Death Quotes

In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economy is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects.

~ Salman Rushdie

The beagle and the kobold approached, walking out of the dusty distance.

~ Terry Pratchett

Some people think destiny is something you cannot escape, such as death or a curdled cheesecake, both of which always turn up sooner or later.

~ Lemony Snicket

The sun would still rise, the seasons would still come, life would continue. I was thankful to have been a part of it; I would take the memories and savor them for the life ahead. I had been given the components that would comprise the fate of my destiny; they had aged into my soul so that part of the past would always remain with me. They would be there for me to draw strength from on days in my future when death would seem a triumph and life too hard to live any more.

~ Sara Niles

You know what I was thinking about on my way home? How different my life would be if you’d made that gash a little deeper. Or how different yours would be if I’d vaulted myself off a roof nine years ago. Do you ever think about things like that? Like, if either you or I wouldn’t have made it, where would the other one be right now? It was something I thought about all the time: how death changes every remaining moment for those still living.

~ Tiffanie Debartolo

The world won't end with a bang or a whimper. It'll end with the death screams of a thousand demons and a defiant, carefree, savage, wolfen howl.

~ Darren Shan

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

By the creative act, however, we are able to reach beyond our own death. This is why creativity is so important and why we need to confront the problem of the relationship between creativity and death.

~ Rollo May

The battle with the gods thus hinges on our own mortality! Creativity is a yearning for immortality.

~ Rollo May

No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.

~ Dan Simmons

A misbegotten hatchling of consciousness, a birth defect of our species, imagination is often revered as a sign of vigor in our make-up. But it is really just a psychic overcompensation for our impotence as beings. Denied nature’s exemption from creativity, we are indentured servants of the imaginary until the hour of our death, when the final harassments of imagination will beset us.

~ Thomas Ligotti

Death ends a life, not a relationship. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on- in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.

~ Morrie Schwartz

Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

He had entered another imaginative world, one connected to the beginning of his life as a writer, to the Napoleonic world that had been a lifelong metaphor for the power of art, for the empire of his own creation He began to dictate notes for a new novel, fragments of the book he imagines himself to be writing. As if he were now writing a novel of which his own altered consciousness was the dramatic center, he dictated a vision of himself as Napoleon and his own family as the Imperial Bonapartes....William and Alice he grasped with his regent hand, addressing his 'dear and most esteemed brother and sister.' To them, to whom he had granted countries, he now gave the responsibility of supervising the detailed plans he had created for 'the decoration of certain apartments, here of the Louvre and Tuileries, which you will find addressed in detail to artists and workment who take them in hand.' He was himself the 'imperial e

~ Fred Kaplan

Writing keeps death at bay. Every book I write is a triumph over death. ... If we did not know we’d die, we’d wander around and sleep like cats.

~ Ray Bradbury

Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.

~ Jeanette Winterson

My mom told me once that Wyatt loved her the way a boy will love his mother, but I loved her the way an artist loves another. Jo taught me what that meant.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

Those who loved with all their heart and mind and might have always thought of death, and those who knew the endless nights of harrowing concern for others have longed for it. The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation, that makes life worthwhile and death welcome. There is no other life I should prefer. Neither should I like not to die. (The Faith of a Heretic)

~ Walter Kaufmann

I worried I would miss it, and I knew, from losing Wyatt, that things happen the moment the soul is released. Wyatt had been there in the school, watching me, making sure I survived. Souls linger…they do. They linger a bit before they turn toward eternity. It could be that no matter how perfect their future will be, the past still tugs for a moment.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

Looking at death can be life-affirming. It doesn’t need to mire us in thoughts of uselessness, nihilism, self-recrimination, and indifference to the future. Just a reminder that our days are numbered invites us to consider our blessings, strengthen our resolve to carry on, and escalate our compassion for all creatures, great and small.

~ Brent Green

I die,” I say with as much conviction as I can muster. “What happens to me then?” Willis says. “If you don’t live, I never have a chance to be born, to live, to make a difference. You’re throwing my life away and I have no say in it.” “What if the world is a better place without me in it?” “My grandmother made a huge difference to the lives of so many people

~ If I Wake

Don’t give up on trying everyday, those who gave up yesterday are living today regretting that they never tried again and again.

~ Bamigboye Olurotimi

I always sense the future, the antithesis of everything is always before my eyes. I have never seen a child without thinking that it would grow old, nor a cradle without thinking of a grave. The sight of a naked woman makes me imagine her skeleton.

