Quotes the Dead Know.

Some of my favorite quotes from literature and poetry are about death.  That may sound morbid, but we often face the question of whether or not there is life after we die, another world to which our souls will flee and remain for eternity.  For some writers, death is something terrifying, to be dreaded in its finality.  For other writers, it is simply a curiosity, to be studied, or even a fact that brings hope rather than despair.

What do the dead know?  And what can our characters learn from the dead?  Here are some beautiful quotes by admired writers concerning death:

“And what of the dead?  They lie without shoes in their stone boats.  They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped.  They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.”

Anne Sexton, “The Truth the Dead Know”

Anne Sexton

“They were greeted by the same monotonous scenery as before.  Maguey and cactus stood stiffly like abandoned tombstones on the parched earth. “

Shusaku Endo, The Samurai

“Yes, that would serve to wrap the dreadful thing in.  It had, perhaps, served often as a pall for the dead.  Now it was to hide something that had a corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death itself—something that would breed horrors and yet would never die.  What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas.  They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace.  They would defile it, and make it shameful.  And yet the thing would still live on.  It would always live.”

 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray  

“I walk through the churchyard

to lay this body down;

I know moon-rise, I know star-rise;

I walk in the moonlight, I walk in the starlight;

I’ll lie in the grave and stretch out my arms,

I’ll go to judgment in the evening of the day,

And my soul and thy soul shall meet that day,

when I lay this body down.”

W.E.B. Du Bois, Negro Song in “Of the Sorry Songs”

“Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that’s all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet.”

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

“A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it.”

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, “Carmilla“