Top 100 Death Poetry Quotes
#1. Perhaps, if I make a friend
of the mountain cuckoo
in this world,
he will talk to me
when we cross the mountain of death
Izumi Shikibu
#3. And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night
Archibald MacLeish
#5. Such is true joy's absolute certainty,
Its slow lit fuse that burns holes
In the shabby shroud of death forever.
Scott Hastie
#6. The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal endings.
Anthony Powell
#7. I feel no grief for being called something
which
I am not;
in fact, it's enthralling, somehow, like a good
back rub
Charles Bukowski
#8. Between the desire
And the spasm,
Between the potency
And the existence,
Between the essence
And the descent,
Falls the Shadow.
T. S. Eliot
#11. Just know I am
Not there to catch you
But I am there for you
Caleb Warta
#12. I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream.
Emilio Estevez
#13. When you're young
a pair of
female
high-heeled shoes
just sitting
alone
in the closet
can fire your
bones;
when you're old
it's just
a pair of shoes
without
anybody
in them
and
just as
well.
Charles Bukowski
#14. Veins of ivy scale stones,
find footholds but
the caretaker cuts
earth short, peels
creepers from Cotswold
rock and props the dead
head to head so they won't
topple like drunks
on their moss-soft shadows.
Jalina Mhyana
#15. I wish I could run into the world's arms. Linger within the spaces between nothing. I wish I could filter out of existence. To live quietly without dying. I wish I could be cherished by life itself. To speak and sing volumes without lying to myself.
F.K. Preston
#16. Sometimes all we need to be able to continue alone
are the dead
rattling the walls
that close us in.
Charles Bukowski
#18. Every known thing used to be unknown
And every rock could become a stone
Someday nature will have to atone
When soul sees dead flesh leaving the bone
Munia Khan
#19. Death defines life. I'd rather stay undefined.
Lera Auerbach
#20. Poetry will exist as long as there is a problem of life and death
Ruben Dario
#21. An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress
W.B.Yeats
#22. A man of few words,
I just sit still on this hill,
I know death will persist,
I write when my mind is still,
I bleed daily to exist.
P.J. Bayliss
#23. We want murderous throats
affairs that resemble bright birds
in death spirals.
Krysten Hill
#24. I sing and drink,
giving no thought to death;
with arms outspread
I fall upon the grass,
and if, in this wide world, I come to die,
then it's certain to be
from sheer joy that I live.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#25. But life, they said, means life. Dying inside.
The Devil was evil, mad, but I was the Devil's wife
which made me worse. I howled in my cell.
If the Devil is gone then how could this be hell?
Carol Ann Duffy
#26. Like two old philosophers, Ashvin and James spoke of the ruin of their lives, their unfulfilled needs, their unanswered prayers and ultimately they were seduced by the phantom call to death by suicide its science, its poetry, its violence, its art.
Peter Akinti
#27. This morning could have been perfect. The cruel truth is they have never been. Give us loneliness or give us death.
Sean Gabler
#28. All around us is a nothing that stretches on for infinity. We humans can barely comprehend that. If we comprehend it we are rarely pleased.
F.K. Preston
#29. Tell me: what's more obscene than fucking waste?
Death is in quite poor taste, if you ask me.
Eleanor Brown
#30. She's all the blood I've ever shed. She's every time I've ever thought of death. She's every time I've ever looked at happiness and thought, 'That's not meant for me.
Elijah Noble El
#31. If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.
Fernando Pessoa
#32. Ah, Lalage! while life is ours,
Hoard not thy beauty rose and white,
But pluck the pretty fleeing flowers
That deck our little path of light:
For all too soon we twain shall tread
The bitter pastures of the dead:
Estranged, sad spectres of the night.
Ernest Dowson
#33. If you love me as I love you Nothing but death can part us two.
L.M. Montgomery
#34. In The Land of Poetry and Fighting, Efficiency rules the throne. I try to live here, so I shave my head because hair is dead and dead is inefficient.
Cameron Conaway
#36. [H]e found poetry more comforting than Scripture - and his ability to forge from his life a cogent, powerful tale of living with death.
Paul Kalanithi
#37. There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou - THOU art Being and Breath,
And what THOU art may never be destroyed.