~ Paul Auster

And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would vanish. We would need no personal names of the old sort in the sidereal future, nothing being fixed. We would be designated by other nouns. Days and nights would belong to the museums. The earth a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery. The seas powdering our bones like quartz, making sand, grinding our peace for us by the aeon. Well, that would be good - a melancholy good.

~ Saul Bellow

And it occurs to me that there’s no real difference between us, the living and the dead; it’s just a matter of tense: past-dead and future-dead

~ Rick Yancey

Though sometimes when he wakes in the night all he can think about is death. His own death, of course, but also the death of those around him,the fact that one day in the not-too-distant future every person he knows, every single one, will be dead and gone, along with all the people he doesn't know,to be replaced by a crop of strangers who will take over the structures left behind.

~ A.s.a. Harrison

All life is preoccupied with death. Death is the only certain future. Yet in the face of reason, everyone holds out hope for the highly improbable.

~ Johnny Rich

My house says to me, Do not leave me, for here dwells your past.And the road says to me, Come and follow me, for I am your future.And I say to both my house and the road, I have no past, nor have I a future. If I stay here, there is a going in my staying; and if I go there is a staying in my going. Only love and death will change all things.

~ Kahlil Gibran

I knelt in front of life, folded my hands and prayed for some more time; there couldn't be any. My heart bled and so did my tearful eyes.Time, they say, flies, but I saw it slowly passing by taking each of my tardy breaths with it as it walked out of my life...

~ Sanhita Baruah

Tomorrow can take me,” he said. “I don’t need today anyway.

~ Shannon A. Thompson

Someday, the people we know, are acquainted to become the people we knew. They leave. They leave to pursue the opportunities laid down in their paths and they leave on account of misunderstandings.Their absence causes a vacuum, a space, an incompleteness which we believe no one can fill. But someday, someone eventually does and that someone rekindles our hopes for companionship, until the circle continues and is ultimately intervened by the permanence of death.The future is alarming, as atrocious as the past. And the friendship, the love, the memories either remain in our hearts cherished or are forgotten like an undeserving dream.Everything eventually fades away, either for the better or worse.Someday, the people we know, are acquainted to become the people we knew.But then again, that someday is not today and so we must be a little more appreciative, for the moment, for the times, for the present because someday everything is going to change.

~ Chirag Tulsiani

Where would the shout of love begin, if not from the summit of sacrifice? Oh my brothers, this is the junction between those who think and those who suffer; this barricade is made neither of paving stones, nor of timbers, nor of iron; it is made of two mounds, a mound of ideas and a mound of sorrows. Here misery encounters the ideal. Here day embraces night, and says: I will die with you and you will be born again with me. From the heavy embrace of all desolations springs faith. Sufferings bring their agony here, and ideas their immortality. This agony and immortality will mingle and make up our death.Brothers, whoever dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a grave illuminated by the dawn.

~ Victor Hugo

Every broken heart has one time or another asked, What is important to me now?

~ Shannon L. Alder

So, apart from casting runes, what other hobbies do you have? Forbidden rituals, human sacrifices, torturing? –

~ Simona Panova

I'm not afraid of death really, just what comes after.

~ Jose Guerra Sison

There will come a time,' I said, 'when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this' - I gestured encompassingly - 'will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does.

~ John Green

Plans never go as planned, ever; that’s just how life is. People spend way too much time dreaming about a future they should be having more nightmares warning them against. But that doesn't mean you should let those bad dreams scare you away; all those nightmares want is respect. If you give them that, they’ll give you the space you need. Unless, of course, they’re the type of nightmares that have an appetite, then you’re fucked.

~ Dave Matthes

That girl, dead and gone, her spirit trapped forever just inside town limits—she'd come from someplace, was going somewhere. Until destiny had stepped into the road in front of her, stopped her forward motion, drawn a killing claw against the white, fluttering swell of her future. Whispering, 'Oh no, you don't.'When you made plans, the saboteurs came out to play.

~ Kat Rosenfield

Her family was a relay team racing toward Tomorrowland, but her father died, and in their shock they kept losing the baton.

~ Stacy Bierlein

All Egypt is obsessed with death! And do you know why, Renisenb? Because we have eyes in our bodies, but none in our minds. We cannot conceive of a life other than this one - of a life after death. We can visualize only a continuation of what we know. We have no real belief in a God.

~ Agatha Christie