QUOTES ABOUT DEATH

The moon had risen behind him, the color of a shark's underbelly. It lit the ruined walls, and the skin of his arms and hands, with its sickly light, making him long for a mirror in which to study his face. Surely he'd be able to see the bones beneath the meat; the skull gleaming the way his teeth gleamed when he smiled. After all, wasn't that what a smile said? Hello, world, this is the way I'll look when the wet parts are rotted.

That can happen when people die, the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration.

This showed once again that everyone had something different to lose in this battle. Some were concerned for their lives, and some for those they cared most about: rays, sea horses, even the chickens that ran free in the streets of the city because they couldn't all be caught in time.

When you die, she thought now, you can no longer give love. You can't give love anymore. She wouldn't be able to love her children. It struck her suddenly as the very worst thing about death, worse than not being able to breathe or laugh or kiss. A kind of existential suffocation, to not be able to give her children her love anymore.

The language of roses shifts under our feet. It blows in and out like the wind. It carries the fragrance of the flower and then it is gone...It is how we learn to speak about something that is disappearing as we say its name.

Life itself means to separate and to be reunited, to change form and condition, to die and to be reborn. It is to act and to cease, to wait and to rest, and then to begin acting again, but in a different way. And there are always new thresholds to cross: the threshold of summer and winter, of season or a year, of a month of a night; the thresholds of birth, adolescence, maturity and old age; the threshold of death and that of the afterlife -- for those who believe in it.

There's plenty in the world that doth not die,
And much that lives to perish,
That rises and then falls, buds but to wither;
The season's sun, though he should know his setting
Up to the second of the dark coming, 
Death sights and sees with great misgiving
A rib of cancer on the fluid sky.
But we, shut in the houses of the brain,
Brood on each hothouse plant
Spewing its sapless leaves around,
And watch the hand of time unceasingly
Ticking the world away,
Shut in the madhouse call for cool air to breathe.
There's plenty that doth die;
Time cannot heal nor resurrect;
And yet, mad with young blood or stained with age,
We still are loth to part with what remains,
Feeling the wind abaut our heads that does not cool,
And on our lips the dry mouth of the rain.