Herman Melville Quotes

Death is always around the corner, but often our society gives it inordinate help.

Truth is a pain which will not stop. And the truth of this world is to die. You must choose: either dying or lying. Personally, I have never been able to kill myself.

They lay listening. Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn't fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn't fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there.

I have to apologize to you that I am still among the living. There will be a remedy for this, however.

Perhaps a man may commit suicide in self-defense.

Everybody will die, but very few people want to be reminded of that fact.

But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float towards his end. He sees it quite clearly, and it fills him with (the word will not go away) despair. The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.

I was afraid I was goin to die and then I was afraid I wasnt.

Would you rather die, or be unwound?

And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we who never let each other sleep above it.

The lapse of ages changes all things - time - language - the earth - the bounds of the sea - the stars of the sky, and everything 'about, around, and underneath' man, except man himself, who has always been and always will be, an unlucky rascal. The infinite variety of lives conduct but to death, and the infinity of wishes lead but to disappointment. All the discoveries which have yet been made have multiplied little but existence.

We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.

Death holds no horrors. It is simply the ultimate horror of life.

Maybe the reason I've never died in this story is that I've never had something worth dying for before.

You think you are killing me. I think you are committing suicide.

I've never really had much of an imagination. But still I would try to picture the exact moment when the beating of my heart would no longer be going on inside my head.

It is worth while dying, to find out what life is.

A man falling off a cliff to certain death will stretch out a hand even to his worst enemy.

whereas, up to the present, there is only one known way of getting born, there are endless ways of getting killed.

I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'.

No art is possible without a dance with death.

I'm being made aware of my mortality all the time.

Time destroyed Is suicide, where more than blood is spilt.