To desire immortality for the individual is really the same as wanting to perpetuate an error forever.

Is this dying? Is this all? Is this all that I feared when I prayed against a hard death? Oh, I can bear this! I can bear it!

If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.

It is noble to die before doing anything that deserves death.

There is no man so fortunate that there shall not be by him when he is dying some who are pleased with what is going to happen.

Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.

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. 

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

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

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

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.

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.