Citations:at death's door


 * 1828, Sir Walter Scott, The Fair Maid of Perth, ch. 32:
 * The minstrel woman who left the castle yesterday has spread the report everywhere that the Duke of Rothsay is murdered, or at death's door.
 * 1840, Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe":
 * A wondering murmur passed through the crowd on beholding her so rosy and bright; that same unhappy niece, whom they had supposed, on the authority of the Parker's Falls Gazette, to be lying at death's door.
 * 1862, Wilkie Collins, No Name, ch. 1:
 * [S]he looked, seriously and literally, at death's door. I immediately agreed with my uncle that the first thing to be done was to send for medical help.
 * 1913, Jack London, John Barleycorn, ch. 32:
 * One of my Polynesian sailors lay at death's door with blackwater fever.
 * 1934, Writers and Readers: An Eccentric Englishwoman, The Age (Australia), 25 Aug., p. 4:
 * During that interval she had been prostrated by yellow fever, and when she lay at death's door, her servants had rifled the place and deserted her.
 * 2008, Josh Quittner, "Bill Gates: PC Genius, Internet Fool," Time, 29 June:
 * Clearly, a business with $26 billion in cash reserves isn't exactly at death's door.