Death And Dying Quotes

Misery comes to miser; joy comes to wiser. (A Very Hot Cup of Tea, Empathy)Juvenile invites, youth tries, adult applies, and the old man dies. (A Straw Man, Empathy)In everyone, there lives a superhero. (The Medicine Man, Empathy)Faith is the strongest word in any dictionary. (The Wisdom Beard, Empathy)I’ve entered into your feelings; it’s your turn now. (Empathy)

~ D.r. Mirror

Fiction is an urgent business. It is the Dying Us telling stories to the Dying Us, trying to crack the nonsense in our heads open with a big hammer pronto, before Death arrives.

~ George Saunders

The death of a lesser man is the death of all those who believe themselves to be greater.

~ Shaun Hick

[W]ishing for immortality won't make life last any longer.

~ Eran Dror

Upon learning that her cancer had spread to her spine, Paula prepared her thirteen year-old son for her death by writing him a letter of farewell that moved me to years. In her final paragraph she reminded him that the lungs in the human fetus do not breathe, nor do it's eyes see. Thus, the embryo is being prepared for an existence it cannot yet imagine

~ Irvin D. Yalom

We born dyin'...But you ask a man an' he talk like he gonna live forevah.

~ Walter Mosley

The moment you will be most stiff is when you die - you never get stiffer than that. So you've got to sleep well, eat well and keep moving.

~ Richard Lloyd Parry

Each of us is impermanent wave of energy folded into the infinite cosmic order. Acknowledgement of the fundamental impermanence of ourselves unchains us from the strictures of living a terrestrial life stuck like a needle vacillating between the magnetic pull of endless desire and the terror of death. Once we achieve freedom from any craving and all desires and we are relieved of all titanic fears, we release ourselves from living in perpetual distress. Once we rid ourselves from any impulse to exist, we discover our true place in the universal order. The composition of our life filament is exactly right when we accept the notion of living and dying with equal stoicism.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

If I die today, will you remember me tomorrow?The love I'm leaving behind, will you care to borrow? From a snake-shed-skin or from the sky unknownIn all living and the dead I'll dwell to groan

~ Munia Khan

One day you will be the only one in the room not living.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

When everything looks the same on the outside, yet everything has changed on the inside, we break. We break in half.This is the duality of loss.

~ Christina Rasmussen

A death without being a loss to anybody is the most unworthy death.

~ Alireza Salehi Nejad

Some days in the camp you prayed to live; some days you prayed to die quick. Some days you didn't bother praying, knowing there was no sense to anything.

~ Allan Dare Pearce

A person's destiny often ends before his death.

~ Milan Kundera

Writing and other efforts to produce an enduring piece of artwork is a gallant response to the prospect of death. Every person knows that they must die, and consequently people build elaborate symbolic defenses mechanism to shield themselves from knowledge of their impermanence. Every person possesses autonomy of the will, the ability to choose how to conduct their life. The freedom to act towards objects is ultimately useless; it provides a person with no sense of meaning and supplies no purpose to life because a mere collection of objects will not transcend their physical demise. An artist does not deny their impermanence but embraces the prospect of their death by laboring to create a monument of their existence that will survive their expiry.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.

~ George Orwell

All my life I had lived on the presumption that there was no existence beyond... flesh, the moment of being alive... then nothing. I had searched in superstition... But there was nothing. Then I heard the sound of my own life leaving me. It was so... tender. I regretted that I had paid it no attention. Then I believed in the wisdom of what other men had found before me... I saw that those simple things might be true... I never wanted to believe in them because it was better to fight my own battle. You can believe in something without compromising the burden of your own existence.

~ Sebastian Faulks

Writing, painting, singing--it cannot stop everything. Cannot halt death in its tracks. But perhaps it can make the pause between death's footsteps sound and look and feel beautiful, can make the space of waiting a place where you can linger without as much fear. For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey there between footsteps makes up our lives.

~ Ally Condie

It is not normal for a body to remain horizontal; beyond a certain length of time it attracts concern. Death and burial ('laid to rest') are seen as the natural horizontal states, which is surely why the calculated falsity of perpendicular deaths, such as hangings, crucifixions, burnings at the stakes, etc. produce such indelible shock.

~ Murray Bail

There is absolutely no worse death curse than the humdrum daily existence of the living dead.

~ Anthon St. Maarten

I swore as the knife I’d been using to dice our dinner bit into my finger. I dropped it on the floor, blood spattering the counter and cupboard doors a furious red. I watched, mesmerised, as the blood welled up and began to seep down my hand; I tried to catalogue the amount of pain I was in. Surprisingly little, I concluded, pushing at the edges of the wound to see how deep it went. Deep enough. I was starting to feel it now, but it didn’t hurt so much. I’d endured far worse.If it came to it, I could do it. There was comfort in that knowledge.

~ Hazel Butler

It was a fact that had become the focus of my entire life, a whisper in my heartbeat, a permanent, insidious presence that punctuated my every breath. I couldn’t escape it, that persistent voice, lingering in the blood pulsing through my veins. It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish, the knowledge of a thing that could never be undone.James is dead. James is dead. James is dead. James is dead.

~ Hazel Butler

But never has the Call been so clearAs now, when death’s cool handEases my spirit from my fevered body--And I answer the Call of the Master—The Call to new Heights.

~ Jessica Coupé

Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.

~ Orson Scott Card

So many things that are so dramatic or exciting when you read about them actually happen so simply and quietly. We humans like to consider ourselves important to creation and to the world, and we expect that whenever death comes it should be with a crash of thunder and wild shouts or something, or with soft music around and people looking grave and serious. We always have it that way in the theatre because it makes us believe in our importance. Most of our life is a matter of dressing ourselves up to believe in just that, dressing ourselves in attractive clothes, in titles, in reputations. Actually, at base we all realize that we're just a frightened bundle of animals, still afraid of the unknown, and still afraid of thousands of things that can separate us from life, and trying to shield ourselves from our own smallness.

~ Louis L'amour

In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth ... and wondering with an immortal Alice at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles - no matter the imminent peril - these asides of the spirit ... are the highest form of consciousness.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

The picture enclosed here is of a hibiscus that has been flowering in the parlor window one bloom at a time for what seems like a year or more. It’s getting to where I don’t remember when there wasn’t a bud or two and a flower either out or on the way.This morning there is a fresh new flower just like the one in the picture, but right next to it is the one that was new yesterday and is already spent. I don’t know whether to be happy for the beautiful one or sad for the one that is gone. I guess if I wait until tomorrow I can be sad for the one that is so beautiful now. But how can I anticipate being sad for something that is so pretty?It’s really a good thing that people can only “see” the present because we are on the same train as a hibiscus except that we are on a longer trip. I’ve told you before but it fits in here so I will say it again. Sometimes I get feeling so good that I get afraid to anticipate the loss. If life could be a series of beautiful scenes and beautiful music and pleasant visits with people we love, then life should just go on forever. I suppose that’s why people get old and feeble with wandering minds. What is can end without too much loss, and what was did not stop so will be forever. Right now and as far as I can see, I want to be this morning’s flower. I’ll be a hibiscus. You be a rose…

~ M. Reed Mccall

Jöns: But feel, to the very end, the triumph of being alive!

~ Ingmar Bergman

Anything man can make, man can destroy.

~ Jonathan Anthony Burkett

Death is the first and final entry in the book of this life.

~ Kevin Focke

Death is easy, living difficult.

~ Fakeer Ishavardas

It's a strange experience, dying. People talk about how it creeps over you like a warm blanket. That's not true. It starts out warm, but then it hits you like a bucket of icy water after stepping out of a sweat lodge. Then it's all black like a void. I would know. I died and lived to tell about it.

~ Morgan Chalfant

Your life can end at any time, and it can end more than once. But it can also begin more than once.

~ Michael R. French

Here now in his triumph where all things falter, Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,As a god self-slain on his own strange altar, Death lies dead.

~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

Sadly enough, the most painful goodbyes are the ones that are left unsaid and never explained.

~ Jonathan Harnisch

One day I wish to die, but today, I wish to live.

~ Peprah Boasiako

Time is life.Time for birth, time for death.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

...the kind of weather that reminds you after a long winter that while the world wasn't built for humans, we were built for the world. t

~ John Green

The mind is a useful tool but not a very good friend.

~ Stephen Levine

As we witness the death of departed souls, other people will observe our departure from the world.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita