He had never expected death to be this quiet, this secretive, this easy.
I hold the view that death is rather like changing one's clothes when they are torn and old. It is not an end in itself. Yet death is unpredictable-you do not know when and howT it will take place.
Death is like my car. It takes me where I want to go.
I think of death as a glad awakening from this troubled sleep which we call life; as an emancipation from a world, which, beautiful though it may be, is still a land of captivity.
One should part from life as Odysseus parted from Nausicaa-blessing it rather than in love with it.
Death! It is rest to the aged, it is oblivion to the atheist, it is immortality to the poet!
I depart from life as from an inn, and not as from my home. [Lat., Ex vita discedo, tanquam ex hospitio, non tanquam ex domo.]
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. Nature I loved and, next to Nature, Art: I warm'd both hands before the fire of life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
'Tis the maddest trick a man can ever play in his whole life, to let his breath sneak out of his body without any more ado, and without so much as a rap o'er the pate, or a kick of the guts; to go out like the snuff of a farthing candle, and die merely of the mulligrubs, or the sullens.
Death comes to us, under many conditions, with all the welcome serenity of sleep.
It is not that death comes, but that life leaves.
well, death says, as he walks by, I'm going to get you anyhow no matter what you've been: writer, cab-driver, pimp, butcher, sky-diver, I'm going to get you
She died--this was the way she died; And when her breath was done, Took up her simple wardrobe And started for the sun. Her little figure at the gate The angels must have spied, Since I could never find her Upon the mortal side.
Death. The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and fragrant drop of levity- and now you strange apothecary souls have turned it into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive.
Death is not as terrible as you think. It comes to you as a healer. Sleep is nothing but a counterfeit death. What happens in death we can picture in sleep. All our sufferings vanish in sleep. When death comes, all our mortal tortures cease; they cannot go beyond the portals of death.
O Death, what are thou? nurse of dreamless slumbers freshening the fevered flesh to a wakefulness eternal.
I wanted to say something different: the pictures are also a leave-taking, in several respects. Factually: these specific persons are dead; as a general statement, death is leave-taking. And then ideologically: a leave-taking from a specific doctrine of salvation and, beyond that, from the illusion that unacceptable circumstances of life can be changed by this conventional expedient of violent struggle.
Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.
Death. An instantaneous state, without past or future. Indispensable for entering eternity.
How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers The buck in the snow . . . Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.
Then with no throbs of fiery pain, No cold gradations of decay, Death broke at once the vital chain, And freed his soul the nearest way.
Death, which we are accustomed to consider an evil, really acts for us the friendliest part, and takes away the commonplace of existence.
There's ways and ways of dyin'. Some is took, and some takes French leave, and others is 'elped out of life.
While life could be evaded, death could not.
So that he seemed not to relinquish life, but to leave one home for another.
