Death and Mourning

I know what every colored woman in this country is doing. . . . Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.

[ Drawing his beard aside before placing his head on the block :] This hath not offended the king.

When Abraham Lincoln was murdered

The ceaseless labor of your life is to build the house of death.

I want . . . death to find me planting my cabbages.

Human beings . . . they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It’s kind of boring, isn’t it?

As he saw it, there was only one choice—to be strong and upright, or to commit suicide.

A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that’s what it’s for!

Suicide: a belated acquiescence in the opinion of one’s wife’s relatives.

Aye, toil as we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths.

What though before us lies the open grave?

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,

[ “Last words” :] Money can’t buy life.

The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead.

A person starts dying when they stop dreaming.

What you possess in the world will be found at the day of your death to belong to someone else. But what you are will be yours forever.

Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.

Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.

It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.

Absence and death are the same - only that in death there is no suffering.

Death takes no bribes.

Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.

Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.