Death And Dying Quotes

Too evident sorrow does not inspire pity but repugnance, it is the sign of mental instability or of bad manners: it is morbid.

~ Philippe Ariès

An acceptable death is a death which can be accepted or tolerated by the survivors. It has its antithesis: ‘the embarrassingly graceless dying,’ which embarrasses the survivors because it causes too strong an emotion to burst forth; and emotions must be avoided both in the hospital and everywhere in society. One does not have the right to become emotional other than in private, that is to say, secretly.

~ Philippe Ariès

We all emerge into this material soup, mix about with the meat and potatoes of life, and then slip away, back to the primordial germination whence we came. Nascence is a strange business: we forget what we were doing only to come forth and continually forget what we were doing perpetually over the course of a lifetime, until it is time to quit this plane through some unseen and ethereal vomitorium, and presumably forget that we had forgotten all over again.

~ Michelle Franklin

Indeed, in the majority of cases the dying person has already lost consciousness. Death had been dissected, cut to bits by a series of little steps, which finally makes it impossible to know which step was the real death, the one in which consciousness was lost, or the one in which breathing stopped. All these little silent deaths have replaced and erased the great dramatic act of death, and no one any longer has the strength or patience to wait over a period of weeks for a moment which has lost a part of its meaning.

~ Philippe Ariès

She was infamous once upon a time. She's legendary now. The girl is a definite force to be reckoned with, though perhaps she doesn't know it yet.

~ Rebecca Harris

The sky looks comfortingly mundane compared to the garish kaleidoscope of the stained glass. It makes Rose yearn to be reliving any one of a thousand ordinary days spent with her ordinary older sister, who has now done this extraordinary thing and died.

~ Liane Moriarty

There is not a single person I have met in my lifetime who is comfortable talking about death. It’s the biggest downside to our youth-centric culture. Death is a bummer, so let’s not talk about it. Let’s hide it away and hope it never strikes close to home.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

There will be no beautiful widow with Persian eyes sitting at your grave. And teary-eyed kids won't be asking: Papa, papa, can you hear us?

~ Ilya Ilf

You still are? There go my plans! And the suit I had bought to attend your funeral. Well, well. Anyway, do call me up when you an't.

~ Fakeer Ishavardas

Death is what happens when you die.

~ Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff

No one dies pre-maturely. As is meant, happens naturally

~ Fakeer Ishavardas

Death is the vehicle God uses to get us from here to where we are going. Before you take that ride, make sure you know in what direction you are heading.

~ Danny L Deaubé

It made leaving bearable, knowing I'd had that kind of love in my life. Knowing I'd had the best thing.

~ Saul Black

An old Celtic proverb boldly places death right at the center of life. ‘Death is the middle of a long life,’ they used to say. Ancient people did things like that; they put death at the center instead of casting it out of sight and leaving such an important subject until the last possible moment. Of course, they lived close to nature and couldn’t help but see how the forest grew from fallen trees and how death seemed to replenish life from fallen members. Only the unwise and the overly fearful think that death is the blind enemy of life.

~ Michael Meade

It's difficult the first time you have to get close to kill another. You see their eyes, see the light in it go out. Even a troll's eyes have that light. I'd be worried if you didn't feel something after that. I don't like hunting with a man who's a killer without that feeling.

~ Raymond E. Feist

It was something he had never quite understood about himself. He had seen thousands of men die in nearly ten years of war and could look on it at times with a near-total detachment, but an animal suffering - be it a horse or needra injured in battle, or the stag now dying - moved him deeply.

~ Raymond E. Feist

From our birth we are all dying, but some of us finish sooner than others.

~ Raymond E. Feist

It has been seven years since you died. Of course what I'll say next is that time has flown by. I got old. All of a sudden, de repente. I walk with difficulty. I even drool. I leave the door unlocked in case I die in my sleep, but it's more likely I'll go endlessly on until I get put away someplace. I am already dotty.... It's not so strange that I talk to my cat but I feel silly because he is totally deaf.

