Quotes about Death
Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death.
- Herman Melville
Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.
- Herman Melville
A short life to them, and a jolly death.
- Herman Melville
if he is going to live for ever, what good will it do to pitch him overboard—tell me that?" "Give him a good ducking, anyhow.
- Herman Melville
Then, if the hull go down, there'll be thirty lively fellows all fighting for one coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath the sun!
- Herman Melville
Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.
- Herman Melville
Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
- Herman Melville
Yet, as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven over with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but himself a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.
- Herman Melville
Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled—the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato's honey head, and sweetly perished there?
- Herman Melville
even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.
- Herman Melville
See that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident against the vessel's side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.
- Herman Melville
But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
- Herman Melville