“So they pass away: friends, kindred, the dearest-loved, grown people, aged, infants. As we go on the down-hill journey, the mile-stones are grave-stones, and on each more and more names are written; unless haply you live beyond man's common age, when friends have dropped off, and, tottering, and feeble, and unpitied, you reach the terminus alone.”
Source: Miscellanies: The four Georges. The English humorists. Roundabout papers
“Could the best and kindest of us who depart from the earth have an opportunity of revisiting it, I suppose he or she (assuming that any Vanity Fair feelings subsist in the sphere whither we are bound) would have a pang of mortification at finding how soon our survivors were consoled.”
Source: Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero
“Dying men think of funny things-and that's what we all are here, aren't we? Dying men.”
Source: Otherland: City of Golden Shadow
“I don't want to die. Damn death. Long live life.”
Source: Ulysses
“It is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realise the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.”
Source: Moby Dick
“Life and death are different sides of the same coin.”
Source: American Gods
“Every twinge of sensation, even of agony, was a negation of death.”
Source: ROBERT E. HOWARD Ultimate Collection – 300+ Cult Classics, Adventure Novels, Western, Horror & Detective Stories, Historical Books (Including Poetry, Essays, Articles & Letters) - ALL in One Volume): Sword & Sorcery Fiction Including Complete Conan the Barbarian, Solomon Kane and Kull the Conqueror Series, as well as Weird Fiction, Fantasy Stories of the Weird West, The Cthulhu Mythos Tales and more
“No intellect is needed to see those figures who wait beyond the void of death - every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, wrapped in authority older than the universe. They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions. Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them, the builders of the unimaginable, the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence.”
Source: Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'
“Life is a waste of woes, And Death a river deep, That ever onward flows, Troubled, yet asleep.”
Source: Imogen: And Other Poems
“The laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between king and cobbler, manager and call-boy; and, if haply your dates of life were conterminant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by cheek (O ignoble levelling of Death) with the shade of some recently departed candle-snuffer.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Illustrated)