According to legend, in 1794, grave robbers stole Shakespeare’s skull.

In 2016, an archaeologist used radar to confirm that his skull is not in his tomb: “What we found is that half of his grave is undisturbed. And then the head end, so where his skull would have been, there is voids.”

Georges Perec’s novel A Void (the English title of La Disparition—the disappearance) does not contain the letter e.

To adhere to the constraint, it might also have been translated A Vanishing.

Perec, born Peretz, an orphan, died outside Paris, from lung cancer, in 1982.

Every death is a fact.

Barthes writes: “Don’t say Mourning . . . I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.”

That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die

There was a metal band that was just called Death.

I used to think I wasn’t afraid of death, but actually what I wasn’t afraid of was being dead.

You can’t attend your own funeral, but you have to attend your own death.

You are going to die of something.

I hope I die of boredom in my sleep.

Do you ever remember being so excited about the future you were afraid you might die before it happened?

I mean, who cares, of course, democracy is dead.

Death wish, free will, cause and effect, happiness as misery.

I wonder if the wealthy dinosaurs were the last to die.

Hemingway titled a book Death in the Afternoon, which is the best possible name for a cocktail, then invented a cocktail named after it. I am extremely jealous of this whole move.

I don’t actually want to die laughing.

“Only one image of Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe has been authenticated: a watercolor portrait painted several hours after her death.”

There was 100% a culture of dead bodies are cool.

Is a beautiful woman still beautiful even if all men everywhere are dead?

Vanity ends with death.

Who wants to be present in the moment? I want to die when an asteroid hits my cryogenic chamber.

Naps, but for death.

You can’t actually sleep when you’re dead.

The secret to immortality is boredom. If you’re bored enough you’ll never die.

Die with dignity like Benjamin Guggenheim.

Death by attrition. War of natural causes.

Death has an anchoring, as in dragging-down, effect, so, don’t die.

“Sex” and “death” kind of rhyme.

You can sleep in your deathbed.

Sappho: “To die is evil. The gods think so, Else they would die.”

Cry now, die later. Move to Europe, smoke and die cool.

I want to die someday.

I don’t want to die laughing.

Madness

It’s not my hands that are shaking—it’s my mind.

Cut off my head!

That’s where the pain lies.

Mishima believed sincerity was found in the entrails.

This must be a mistranslation.

I think he meant reality.

Hope is the dark part of morning,

The trees and not the sky behind.

A glimmer without a color.