I am not afraid of death, which after all can’t be far away. What does frighten me, though, is the halfway stage.

This whole goddam house stinks of ghosts. I don’t mind so much being haunted by a dead ghost, but I resent like hell being haunted by a half-dead one.

Cordelia! stay a little. Ha! What is’t thou say’st? Her voice was ever soft.

My God, Justin, do you hate him so?””Bah!” said his Grace…”does one hate an adder? Because it is venomous and loathsome one crushes it underfoot, as I shall crush this Comte.

Do you believe that you will die? Yes, man is mortal, I am a man, ergo… No, that isn’t what I mean. I know that you know that. What I’m asking is: Have you ever...

Life and Death took a break,weary from their burdensome role.Nobody lived or died that day.

[…] death is only a small interruption.

When we understand that Peace is a state of mind we understand true Peace.

Somehow, grief had seemed easier to bear when the skies were dark and a cold wind kept cats and prey inside their nests.

Just being alive should make you late for everything. In case you’ve never noticed, the dead are always on time.

Fear manifested itself as a physical presence that seemed to dominate the public sphere. Time almost stopped. Even without confirmation I could sense that something had gone terribly wrong.

Rhianon, he said, hold my hand, Rhianon.She did not hear him, but stood over his bed and fixed him with an unbroken sorrow.Hold my hand, he said, and then: why are your putting the sheet...

When your mother is the grave and your father is a lightning bolt it tends to make you kind of horny. And death has a way of removing one’s inhibitions.

By the time men get to be of our age, Mr. Vaiden, about all any new acquaintance can do is to remind them of somebody else. You know at times I have thought that is...

When he died, I went about like a ragged crow telling strangers, “My father died, my father died.” My indiscretion embarrassed me, but I could not help it. Without my father on his Delhi rooftop,...

The thing about our choices is that after we have made them, they turn around and make us.

Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.

Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone’s about to die.

I’ll tell you what I don’t believe, Alwyn. I don’t believe there’s a pretty forest in the sky with castles and a white light and God and all his angels waiting to welcome all the...

Death is ordinary. Behold it, subtract its patterns and lessons from those of the death that weapons bring, and maybe the residue will show what violence is.

Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.

Problems are mortal. Solutions live forever.

It happened. It was awful. You aren’t perfect. That’s all there is. Don’t confuse your grief with guilt.”We stay in the silence and the loneliness of the otherwise empty dormitory for a few more minutes,...

You’re probably wondering what’s going to happen to you. That’s easy. The same thing is going to happen to you that has happened to every other human being who has ever lived. You’re going to...

Thine are these orbs of light and shade;Thou madest Life in man and brute;Thou madest Death; and lo, thy footIs on the skull which thou hast made.

OH, THERE HAS TO BE SOMETHING IN THE STOCKING THAT MAKES A NOISE, said Death. OTHERWISE, WHAT IS 4:30 A.M. FOR?

I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt.”[As quoted in Pol Neveux’s introduction, Guy De Maupassant: A Study]

Everything- even me, and one day even Charlotte- must come to end.

When I arrived at the house in the suburbs that night I seriously contemplated suicide for the first time in my life. But as I thought about it, the idea became exceedingly tiresome, and I...

There’s no way of knowing that your last good day is Your Last Good Day. At the time, it is just another good day.

My father was a doctor,’ she says, ‘a very kind man. He died in the early ’70s, relatively young.’ She taps the cigarette packet on the table. ‘Of lung cancer.”Oh.”But the thing about that is,’...

Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they’d ruined, got a little stale after a while.

As I remember his laugh, there was nothing mad about it, it was more like the laugh of someone who has been the victim of a practical joke, a farce in which he had believed...

A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death. A culture that has lost its faith in life cannot comprehend why it should be endured.

But man by his nature is an unnatural animal. If any creature stands a chance of defeating death, it is man.

It seems we’ve been at cross purposes, doesn’t it? But it’s no use now. As long as there was Bonnie, there was a chance that we might be happy. I liked to think that Bonnie...

Mr. Codro’s destiny is Ptolemaic; in other words, based on fiction. Ptolemaic says it all; it means above all fixed and unchanging, that is to say different from real life which is by nature changing...

On the Death of his ChildDew Evaporates And all our world is dew…so dear, So fresh, so fleeting

God isn’t the son of Memory; He’s the son of Immediate Experience. You can’t worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it’s...

You, my lord, are the ending of all true stories.

This human need for mysticism – surrender to an unknown truth, union – stands at the helm of all romantic feeling. It is, in essence, the same intimacy known in a mother’s arms; in those...

Death, I’ve dreamed of it, I’ve desired it, but what real happiness can come from it?

A dead Christ I must do everything for; a living Christ does everything for me.

It’s your call. You want to go back home, go ahead. But if I were you, I wouldn’t. Home is death.

There is, you will concede, a limit to the niceties a man is obliged to fulfill when his wife is dead and not yet cold.

Self-destruction would be a brief, almost autoerotic free-fall into a great velvet darkness

Mistake this day as being like any other, and your deaths will go as unmourned as the insects of the field.

Love doesn’t die with death. Love is like liquid; when it pours out, it seeps into others’ lives. Love changes form and shape. Love gets into everything. Death doesn’t conquer all; love does. Love wins...

What is birthday, but a celebration of death.

—if the spirit tries to hide, its temple far away… acopper for those they ask, a diamond for those who stay.