Death keeps no calendar.

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

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

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

I doubt that we have any right to pity the dead for their own sakes.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.

In dealing with the dead, if we treat them as if they were entirely dead, that would show a want of affection and should not be done; or, if we treat them as if they were entirely alive, that would show a want of wisdom and should not be done.