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

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.

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

I was born without knowing why, I have lived without knowing why, and I am dying without either knowing why or how.

Nobody, sir, dies willingly.

Death renders all equal.

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.

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

I don’t believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.

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. 

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

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

We and the dead ride quick at night.