What is death? A scary mask. Take it off—see, it doesn’t bite.

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

Those from whom we were born have long since departed, and those with whom we grew up exist only in memory. We, too, through the approach of death, become, as it were, trees growing on the sandy bank of a river.

Anyone who’s never watched somebody die is suffering from a pretty bad case of virginity.

It is not my design to drink or sleep; my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.

Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.

Nobody, sir, dies willingly.

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living.

Man has here two and a half minutes—one to smile, one to sigh, and half a one to love; for in the midst of this minute he dies.

Epitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.

When a man dies, and his kin are glad of it, they say, “He is better off.”

The dead are often just as living to us as the living are, only we cannot get them to believe it. They can come to us, but till we die we cannot go to them. To be dead is to be unable to understand that one is alive.