Death. Gloria would rather like to be the Grim Reaper. She wouldn't necessarily be grim, she suspected she would be quite cheerful (Come along now, don't make such a fuss).
As anyone who has the slightest knowledge of my work knows, I have little in common with Larkin, who was tall, taciturn and thin-on-top, and unlike him I laugh, nay, sneer, in the face of death. I will concede one point: we are both lesbian poets.
People are scared to death of dying. I am the opposite.
All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death.
People speak of a will to live. They rarely speak of a will to die. Because people are afraid of death. Death is dark and unknown and frightening. But not for me. It is not the end.
I didn't feel that way about it. I had been playing with death for some time. I can't say we were the best of friends but we were well acquainted.
The "public" seems to have bought into this belief that life can, and should, be run without risk, that all accidents are avoidable, and that death is something that only happens to people who eat meat and smoke.
Why would you be afraid of death? It would be an inconvenience. I have a lot of undone things and it's bound to get in the way. But, no, it doesn't scare me at all.
I wouldn't want my funeral to be a sad, sappy thing.
For the young, death is an enemy they wish to try their strength against. For those of us a little older, she is an old friend, an old lover, but one we are not eager to meet again soon.
