Death And Dying Quotes

We should live lives of intentionality, for every life ends in death, but not every death ends in peace. The type of death one wishes to experience determines the type of life one ought to live. We should begin with the end in view, and in our journey we should never lose sight of the destination. The meaning of death holds the key to the meaning of life.

~ James Castleton

There are no more surprises and shocks in life, so that I watch the flame without agitation. For me the greatest reality is this and nothing else... Nothing else will worry or interest me in life hereafter.

~ R.k. Narayan

For the next two weeks, the world and all other issues would be omitted. We were two people alone in a hospital room. We allowed no visitors. We had two weeks of near-silence with each other and my increasing helplessness. I tended to tangle the IV and misplace the oxygen tube. As I started to say earlier, I could feel no sensible interest in the future. The moments became extraordinarily dimensionless - not without value but flat and a great deal emptier. When you learn you're fatally ill, time becomes very confusing, perhaps uninteresting, pedestrian. But my not caring if I lived or died hurt Ellen. And I was grateful that I could indulge my cowardice toward death in terms of living for her.

~ Harold Brodkey

When people pass on we must choose how to remember them. While our loved ones sleep for eternity we must carry on with our daily toil. We can elect to harbor adoration and love in our precious memories or cling to animosity and detestation. We can kindly remember our ancestors or continue to feel embedded enmity towards people who no longer walk this earth. Regardless the human frailties of the recently departed, it seems that we should aspire to clutch the best part of our ancestors being fast to our hearts. A book encapsulating a departed person’s life has many pages; we must choose which chapters to treasure and what chapters to disregard or downplay.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

[G]ive him this much: death didn't just walk up and inhale him. He wasn't exactly whisked away. He left claw marks on his life.

~ Denis Johnson

In the lassitude after love Odysseus asks Circe, What is the way to the land of the dead?Circe answers, You are muffled in folds of heavy fabric. You close your eyes against the rough cloth and though you struggle to free yourself you can barely move. With much thrashing and writhing, you manage to throw off another layer, but find that not only is there another one beyond it, but that the weight bearing you down has scarcely decreased. With dauntless spirit you continue to struggle. By infinitesimal degrees, the load becomes lighter and your confinement less. At last, you push away a piece of coarse, heavy cloth and, relieved, feel that it was the last one. As it falls away, you realize you have been fighting through years. You open your eyes.

~ Zachary Mason

How easy it would be just to let go, to go willingly into all that wonderful energy.

~ Adrienne Wilder

I understood him. He wanted to die at home. He didn't want to be going someplace all the time for the sake of a hopeless hope. He wanted to die as himself out of his life. He didn't want his death to be the end of a technological process.

~ Wendell Berry

I kept a picture of me kissing my dad’s corpse on the forehead in my wallet for years. I’d break it out any time someone showed me a baby picture, just so they would know how it ends.

~ Doug Stanhope

Every living thing dies, Art. That’s why we cherish it while we have it. That’s why we respect the decisions our loved ones make for themselves. That’s why we love, and why we care, and why we hurt. Because everything dies.

~ Reilyn J. Hardy

I don't want to die. I want to live. I want to live long enough so I can really live.

~ Patrick Ness

But dying people don't need to be reminded that they're dying, I feel they need to be reminded that they're still very much alive.

~ Nicole Curtis

There are televisions and radios and the sounds of life, but too there is the sound of death, crying and oxygen tanks, and the squeaky wheels on wheelchairs. Like life and death are in a very close proximity to one another.

~ Jon Chopan

Why is such a bad thing to die?

~ Han Kang

But here I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all—but the certain knowledge that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now—this very instant—your soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man—and that this is certain, certain!

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

On my strand, lovely flowers their blossoms unfold,My mother shall grace thee with garments of gold.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

My father, my father, and dost thou not hearThe words that the Erl-King now breathes in mine ear?'Be calm, dearest child, 'tis thy fancy deceives;Tis the sad wind that sighs through the withering leaves.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

We know everyone we love is going to die, but we don't know it, can't possibly believe it, she thought, or long ago I would have gone and started digging until I had a hole big enough to lie down in.

~ Rae Meadows

If we are to welcome the elderly into our communities and support them to stay there for as long as possible, if we are to attend to the social needs of our elderly citizens both inside and out of institutions, then we need both government intervention and funding, along with the community's engagement and help.

~ Karen Hitchcock

So, what is the right way to look at death? Do we see death as life's expiration date and the point of no return? Or is it simply a threshold to be crossed, on the way to another dimension, or another life? Do you want to know what the right answer is?Whatever makes you feel more comfortable about dying.

