To die will be an awfully big adventure.
- J.M. BARRIE, Peter Pan
A man dies … only a few circles in the water prove that he was ever there. And even they quickly disappear. And when they’re gone, he’s forgotten, without a trace, as if he’d never even existed. And that’s all.
-WOLFGANG BORCHERT, The Outsider
Cowards die many times before their deaths
The valiant never taste of death but once.
-WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Julius Caesar
We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.
- SIR THOMAS BROWNE, Religio Medici
Death, in itself, is nothing; but we fear,
To be we know not what, we know not where.
- JOHN DRYDEN, Aureng-Zebe
Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.
- BERTRAND RUSSELL, Philosophical Essays
A man begins dying at the moment of his birth. Most people live in denial of Death’s patient courtship until, late in life and deep in sickness, they become aware of him sitting bedside.
- DEAN KOONTZ, The Husband