Death Quotes

Because Dad told you he'd be here forever. Because I thought forever was like Mars -- far away.

~ Kwame Alexander

I do not know, not do I care to rememberThe time in which I knew distinctly that you were goneYou fade in and out of memoryUpon which I can not feign to touchOr feelHow cruel to leave me With paper but no penWhat a way to leave meYou give me cups, but not water to fill themSo they sit thereEmpty Your reflectionBouncing to and froFrom every surface

~ Queenbe Monyei

I do not know, nor do I care to rememberThe time in which I knew distinctly that you were goneYou fade in and out of memoryUpon which I can not feign to touchOr feelHow cruel to leave me With paper but no penWhat a way to leave meYou give me cups, but not water to fill themSo they sit thereEmpty Your reflectionBouncing to and froFrom every surface

~ Queenbe Monyei

Only marriage combines all three forms of companionship - spouse is family, best friend, and permanent companion. This is why it is widely held that while the death of a child is the most painful loss, the death of a spouse is the most disorienting one.

~ Dennis Prager

There was a time when I was lucky enough to believe that 'There's this girl in Pakistan' would be the worst five words that Al ever said to me. Years later, they would be totally eclipsed by 'They can't find a heartbeat'.

~ Ruth Ahmed

Saying goodbye to someone you love isn’t really the hard part. It’s living every day, not being able to say anything to them at all.

~ Laurel Ulen Curtis

The sorrow we feel when we lose a loved one is the price we pay to have had them in our lives.

~ Rob Liano

They are dead. We are dead. It is over.

~ Victoria Aveyard

We get sombre about death. Think about Charon the ferryman rowing the souls across the Styx to the Isle of the Dead. Pretty grim stuff. Unless you think that, perhaps, at times, old Charon rows souls back to the land of the living too. Perhaps I have merely gone to rest awhile…

~ Sean J Halford

Can anyone actually find a replacement for a lost loved one?Isn't there a difference between things and human beings?

~ Honeya

Oh, trust me Sydney Tar Ponds, you aren’t the first Personification to be forgotten by somebody ordinary,” Mearth sighed with a falsely-reassuring smile. Alecto stepped back from her, glaring hatefully. “Sydney Tar Ponds,” Mearth added, “I’ve had so many ordinary people as friends in my life that by now I’ve forgotten all their names. At first it was difficult… very sad… to see them always leaving, dying, disappearing, ignoring, but after a while I realized that they weren’t worth the trouble. I’d rather be in the company of other Personifications. At least they aren’t always dropping dead like houseflies or sailing away to parts unknown. Nil sa saol seo ach ceo, i ni bheimid beo, ach seal beag gearr. Wouldn’t you agree?”“No,” Alecto told her. “I think you’re insane.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

A star's light still shines even if there's no one to see it, but without someone to remember Jesse, his light will disappear.

~ Shaun David Hutchinson

Poor Ramon.

~ Robin Stevenson

You can't learn anything from losing someone you love. Any lesson you learn from that isn't a lesson. It's a compromise with life. A lie you tell yourself.

~ Sonali Dev

Age isn't stealing from my grandmother, it's slowly unwinding her.

~ Shaun David Hutchinson

The best part, though, was hearing my mother's voice. It was like having her again, coming out from far inside me. It hurt, of course, but more often than not the best things do, I've found. You wouldn't think it could be so, but-as the oldtimers used to say - the world's titled, and there's an end to it.

~ Stephen King

He hadn’t saved her. He hadn’t even bothered trying.

~ Tan Redding

As a young girl I was told the truth. I knew about death. I was afraid to lose but not afraid to die.

~ Kayko Tamaki

I realize in this moment that all my life I've felt that I deserve to be punished, for wanting so much, for taking so much from this world, from the people who love me.

~ Claire Bidwell Smith

I don't want to tiptoe around her or him or you anymore. The only thing that's doing us making it harder for me to remember her. Sometimes i try to concentrate on her voice just so i can hear her again-The way she always said 'Hey there' when she was in a good mood,An 'Vi-o-let' when she was annoyed.For some reason, these are the easiest ones.I concentrate on them, and when i have them. I hold on to them because i don't ever want to forget how she sounded.Like it or not,She was here and now she's gone.But she doesn't have to be completely gone.

~ Jennifer Niven

When you've gone through something traumatic, when you've faced death and loss as much as we have, it's only natural that it changes your entire view of life.

