“There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, these are matters of which no jest can be made.”

Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death

“Duty is the essence of life, Nicholas. It is the only thing over which death has no dominion. It is true immortality.”

Eric Van Lustbader, The Ninja

“None of us is destined to live forever.”

Lucia St. Clair Robson, Tokaido

“Death is the final isolation, but from what, from what?”

Peter Matthiessen, At Play in the Fields of the Lord

“A man’s half licked when he says he is. An’ you’re half eaten from the way you’re goin’ on about it.”

Jack London, White Fang

“We each owe a death. There’s no exception.”

The Green Mile

“As a race we had allowed ourselves to become accustomed to the idea that the proper way to die is in bed, at a ripe age. It is a delusion. The normal end for all creatures comes suddenly.”

John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes

“For Saigo, as for all Japanese warriors from time immemorial, there were only two honorable ways to die: in battle or by one’s own hand with calmness and ritual. To die otherwise would mean terrible, insupportable shame throughout eternity, an awful karma brought into the next life, or, far worse, carried into the infinity of limbo.”

Eric Van Lustbader, The Ninja

“Maybe staring death in the face makes cowards out of everyone.”

Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi – Book One: The Way of the Samurai

“People die everywhere, everyday.”

Harold Robbins, Stiletto

“On the contrary, he might have even looked forward to it, knowing that the importance of death lay not in the dying itself but in the manner of one’s death. How one died was recorded by history and one was remembered as much for the manner of one’s death as for one’s life.”

Eric Van Lustbader, The Ninja

“You probably know that their Zen monks are expected to write a poem close to the moment of death. It’s a very traditional art form, and the most famous poems are still quoted hundreds of years later. So you can imagine, there’s a lot of pressure on a Zen roshi when he knows he’s nearing death and everyone expects him to come up with a great poem.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him.”

Ambrose Bierce, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

“The reality of living was never greater than when you held death clutched tightly in your hands.”

Harold Robbins, Stiletto

“In darkness there is sin; in darkness there is death. Sin negates spirit; and the killing of beings without spirit can only be looked on as an act of charity.”

Eric Van Lustbader, The Ninja

“For, as I drew closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning.”

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“A dead man is of no use to anyone.”

Michael Crichton, The 13th Warrior

“Death teaches you, just like life does. It ain’t ours to question.”

Bethany Campbell, Hear No Evil

“To be, or not to be – that is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep –

No more – and by a sleep to say we end

The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to. ‘Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep -

To sleep – perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub,

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause. There’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life.”

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who wanted to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was some natural, spontaneous suicide. I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed in cunning, that walks carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a hunter because of its own stupidity…”

Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask