Mrs. Symons, a very fine woman, very merry after dinner with marrying of Luellin and D. Scobell’s kinswoman that was there.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

2. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin.
— from The Art of War by active 6th century B.C. Sunzi

I soon fell asleep before Wemmick's fire, and the Aged and I enjoyed one another's society by falling asleep before it more or less all day.
— from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Ask him to make an appointment with me some time this evening; it is a matter of life and death.”
— from Father Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

But in this matter she insisted; she made me sit down at the piano, and then plunged into the study of her role as if it were a matter of life and death.
— from My Life — Volume 1 by Richard Wagner

But you said it was a matter of life and death."
— from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

It is a matter of life and death.
— from The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

There, on the farm with her, he lived through a mystery of life and death and creation, strange, profound ecstasies and incommunicable satisfactions, of which the rest of the world knew nothing; which made the pair of them apart and respected in the English village, for they were also well-to-do.
— from The Rainbow by D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

They had a chance of taking prisoners at Longueval, where they rummaged in German dugouts after the line had been taken by the 15th Scottish Division and the 3d, and they brought back a number of enormous Bavarians who were like the Brobdingnagians to these little men of Lilliput and disgusted with that humiliation.
— from Now It Can Be Told by Philip Gibbs

Religion is still to them a matter of life and death.
— from Studies in Judaism, First Series by S. (Solomon) Schechter

Nor did it want two glances at the stranger to disclose the fact that this was Tsu-Hi, the deputy-governor of the walled city of Hatsu, an official with absolute powers for the moment of life and death; one who, discovering Jong where he lay, could, with one single nod, condemn him to instant execution.
— from Under the Chinese Dragon: A Tale of Mongolia by F. S. (Frederick Sadleir) Brereton

In "Tristan and Isolde" is the greatest music of love and death.
— from The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Complete Contents Dresden Edition—Twelve Volumes by Robert Green Ingersoll

Then, as we jogged the six miles home by peaceful thoroughfares, the lady, being questioned persistently and suitably, spoke with utter freedom of Homer Gale, who had shamefully deserted his job for two days at the busiest end of the season, when a white man wouldn't of thought of leaving, even on a matter of life and death.
— from Ma Pettengill by Harry Leon Wilson

The camp lay hidden in the distance, and the throng in the streets hung on the fences, listening to the music, or laughed and danced in full sympathy with the occasion.
— from Red Rock: A Chronicle of Reconstruction by Thomas Nelson Page

He therefore told his learned visitor, that although his son had been incommoded by the heat of the court, and the long train of hard study, by day and night, preceding his exertions, yet he had fortunately so far recovered, as to be in condition to obey upon the instant a sudden summons which had called him to the country, on a matter of life and death.
— from Redgauntlet: A Tale Of The Eighteenth Century by Walter Scott