~ Merlyn Gabriel Miller

When I spoke to a colleague about Joe's report, her face registered surprise. She said, Is it possible for a death in a nursing home to be premature? Joe told me, If it were happening in any other kind of institution, to any other part of the population - workers, say, or children - there'd be an outcry, media, inquiries, swift intervention. The truth is we do not value the last months or years of a person's life. The remaining life of someone old. Particularly if they are in residential care. If we are all just economic units who lift or lean, then very little is lost when a nursing home resident or anyone getting on in their years dies prematurely. In fact money might be saved - one less nursing-home bed to fund, and the kids can finally get their hands on the house.

~ Karen Hitchcock

Your body's dying...pay no attention

~ Anne Rice

Medicine and society have entered into a folie a deaux regarding medicine's importance in gigantic population ills. We believe that genetics and pills and enzymes bring us health. We wait for the dementia cure (the obesity cure, the diabetes cure) rather than changing our society to decrease incidence and severity. We slash social welfare programs and access to GPs and ignore the downstream effect this will have on future generations. To reduce non-communicable disease, the actions we need to take are societal: make it easier for people to move and eat well, strengthen education, promote community participation and meaningful work. Our collective delusion is that we can have all the benefits such a society would bring without the structural supports necessary to bring it into being, that we can attain health by inventing and buying drugs. It is hard to know which is the more utopian vision: magic pills or a society serious about prevention.

~ Karen Hitchcock

Having parked up at the entrance to the football ground I’d like my coffin to be taken from the hearse and carried around the mile and a half perimeter of the pitch in a fitting lap of honour. Then, after the lap of honour, I would like the undertakers to lift me out of my coffin, dress me in the home strip and sit with me in the Evans Halshaw Home Stand for a match against any team in the Essex and Suffolk Border League Division One. (From Undertaker's Question Time, 2016)

~ Nick John Whittle

Death: When next we meet, the hour will strike for you and your friends.Antonius Block: And will you reveal your secrets?Death: I have no secrets.Antonius Block: So do you know nothing?Death: I am unknowing.

~ Ingmar Bergman

DEATH IS A PROFOUND LESSON IN TRUTH: We grow to understand more about it from childhood until the day we must cross the mystic chasm and abandon the land of the living.

~ Loren Mayshark

Time is quixotic because it can torment us. When we have insufficient stimulus to fill our lives, we resent the relentless quality of time, and we engage in activities designed to “kill time.” Time that passes slowly creates insufferable boredom; time that passes to quickly makes us aware of our accelerated death march. A person’s perspective on time depends mostly on what they are most afraid of, boredom or death.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Perhaps we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life.

~ John Updike

The world slides, the world goes, and death makes equal the rich and the poor

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Be assured that any hurt to your spirit will pass in time. It is the nature of Death to take, but the nature of Life to give.

~ Garth Nix

Though we are terrorized by death, it's not different from birth, it just happens

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Death is permanent. There’s no coming back if you get off the ferryman’s boat.

~ Martha Sweeney

He wanted to argue like this forever. This was better than nothing. There was no exhausting his anger at his father, and every word, however well intentioned or intentionally barbed, was a pull at a scab on his bloody heart. It was too late for any of this. There could ultimately be no healing. Marty had terminal cancer, and so did the two men have a cancer between them. They were terminal together, as father and son. They remained, momentarily exhausted, but it was really only that quiet between lightning and thunder as sound lags behind speed. The lightning had cracked the ground already, you just hadn't heard it yet.

~ David Duchovny

I was scared. Not of being dead, that I could not comprehend, to be nothing was impossible to grasp and therefore nothing really to be scared of, but the dying itself I could comprehend, the very instant when you know that now comes what you have always feared, and you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember.

~ Per Petterson

Veins of ivy scale stones,find footholds butthe caretaker cuts earth short, peels creepers from Cotswold rock and props the deadhead to head so they won’ttopple like drunkson their moss-soft shadows.

~ Jalina Mhyana

How are we supposed to live every day if we know we're going to die?' He looked at me, clearly pained by the dawning of my genetically predestined morbidity. He had been the same way as a kid. A day never went by where he didn't think about this eventual demise. He sighed, leaned back in his chair, unable to conjure a comforting answer. 'You just do'.

~ Lena Dunham

Birth is not a beginning; it’s a continuation. That lends tremendous comfort because we then understand that, equally true, death is not an end; it’s merely a continuation.

~ Laurie Buchanan

The tragedy of life is not death, but fearing to live, allowing parts of us to wilt and die instead of flower and rejoice.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

You never know when you're going to die, but maybe something in you does, some cellular consciousness that's aware of the cosmic countdown and starts making plans.

~ Jonathan Trooper

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.

~ Philippe Ariès