Death

Various acclaimed Blacks share their serious, profound, and sometimes humorous points of view on the concept of death.

DEATH is the end of all life in the individual or the thing; if physical, the crumbling of the body into dust from whence it came. He who lives not uprightly, dies completely in the crumbling of the physical body, but he who lives well, transforms himself from that which is mortal, to immortal.
Marcus Garvey

Full fathom five thy father lies; Or his bones are coral made: Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.

I am not going to die, I'm going home like a shooting star.
Sojourner Truth

I answer the heroic question ?Death, where is they sting?? with ?It is here in my heart and mind and memories?.
Maya Angelou

I want a busy life, a just mind, and a timely death.
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

I want to die before my wife, and the reason is this: If it is true that when you die, your soul goes up to judgment, I don't want my wife up there ahead of me to tell them things.
Bill Cosby

I'm dying always.
Jessye Norman

Life is not a 'brief candle'. It is a splendid torch that I want to make burn as brightly as possible before handing on to future generations.
George Bernard Shaw

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.
Huey Newton

Some day the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of ten million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living--Liberty, Justice, and Right--is marked ?For White People Only?.
W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
Toni Morrison