Emily Bronte
#38. If on thoughts of death we are fed,
Thus, a coffin, became my bed.
E.A. Bucchianeri
#39. When the star dies,
Its eye closes; tired of watching,
It flies back to its first bright dream.
Dejan Stojanovic
#40. And hence the poet must seek to be essentially anonymous,
He must die a little death each morning,
He must swallow his toad and study his vomit
as Baudelaire studied la charogne of Jeanne Duval.
Delmore Schwartz
#41. What is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death?
Erica Jong
#42. When I die, don't come, I wouldn't want a leaf
to turn away from the sun
it loves it there.
There's nothing so spiritual about being happy
but you can't miss a day of it, because it doesn't last.
Frank O'Hara
#44. Death makes its own choices.
Has reasoning an order has a taste ...
Angelo Tsanatelis
#45. We returned to our palaces, these Kingdoms, but no longer at ease here in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.
T. S. Eliot
#46. I believe that to be the world's greatest living
writer
there must be something
terribly wrong with you.
I don't even want to be the world's greatest
dead writer.
just being dead would be fair
enough.
Charles Bukowski
#47. It is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#48. Writing poetry requires frequent visits to the land of the dead.
Marty Rubin
#49. Mist lies over the river like the icy breath of winter angels. Darkness gathers round ... and it is beautiful.
Thank you for this life, this death, whatever it is you are
that makes us finally see.
Jay Woodman
#50. i
let myself
know
that my life
doesn't
have to be over
just because
theirs are
& i went
ahead
& painted
the sun
back into
my sky.
I am allowed to live my life.
Amanda Lovelace
#51. Some men never
die
and some men never
live
but we're all alive
tonight.
Charles Bukowski
#52. We are all of life
who stepped from the sea
trading weightless journeys of the currents
We are all of life
who build and tear down and build again
to find gold and silver
to find scars that weep and bleed
to step from the sea
to stay with the sea
Tamara Rendell
#53. My creativity keeps me from starving. Humanity keeps my life mundane. Loving secures my love for life, but my imagination keeps me sane.
F.K. Preston
#54. The will of life and death,
never share the same motivation ...
we all know that love is the ultimate motive to die for ...
but let's not kid ourselves ...
... we all know the ultimate motive to rise back from the dead is vengeance.
Non Nomen
#55. Inside a home you left me, a blue orphanage.
Inside a bluish mosaic, space to live.
Heng Siok Tian
#57. All that is required of you is an open mind and a little patience.
F.K. Preston
#58. Nature is bent on new beginning
and death has not a chance of winning ...
Rosy Cole
#59. I found the best thing
I could do
was just to type away
at my own work
and let the dying
die
as they always have.
Charles Bukowski
#60. All paths lead to death,
our premature sacrifice for future spawn
(from Elixir)
Bryan Murphy
#61. I have no life but this,
To lead it here;
Nor any death, but lest
Dispelled from there;
Nor tie to earths to come,
Nor action new,
Except through this extent,
The realm of you.
Emily Dickinson
#62. SOME PEOPLE SIMPLY DO NOT EXIST ANYMORE. GET USED TO IT. QUESTION MARK.
Amy King
#63. A poetess is a collection of unfinished thoughts. She is a tormented phantom, a harbinger of life and death. Those who peer deep inside her catacombs will learn that even madness is a virtue.
Nichole McElhaney
#64. No mark survives this place: you too will yield
to unmemory.
Mathew Henderson
#65. Feel no fear before the multitude of men, do not run in panic,
but let each man bear his shield straight toward the fore-fighters,
regarding his own life as hateful and holding the dark spirits of death as dear as the radiance of the sun.
Tyrtaeus
#66. I take this continent with me into the grave.
Ray Bradbury
#67. Whiteness is the color of death, you know, not black. Wetness is life, the breeder and shaper of life. In the beginning the sun was black. So all light was absorbed before it had a chance to return. And our dreams, then, were empty.
Jim Carroll
#68.
Who knows what death, anxiety of the living,
Who knows what loneliness, end of the loving
I could say to myself of the love (I had):
Let it not be immortal, since it is flame
But let it be infinite while it lasts.
