Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection the past then lives in your words and you are free.

An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.

Generosity during life is a very different thing from generosity in the hour of death one proceeds from genuine liberality and benevolence the other from pride or fear.

When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence so I said they could shoot me in my absence.

Death is easier than a wretched life and better never to have born than to live and fare badly.

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

Birth was the death of him.

Normality is death.

Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members that has itself died can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

Not the torturer will scare me nor the body's final fall nor the barrels of death's rifles nor the shadows on the wall nor the night when to the ground the last dim star of pain is hurled but the blind indifference of a merciless unfeeling world.