Death and Mourning

Do not wait for the last judgement. It comes every day.

Cowards die many times before their deaths The valiant never taste of death but once.

Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.

One dies only once, and it’s for such a long time!

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day.

 

a fruitless enterprise, a great mistake, a decrepit frenzy, and rightly viewed, a corpse, some dust, a shadow, mere nothingness.

 

You know a real friend? Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone.

And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always— take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!

 

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.

Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.

 

They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!

Dear as remember’d kisses after death, And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d On lips that are for others; deep as love, Deep as first love, and wild with all regret; O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

 

The relatives of a suicide always take it in bad part that he did not remain alive out of consideration for the family dignity.

In every parting there is an image of death.

The thing I came for:

In Memoriam.

 

I speak no comfort to you, for there is no comfort for such pain within the circles of the world. The uttermost choice is before you: to repent and go to the Havens and bear away into the West the memory of our days together that shall there be evergreen but never more than memory; or else to abide the Doom of Men.

 

How can I die alone. Where will I be then who am now alone, what groans so pathetically in this room where I am alone?

Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead

 

Fish bones walked the waves off Hatteras And there were other signs That Death wooed us, by water, wooed us By land:

The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.

The dead will think the living are worth it we will know Who we are And we will all enlist again.

 

Have you built your ship of death, O have you?

 

O the chimneys On the ingeniously devised habitations of death When Israel’s body drifted as smoke Through the air— Was welcomed by a star, a chimney sweep, A star that turned black Or was it a ray of sun? 1