Lapham’s Quarterly

Nobody, sir, dies willingly.

You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.

If a parricide is more wicked than anyone who commits homicide—because he kills not merely a man but a near relative—without doubt worse still is he who kills himself, because there is none nearer to a man than himself. 

The play is the tragedy “Man,” And its hero the conqueror worm.

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

I think it makes small difference to the dead if they are buried in the tokens of luxury. All this is an empty glorification left for those who live.

Can we not live without pleasure, who cannot but with pleasure die?

I imagined it was more difficult to die. 

Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows and, looking at each other with grief and despair, await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.

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.

A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest.

When a man dies, and his kin are glad of it, they say, “He is better off.”

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.

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.

Death keeps no calendar.

We and the dead ride quick at night. 

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

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

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

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.

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

I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

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

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

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.

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

Whoever has died is freed from sin.

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

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

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

Death renders all equal.

A god cannot procure death for himself, even if he wished it, which, so numerous are the evils of life, has been granted to man as our chief good.

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

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

The only evidence, so far as I know, about another life is, first, that we have no evidence; and, secondly, that we are rather sorry that we have not, and wish we had.

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

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.

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better, only the god knows.

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.

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

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.

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!

Men have written in the most convincing manner to prove that death is no evil, and this opinion has been confirmed on a thousand celebrated occasions by the weakest of men as well as by heroes. Even so I doubt whether any sensible person has ever believed it, and the trouble men take to convince others as well as themselves that they do shows clearly that it is no easy undertaking. 

I looked and there was a pale green horse! Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed with him.

The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living.

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

I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.