~ Claire Bidwell Smith

We must learn to live in this world, because we have no other choice. What we do have a choice in is how we choose to live. We can remain gray and immobile in the wake of our losses or we can open ourselves up to the world, let the sunshine in, fill our surroundings with heaps of flowers, and know that we loved someone truly and deeply.

~ Claire Bidwell Smith

I am them. And they are me. All of us, we are each other. There is no such thing as good-bye.

~ Claire Bidwell Smith

She thought often of her own death, but without fear, loss having been her only belonging in this life. For years, acceptance had been her only means of survival. She knew that no matter how miserable or wretched life became, all she could do with her meek piece of time was sustain it. Decades of guilt, lost faith, the betrayal by those few people she'd let herself love - it was worth enduring these things, if only for the gift of a single, exalted moment. And such moments happened, even frequently, in the lives of people wise enough to see them.

~ Esi Edugyan

My Dad is everywhere and he is nowhere. My world tilts on a different axis, orbiting the sun of my own family- but still, I feel his warmth.

~ Elisabeth Egan

From my distance the loss was theoretical, and though I couldn’t have said so, I preferred it that way. I felt relieved to be so far away, because I was excused from grieving. I felt nothing but tenderness for her, but there was an emotional emancipation to being here and not there. Even though I didn’t believe in God or heaven, I could childishly go on believing that she was still around. When it happened, the specific timing of my grandmother’s death seemed like a footnote: She died just after I went away. But a lesson would persist as I formed and unformed long-distance relationships over the years. Going away could free you from feeling too much.

~ Elisabeth Eaves

The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty spaces of the world.

~ John Banville

Sometimes I feel like my whole life before she died was a dream.

~ Ann Dee Ellis

Kell stared at her, at a loss. Was her bravado a front, or did she truly have so little to lose? But she had a life, and a life was a thing that could always be lost.

~ V.e. Schwab

Ten years from now, her mother might not even recognize her. Already she was different, but the day would come when she'd be this person her mother had never seen. There would be other people - someone like Carolyn or Alan, or even Violet - who had known her longer than her mother ever did.

~ Joyce Maynard

And I, could I stand byAnd see you freeze,Without my right of frost, Death's privilege?

~ Emily Dickinson

I don't think those who die are any better than those who stay alive. They just look better. They can't mess anything up anymore.

~ Hannah Moskowitz

Once, when I was little, I asked her if she’d cried when my father had fallen to his death.At the funeral? I mean, the burial?No, I did not.Because you weren’t sad?Because it was nobody’s business if I was.

~ Khaled Hosseini

know one day, I will be gone.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Grief came in waves, sometimes big, sometimes small, but even on the calmest days, the grief remained. The tide still came ashore.

~ Dianna Hardy

Well, I'm sorry you couldn't make it either. I'm sorry I had to sit there in that church--which, by the way, had a broken air conditioner--sweating, watching all those people march down the aisle to look in my mother's casket and whisper to themselves all this mess about how much she looked like herself, even though she didn't. I'm sorry you weren't there to hear the lame choir drag out, song after song. I'm sorry you weren't there to see my dad try his best to be upbeat, cracking bad jokes in his speech, choking on his words. I'm sorry you weren't there to watch me totally lose it and explode into tears. I'm sorry you weren't there for me, but it doesn't matter, because even if you were, you wouldn't be able to feel what I feel. Nobody can. Even the preacher said so.

~ Jason Reynolds

Mid-Term BreakI sat all morning in the college sick bayCounting bells knelling classes to a close.At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.In the porch I met my father crying—He had always taken funerals in his stride—And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pramWhen I came in, and I was embarrassedBy old men standing up to shake my handAnd tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,Away at school, as my mother held my handIn hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.At ten o'clock the ambulance arrivedWith the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.Next morning I went up into the room. SnowdropsAnd candles soothed the bedside; I saw himFor the first time in six weeks. Paler now,Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

~ Seamus Heaney

Sometimes we grieve the living more than the dead.

~ Lawren Leo

Oscar did not know what he was supposed to be feeling right now, what all the adults behind him would be expecting him to feel. He did not even know what he was, in fact, feeling. Except, whatever it was, it was a lot. Too much. More than bodies could hold.

~ Anne Ursu

It is not about what you lose when it is over. Far more, it is about what you gain during the journey!

~ Cass Van Krah