Death Comes to the Banquet Table, 1635 © Giovanni Martinelli
Editor's Note:
If you’re stirred by these author quotes, amble down our archive for more.
All Hallows Eve is nigh, and while we’re happy to drown our cares in cute costumes and Pumpkin Spice, it’s also impossible to escape the true reason for the season: remembering the dead, and reconnecting with the all-too-often-ignored awareness of our own mortality.
Being a moribund lot in general, our favorite authors are uniquely qualified to preside over this peek through the veil between the worlds. Recording one’s thoughts for posterity is itself a form of defiance against death (though as Woody Allen said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying”). However, no two writers tackle the subject quite the same way, variously using it as an opportunity to horrify, amuse, or soothe those of us who persist in living.
Herewith, an urn full of author quotes about the afterlife.
1. Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn, 1968
“When I was alive, I believed — as you do — that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said ‘one o’clock’ as though I could see it, and ‘Monday’ as though I could find it on the map.”
2. Toni Morrison, Beloved, 1987
“People who die bad don’t stay in the ground.”
3. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death,” 1842
“And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”
4. Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body, 1993
“Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.”
5. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818
“The whole series of my life appeared to me as a dream; I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never presented itself to my mind with the force of reality.”
6. Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, 1963
“We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.”
7. H.P. Lovecraft, Collected Essays 5: Philosophy, Autobiography and Miscellany
“It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.”
8. Clive Barker, Hellbound Heart, 1986
“You cut up a thing that’s alive and beautiful to find out how it’s alive and why it’s beautiful, and before you know it, it’s neither of those things, and you’re standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it.”
9. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1963
“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have.”