Don’t send me flowers when I’m dead. If you like me, send them while I’m alive.
Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.
What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
John Candy knew he was going to die. He told me on his 40th birthday. He said, well, Maureen, I’m on borrowed time.
Pale Death beats equally at the poor man’s gate and at the palaces of kings.
Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them.
Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
The dead cannot cry out for justice. It is a duty of the living to do so for them.
When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.
The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.
If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.
To be idle is a short road to death and to be diligent is a way of life; foolish people are idle, wise people are diligent.
It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.
Death is the last enemy: once we’ve got past that I think everything will be alright.
We cannot banish dangers, but we can banish fears. We must not demean life by standing in awe of death.
No one else can take risks for us, or face our losses on our behalf, or give us self-esteem. No one can spare us from life’s slings and arrows, and when death comes, we meet it alone.
While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
None of us, in our culture of comfort, know how to prepare ourselves for dying, but that’s what we should do every day. Every single day, we die a thousand deaths.
It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it.
Death is always around the corner, but often our society gives it inordinate help.
A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.
Love and death are the two great hinges on which all human sympathies turn.
I tell myself that God gave my children many gifts – spirit, beauty, intelligence, the capacity to make friends and to inspire respect. There was only one gift he held back – length of life.
If nothing else, there’s comfort in recognising that no matter how much we fail and sin, death will limit our suffering.
When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
Death is not more certainly a separation of our souls from our bodies than the Christian life is a separation of our souls from worldly tempers, vain indulgences, and unnecessary cares.
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
Those who have the strength and the love to sit with a dying patient in the silence that goes beyond words will know that this moment is neither frightening nor painful, but a peaceful cessation of the functioning of the body.
Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people.