Top 52 Life And Death Poetry Quotes
#1. 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
#2. I grow into my death.
My life is small
and getting smaller. The world is green.
Nothing is all.
Mark Strand
#3. We are all the fools of time and terror: Days
Steal on us and steal from us; yet we live,
Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.
George Gordon Byron
#4. Poetry will exist as long as there is a problem of life and death
Ruben Dario
#5. The world is better without
them.
only the plants and the animals are
true comrades.
I drink to them and with
them.
Charles Bukowski
#6. For life's not a paragraph/ and death, i think, is no parenthesis.
E. E. Cummings
#7. ...and when we die
we die alone
I cry, I cry alone
Like a piece of stone
I am thrown
into the wavy ocean of life
to atone...to atone
Only to atone...
Munia Khan
#9. 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
#11. 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
#13. Between the desire
And the spasm,
Between the potency
And the existence,
Between the essence
And the descent,
Falls the Shadow.
T. S. Eliot
#14. The tags' chain stirs with the wind; and I sleep
Paid, dead, and a soldier. Who fights for his own life
Loses, loses: I have killed for my world, and am free.
Randall Jarrell
#15. 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
#16. I see a bright
portion
under the overhead light
that shades into
darkness
and then into darker
darkness
and I can't see beyond that.
Charles Bukowski
#17. Even though I seem not human, a mute shelf
of glucose, bottled blood, machinery
to swell the lung and pump the heart - even so,
do not put out my life. Let me still glow.
Dudley Randall
#18. Life is beautiful. Death is astonishing.
And love is the just breaths taken in between
Michael Biondi
#19. I can't even make up a rhyme about an umbrella, let alone death and life and eternal peace.
Knut Hamsun
#20. [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
#21. Dear friend, I have searched all night
through each burnt paper,
but I fear I will never find
the formula to let you die
Leonard Cohen
#22. 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
#23. I'm merely dying to be remembered for simply writing about my living memories
Michael Biondi
#24. In medicine as well as in romantic poetry, it is the heart that is the center and controlling mechanics of life. If the heart stops, life stops. The loss of sight doesn't not mean death. Yet for ages, the eyes was believed to contain a human being's vital essence - a not wholly irrational belief.
Henry Grunwald
#25. 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
#26. 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
#28. Science ask facts and religion ask faith, humans are confused between life and death.
Santosh Kalwar
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Some men never
die
and some men never
live
but we're all alive
tonight.
Charles Bukowski
#32. Is there life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup,
We hug our little destiny again.
Seamus Heaney
#33. 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
#34. All paths lead to death,
our premature sacrifice for future spawn
(from Elixir)
Bryan Murphy
#35. I didn't know who to
believe
but
one thing I do
know: when a man is
living
many claim relationships
that are hardly
so
and after he dies, well,
then it's everybody's
party.
Charles Bukowski
#36. 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
#37. All that is required of you is an open mind and a little patience.
F.K. Preston
#38. The greatest happiness is a quiet kind. It's the tender understanding that we're living in a very strange place full of strange creatures. And there's quite a bit of wonder in that.
F.K. Preston
#39. 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
#40. even in death, his last breath was poetry
existing in the wind
and on the breeze of
"it used to be likes"
forever remembering,
yet never reliving
his life
will never be what it used to be like.
N'Zuri Za Austin
#41. The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
Blaise Pascal
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. I feel my griefs too, and there scarce is ground
Upon my flesh t'inflict another wound.
Yet dare I not complain, or wish for death
With holy Paul; lest it be thought the breath
Of discontent; or that these prayers be
For weariness of life, not love of thee.
Ben Jonson
#46. 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
#47. I keep dying and hoping you notice me. But you're too busy living.
F.K. Preston
#48. 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
#49. Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these things are justification enough for our hopes and dreams, although I wouldn't say that to a dying man.
Don DeLillo
#50. One doesn't even think of
the liver
and if the liver
doesn't think of
us, that's
fine.
Charles Bukowski
#51. Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down
on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity
i hate you
E. E. Cummings
#52. Love and Death? What has great music or poetry ever been about, but those twin forces that undo a man?
Douglas Wynne
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