For this week’s Thursday Thirteen, I post thirteen of my favourite quotes on death. As my regular readers know, I have been revisiting my beloved mama’s passing. It’ll be one year on November 26. I finally confirmed her memorial service with the Greek church here in Victoria. The service will take place on Sunday, November 18. To those of you who do leave comments, know that I read each and every one and cherish your responses. I will be visiting soon, I promise.

1. God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled. ~Author Unknown

2. People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad. ~Marcel Proust

3. Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me.
The Carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality
~Emily Dickinson

4. While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die. ~Leonardo Da Vinci

5. Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it. ~Alice Walker

6. The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity. ~Seneca

7.Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life. ~Albert Einstein

8.Death may be the greatest of all human blessings. ~Socrates

9. We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love. ~Madame de Stael

10. People living deeply have no fear of death. ~Anais Nin, Diary, 1967

11. For what is it to die,
But to stand in the sun and melt into the wind?
~Kahlil Gibran, from “The Prophet”

12. Life and death are balanced on the edge of a razor. ~Homer, Iliad

13. Oh, for the time when I shall sleep
Without identity.
~Emily Bronte