Under the wide and starry sky, / Dig the grave and let me lie.

Death keeps no calendar.

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

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

I’m doomed to die, right? Why should I care if I go to Hades either with gout in my leg or a runner’s grace? Plenty of people will carry me there.

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. 

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

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

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

I order that my funeral ceremonies be extremely modest, and that they take place at dawn or at the evening Ave Maria, without song or music.

Let my epitaph be, “Here lies Joseph, who failed in everything he undertook.”

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

I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.