Vinicius De Moraes
#69. Sweet as the tender fragrance that survives,
When martyred flowers breathe out their little lives,
Sweet as a song that once consoled our pain,
But never will be sung to us again,
Is they remembrance. Now the hour of rest
Hath come to thee. Sleep, darling: it is best.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#70. Parting
One is strong, a child now grown
The other weak, a parent aged
-
The strong once feeble
The weak once mighty
-
Time, the infinity
has marked them ...
Muse
#72. And at the closing of the day
She loosed the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shallot.
Alfred Tennyson
#73. I fain would follow love, if that could be;
I needs must follow death, who calls for me;
Call and I follow, I follow! let me die.
Alfred Tennyson
#74. O serpent heart hid with a flowering face!
Did ever a dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant, feind angelical, dove feather raven, wolvish-ravening lamb! Despised substance of devinest show, just opposite to what thou justly seemest - A dammed saint, an honourable villain!
William Shakespeare
#75. Dying only means moving into a nicer house.
We have only gone into the next room.
We still are what we have always been.
We aren't far away. We are only on the other side of the pathway.
Kerry Okines
#76. I keep dying and hoping you notice me. But you're too busy living.
F.K. Preston
#77. If poetry could truly tell it backwards, then it would.
Carol Ann Duffy
#78. We are all debts owed to death.
Simonides
#79. Heaven isnt my place, neither is hell. I have no place, except the death that's awaiting me
Erin Hanson
#81. Topography is one of my chief themes in my poetry..about the country, the suburbs and the seaside ... then there come's love ... and increasingly; the fear of death.
John Betjeman
#82. At five in the afternoon.
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.
A frail of lime ready prepared
at five in the afternoon.
The rest was death, and death alone
Federico Garcia Lorca
#83. This world
that was our home
for a brief spell
never brought us anything
but pain and grief;
its a shame that not one of our problems
was ever solved.
We depart
with a thousand regrets
in our hearts.
Omar Khayyam
#84. Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary,
imperial joy and sorrow of human existence,
the dreamed as well as the lived
what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?
Louise Gluck
#85. We all must face death and walk with it. But we also must love and live in it.
Rolando Mithcell
#86. The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Sylvia Plath
#88. Where music thundered let the mind be still,
Where the will triumphed let there be no will,
What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.
May Sarton
#89. There is nothing to me but you. I know it's pathetic but, oh darling, it's true.
F.K. Preston
#90. It is always better
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end. Let whoever can
win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,
that will be his best and only bulwark.
Seamus Heaney
#91. I leave you, to go the road we all must go. The road I would choose, if only I could, is the other.
Murasaki Shikibu
#92. Love taught me to die with dignity that I might come forth anew in splendor. Born once of flesh, then again of fire, I was reborn a third time to the sound of my name humming haikus in heaven's mouth.
Aberjhani
#93. That day, that day when I can gaze at the sea
both of us calm
and I, trusting, having poured my whole heart into my Life Work ... when death
black waves!
no longer courts me and I can smile, constantly, at everything because, my bones, there will be so little of myself left to give it.
Juan Ramon Jimenez
#94. The worm doth woo the mortal, death claims a living bride,
Night unto day is married, morn unto eventide,
Earth a merry damsel, and heaven a knight so true,
And Earth is quite coquettish, and beseemeth in vain to sue.
Emily Dickinson
#95. Aflame in black ecstasy, orders extinguished:
after death
how will I know my love was true,
this sacrifice not an exercise in vanity?
Phan Ming Yen
#96. Violence can read like poetry. You just have to describe the act as if you're in love with the way your characters bleed.
F.K. Preston
#97. Old McDonald had a restaurant,
E, I, E, I, O,
And in that restaurant was some beef,
E, I, E, I, O,
With a moo moo here,
And a moo moo there.
Here a moo, there a moo,
Everywhere a moo moo cholesterol filled death trap burger.
Harry Whitewolf
#98. The red washing
down the bathtub
can't change the color of the sea
at all.
Derrick Brown
#99. Life is first boredom, then fear.
whether or not we use it, it goes,
and leaves what something hidden from us chose,
and age, and then the only end of age.
Philip Larkin
#100. I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
Adrienne Rich
