H. L. Mencken Quotes

My disorder has been attended with several symptoms of a consumption; and I have been at times apprehensive that my great change was at hand: yet blessed be God, I have never been affrighted; but, on the contrary, at times much delighted with a view of its approach.

Did he die well?" No, I thought. Nobody did. They just died.

We tend to talk about death as if it is losing a battle, but that assumes living is winning and dying is not.

I'm not afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.

A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I've seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I've never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That's amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that's being taken apart.

I think of dying every day... At a certain age, you should be prepared to go at any time.

No one can avoid death; it is inevitable. Therefore, I should create in my mind a kind of willingness and accepting for that event without any fear.

I'm not scared of death anymore.

Severn - I - lift me up - I am dying - I shall die easy; don't be frightened - be firm, and thank God it has come.

I am very happy, Jane; and when you hear that I am dead, you must be sure and not grieve: there is nothing to grieve about. We all must die one day, and the illness which is removing me is not painful; it is gentle and gradual: my mind is at rest. I leave no one to regret me much: I have only a father; and he is lately married, and will not miss me. By dying young, I shall escape great sufferings. I had not qualities or talents to make my way very well in the world: I should have been continually at fault.

For death betimes is comfort, not dismay, and who can rightly die needs no delay.

Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one's life!

He will live ill who does not know how to die well.

I would not that death should take me asleep. I would not have him merely seize me, and only declare me to be dead, but win me, and overcome me. When I must shipwreck, I would do it in a sea, where mine impotency might have some excuse; not in a sullen weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming.

To learn to die is an heroic work.

Sustained and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

no one dies happy, you can only die well

In accepting death as inevitable, we don't label it as a good thing or a bad thing. As one of my teachers once said to me, “Death happens. It is just death, and how we meet it is up to us.

I am not the least afraid to die

He was in a room of the Gesshuuji, which he had thought it would be impossible to visit. The approach of death had made the visit easy, had unloosed the weight that held him in the depths of being. It was even a comfort to think, from the light repose the struggle up the hill had brought him, that Kiyoaki, struggling against illness up that same road, had been given wings to soar with by the denial that awaited him.

Once you learn how to die you learn how to live.

To one bent on age, death will come as a release. I feel this quite strongly now that I have grown old myself and have come to regard death like an old debt, at long last to be discharged.

How gladly would I meet mortality, my sentence, and be earth in sensible! How glad would lay me down, as in my mother's lap! There I should rest, and sleep secure.

... I started to die 36 hours before I was born, so dying was a way of life for me.