Leonard Bernstein said, “What’s this?”
Babe Ruth said, “I’m going over the valley.”
Cotton Mather said, “Is this all? Is this what I feared when I prayed against a hard death? Oh, I can bear this. I can bear it!”
The Greek philosopher Anaxarchus, pounded to death with pestles in the fourth century B.C., said, “Pound, pound the pouch containing Anaxarchus. You pound not Anaxarchus.”
Air Force Major Norman Basell, flying bandleader Glenn Miller to France on a flight that vanished over the English Channel, said, “What’s the matter, Miller—do you want to live forever?”
The philologist Barthold George Niebuhr, noticing that his medicine was intended only for terminal cases, asked, “What essential substance is this? Am I so far gone?”
Angelica Kauffmann, an eighteenth-century artist, stopped her cousin—who had begun to read her a hymn for the dying—and said, “No, Johann, I will not hear that. Read me the ‘Hymn for the Sick’ on page 128.”
William H. Vanderbilt, president of the New York Central Railroad, said, in 1885, “I have no real gratification or enjoyment of any sort more than my neighbor down the block who is worth only half a million.”
Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, said, “I am tired of ruling over slaves.”
Louise, Queen of Prussia, said, “I am a queen, but I have no power to move my arms.”
Queen Elizabeth I said, “All my possessions for one moment of time.”
Phillip III, king of Spain, said, “Oh would to God I had never reigned. Oh that those years in my kingdom I had lived a solitary life in the wilderness. Oh that I had lived alone with God. How much more secure should I have died. With how much more confidence should I have gone to the throne of God. What doth all my glory profit but that I have so much the more torment in my death?”
Cardinal Henry Beaufort said, “Will not all my riches save me? What, is there no bribing death?”
Henry James said, “So here it is at last, the distinguished thing.”
Anne Boleyn said, “The executioner is, I believe, an expert, and my neck is very slender.”
Marie Antoinette, tripping over her executioner’s foot, said, “Monsieur, I beg your pardon. I did not do it on purpose.”
Charles II said, “I have been a most unconscionable time dying, but I beg you to excuse it.”
Sir William Davenant, seventeenth-century British Poet Laureate, unable to complete a final poem, said, “I shall have to ask leave to desist, when I am interrupted by so great an experiment as dying.”
Rabelais said, “I am going in search of a great perhaps.”
James Thurber said, “God bless. God damn.”
H. G. Wells said, “God damn you all; I told you so.”
Francis Buckland, an inspector of fisheries, said, “God is so good to the little fishes, I do not believe He would let their inspector suffer shipwreck at last.”
Eugene Ysaye, a Belgian violinist and composer, said, after his Fourth Sonata was played for him, “Splendid. The finale just a little too fast.”
James Quin, an eighteenth-century British actor, said, “I could wish this tragic scene were over, but I hope to go through it with becoming modesty.”
Replying to the observation that dying must be very hard, the actor Edmund Gwenn said, “It is. But not as hard as farce.”
Flo Ziegfeld said, “Curtain! Fast music! Light! Ready for the finale! Great! The show looks good! The show looks good!”
James Croll, a lifelong teetotaler, said, “I’ll take a wee drop of that. I don’t think there’s much fear of me learning to drink now.”
The eighteenth-century sociologist Auguste Comte said, “What an irreparable loss!”
Da Vinci said, “I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.”
The British newspaper tycoon Lord Beaverbrook said, “This is my final word. It is time for me to become an apprentice once more. I have not settled in which direction.”
Machiavelli said, “I desire to go to hell and not heaven. In the former place I shall enjoy the company of popes, kings, and princes, while in the latter are only beggars, monks, and apostles.”
Looking at a lamp that flared at his bedside, Voltaire said, “The flames already?”
Kansas City Chiefs running back Stone Johnson, killed in a football game, said, “Oh my God, oh my God! Where’s my head? Where’s my head?”
The American Civil War commander General John Sedgwick, who was killed at the battle of Spotsylvania in 1864, looked over a parapet at the Confederate troops and said, “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist—”
Vicomte de Turenne, a French soldier killed at the battle of Sasbach in 1675, said, “I did not mean to be killed today.”
Initially, the rope broke when the Russian revolutionary Bestoujeff was hanged; “Nothing succeeds with me,” he said. “Even here I meet with disappointment.”
Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, said, “Let my epitaph be, ‘Here lies Joseph, who was unsuccessful in all his undertakings.’”
Nicholas Boileau, a French critic, responding to a playwright who asked Boileau to read his new play, said, “Do you wish to hasten my last hour?”
Oscar Wilde, dying in a tacky Paris hotel, said, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”
Charles d’Evereruard, a gourmet, was asked by his confessor if he would be reconciled with Christ; d’Evereruard replied, “With all my heart I would fain be reconciled with my stomach, which no longer performs its usual functions.”
Frederic Moyse, guillotined for killing his own son, said, “What, would you execute the father of a family?”
Longfellow said to his sister, “Now I know I must be very ill, since you have been sent for.”
George Fordyce, a physician, told his daughter, who had been reading to him, “Stop. Go out of the room. I am about to die.”
Baron Georges Cuvier, a zoologist, said to his daughter, who was drinking a glass of lemonade he had refused, “It is delightful to see those whom I love still able to swallow.”
O. O. McIntyre, an American newspaper columnist, said to his wife, “Snooks, will you please turn this way? I like to look at your face.”
Lady Astor, the first woman member of British Parliament, surrounded by her entire family on her deathbed, said, “Am I dying, or is this my birthday?”
Goethe said, “More light.”
The Indian chief Crowfoot said, “A little while and I will be gone from you. Whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we come, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”
Buddha said, “Decay is inherent in all things.”
Gertrude Stein asked Alice B. Toklas, “What is the answer?” When Toklas didn’t respond, Stein laughed and said, “In that case, what is the question?”
After finishing a poem on New Year’s Eve about New Year’s Day, Johann Georg Jacobi said, “I shall not in fact see the New Year which I have just commemorated.”
Andrew Bradford, the publisher of Philadelphia’s first newspaper, said, “Oh Lord, forgive the errata!”
Dominique Bouhours, a seventeenth-century French Jesuit who was the leading grammarian of his day, said, “I am about to—or I am going to—die; either expression is used.”
Replying to a question about whether he was in pain, Henry Prince of Wales, son of James I, said, “I would say ‘somewhat,’ but I cannot utter it.”
Karl Marx, asked by his housekeeper if he had a last message for the world, said, “Go on, get out. Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.”
Pancho Villa said, “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”
“In the event of my death,” my mother’s will said, “I would like to have my body cremated and the ashes