~ Lucia Berlin

Those what yielded the extra lolly were gevyn a clothe to put over themselves when they dost cash in their chips, and were told to staye where they lay until they be picked up. - From Three Interesting Facts about Undertakers

~ Nick John Whittle

Last Comforts” was born when one nagging question kept arising early in my journey as a hospice volunteer. Why were people coming into hospice care so late in the course of their illness? That question led to many others that rippled out beyond hospice care. Are there better alternatives to conventional skilled nursing home operations? How are physicians and nurses educated about advanced illness and end-of-life care? What are more effective ways of providing dementia care? What are the unique challenges of minority and LGBT people? What is the role of popular media in our death-denying culture? What has been the impact of public policy decisions about palliative and hospice care? The book is part memoir of lessons learned throughout my experiences with patients and families as a hospice volunteer; part spotlight on the remarkable pathfinders and innovative programs in palliative and late-life care; and part call to action. I encourage readers – particularly my fellow baby boomers -- not only to make their wishes and goals clear to friends and family, but also to become advocates for better care in the broader community.

~ Ellen Rand

But who thinks of death in the middle of life?-Mike RogersEndless Night by Agatha Christie

~ Agatha Christie

They say that a near death experience makes a person see a flash of their past, but that hasn't happened to me at all.

~ Anthony Otero

​It is not enough to write and deliver a funeral service for a grieving family…you must love them too.

~ Caroline Louise Whittle

If I could control tomorrow's haze,The darkened shore wouldn't bother me,If I can't control the web we weave,My life will be lost in the fallen leaves...

~ David Bowie

Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels put dirt into your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called by any angel. As strata of rock shift, your fingers elongate, and your teeth are distended sideways in a great underground grimace indistinguishable from a strip of chalk. And the earth tumbles on, and the sun expires, and unaltering darkness reigns where once there were stars.

~ John Updike

Death, it turns out, is the mother of all conflicts.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

All things end. They rarely end as we would like them to and often do so before we are ready. We transition in a way that gives our loss honor; we grieve with a love and true appreciation for what we have no longer. It was clear that my mom was ready to go; it was her time. My love of her and my desperation to keep her in my life were of no consequence to that fact, any more than my relentless attempts to improve The Lyon's Den kept it from cancellation. Both personally and professionally I was swamped with the message: Your plan pales compared to the larger one.

~ Rob Lowe

[Mayor Dana] I don't know a lot of things. I do know there will always be problems for Night Vale. There are so many. Usually they pass. Often they kill many people, but what are people but deaths that haven't happened yet? [Jackie] Births that already happened?

~ Joseph Fink

Tis only when faced with our own mortality that we truly realize what it means to be alive

~ Timothy Strother

Death is just one more Path. One you'll come to in time.

~ Jim Butcher

Jason smiled. The sound of wings was louder now, the fluttering of angels come to carry him home.

~ Robert Ferrigno

By not talking about death with our loved ones, not being clear through advanced directives, DNR (do not resuscitate) orders, and funeral plans, we are directly contributing to this future ... and a rather bleak present, at that. Rather than engage in larger societal discussions about dignified ways for the terminally ill to end their lives, we accept intolerable cases like that of Angelita, a widow in Oakland who covered her head with a plastic bag because the arthritic pain of her gnarled joints was too much to bear. Or that of Victor in Los Angeles, who hung himself from the rafters of his apartment after his third unsuccessful round of chemotherapy, leaving his son to discover his body. Or the countless bodies with decubitus ulcers, more painful for me to care for them even babies or suicides. When these bodies come into the funeral home, I can only offer my sympathy to their living relatives, and promise to work to ensure that more people are not robbed of a dignified death by a culture of silence.

~ Caitlin Doughty

Childbirth is nothing. Death is mighty. The 0 to our 1. There is nothing in the world like it. But there is nothing in it that is not like the world.

~ Marion Coutts

Maybe someone who dies at the age of a hundred doesn't feel anything more than the fear that grips us when we're six and it's nighttime and our mother comes in to turn out the light.

~ Kamel Daoud

The casket was lined with lovely velvet, which must have felt lovely even to the dead, but the glowing man continued to rip up the casket.

~ Brad Mckinniss

Death is our friend, precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Obviously the raven with the unquenchable itch was at it again, playing tricks on the world and its creatures. Once by air, he thought, and now by water.

~ Mordecai Richler

It is better to die honorably and render yourself immortal than live to old age and fade to dust.

~ Livia Blackburne

Perhaps, in a few people, I have seen what can be described as a struggle with death, and it can be distressing to behold. But for the vast majority of people death is gentle, tender.

~ Jennifer Worth

We die a day at a time

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana