In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia. He did not speak until they asked him for his last request.
I have slept with you all night long while the dark earth spins with the living and the dead, and on waking suddenly in the midst of the shadow my arm encircled your waist. Neither night nor sleep could separate us.
The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens.
Ambition is the death of thought.
Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
The statement that "God is dead" comes from Nietzsche and has recently been trumpeted abroad by some German and American theologians. But the good Lord has not died of this; He who dwells in the heaven laughs at them.
A little time, and thou shalt close thy eyes; and him who has attended thee to thy grave, another soon will lament.
It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious because it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn. This murder would have been infinitely more difficult to unravel had the body of the victim been simply found lying in the roadway without any of those outré and sensational accompaniments which have rendered it remarkable. These strange details, far from making the case more difficult, have really had the effect of making it less so.
I have neither a fear, nor a presentiment, nor a hope of death. Why should I? With my hard constitution, and temperate mode of living, and unperilous occupations, I ought to, and probably shall remain above ground, till there is scarcely a black hair on my head. And yet I cannot continue in this condition! I have to remind myself to breathe, almost to remind my heart to beat! And it is like bending back a stiff spring — it is by compulsion that I do the slightest act, not prompted by one thought; and by compulsion that I notice anything alive or dead, which is not associated with one universal idea. I have a single wish, and my whole being and faculties are yearning to attain it. They have yearned towards it so long and so unwaveringly, that I'm convinced it will be reached, and soon, because it has devoured my existence. I am swallowed up in the anticipation of its fulfilment. My confessions have not relieved me, but they may account for some otherwise unaccountable phases of humour which I show. Oh, God! It's a long fight, I wish it were over!
He that dies in extreme old age will be reduced to the same state with him that is cut down untimely.