Death Quotes

God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling...

~ Leo Tolstoy

Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

~ John Fowles

Sometimes the only answer to death is lunch.

~ Jim Harrison

Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists...but it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.

~ Lafcadio Hearn

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.

~ E.m. Forster

We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.

~ Stephen King

Survival is the celebration of choosing life over death. We know we're going to die. We all die. But survival is saying: perhaps not today. In that sense, survivors don't defeat death, they come to terms with it.

~ Laurence Gonzales

Decline is also a form of voluptuousness, just like growth. Autumn is just as sensual as springtime. There is as much greatness in dying as in procreation.

~ Iwan Goll

There is no such thing as originality. It has all been said before, suffered before. If a person knows that, is it any wonder love becomes mechanical and death just a scene to be shunned? There is no absolute knowledge to be gained from either. Just another ride on the merry-go-round, another blurred scene of faces smiling and faces grieved.

~ Clive Barker

Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness, of fear; then she wished that it were already the next day. Immediately afterwards she realized that that wish was futile because the death of her father was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening endlessly.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Having made the decision to love, had I chosen life instead of death?

~ Richard Bach

I'll have that someday, thought Peter. Someone who'll kiss me good-bye at the door. Or maybe just someone to put a blindfold over my head before they shoot me. Depending on how things turn out.

~ Orson Scott Card

Grandfather : Death is nothing to be afraid of.Renee : It's not death I'm afraid of.Grandfather: What is it, then?

~ Yvonne Wood

Death is the reward for living

~ Sylvia Browne

No mother should lose her child.

~ Ann Hood

Sometimes the dying live more fiercely and wisely than the rest of us. (146)

~ Julia Cameron

Yes, Max, you are going to die. Just like everybody else.Thank you, Confucious.

~ James Patterson

This sadness is one of the great trials of the human experiment. As far as we know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift - or curse, perhaps - of awareness about our own mortality. Everything here eventually dies; we're just the lucky ones who get to think about this fact every day.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,' the mage said...'And life is also a terrible thing,' Ged said, 'and must be feared and praised.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

That which has died falls not out of the universe. If it stays here, it also changes here, and is dissolved into its proper parts, which are elements of the universe and of thyself. And these too change, and they murmur not.

~ Marcus Aurelius

She couldn't tell where his pupils ended and the irises began, looking into those eyes was like looking into a well where children had drowned.

~ Maryjanice Davidson

Though there had been moments of beauty in it Mariam knew that life for most part had been unkind to her.But as she walked the final twenty paces,she could not help but wish for more of it.She wished she could see Laila again , wished to hear the clangor of her laugh , to sit with her once more for a pot of chai and leftover halwa under a starlit sky. She mourned that she would never see Aziza grow up , would not see the beautiful young woman that she would oneday become ,would not get to paint her hands with henna and toss noqul candy at her wedding . She would never play with Aziza's children. She would have liked that very much , to be old and play with Aziza's children.Mariam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes , it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that wshed over her. She thought of her entry into this world , the harami child of a lowly villager , an unintended thing , a pitiable , regrettable accident. A weed , And yet she was leaving the wolrd as a woman who had loved and been loved back.She was leaving it as a friend , a companion , a guardian.A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was no so bad , Mariam thought , that she should die this way. Not so bad.This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings. pg. 360

~ Khaled Hosseini

Ignorance is not bliss. It is the kiss of death.

~ Suzy Kassem

For some folks death is release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them.

~ Neil Gaiman

Smiling at death seems like a pretty bold act. And so I smile like a damned fool.

~ Emm Cole

I must confess, I have always wondered what lay beyond life, my dear.Yeah, everybody wonders. And sooner or later everybody gets to find out.

~ Neil Gaiman

So if there is something on the planet that is worth living for, I'd better not miss it, because once you're dead, it's too late for regrets, and if you die by mistake, that is really, really dumb.

~ Muriel Barbery

Tirelessly they flew on and on, and tirelessly she kept pace. She felt a fierce joy possessing her, that she could command these immortal presences. And she rejoiced in her blood and flesh, in the rough pine bark she felt next to her skin, in the beat of her heart and the life of all her senses, and in the hunger she was feeling now, and in the presence of her sweet-voiced bluethroat dæmon, and in the earth below her and the lives of every creature, plant and animal both; and she delighted in being of the same substance as them, and in knowing that when she died her flesh would nourish other lives as they had nourished her.

~ Philip Pullman

Music links us humans, heart to heart...Across time and space, and life and death.

~ Nancy Werlin

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,      Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;      ’T is strange, the shortest letter which man uses Instead of speech, may form a lasting link      Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces Frail man, when paper — even a rag like this, Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.

~ George Gordon Byron

Two weeks until your cure she says finally. Sixteen days I say, but in my head I'm counting: Seven days. Seven days until I'm free and away from all these people and their sliding superficial lives brushing past one another gliding, gliding, gliding from life to death. For them there's hardly a change between the two.

~ Lauren Oliver

I lost my father this past year, and the word feels right because I keep looking for him. As if he were misplaced. As if he could just turn up, like a sock or a set of keys.

~ Mark Slouka

She started thinking about all the euphemisms for death, all the anxious taboos that had always fascinated her. It was too bad you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject. People were either too young or too old, or else they didn't have time.

~ Tove Jansson

There is shadow under this red rock // (Come in under the shadow of this red rock) // And I will show you something different from either // Your shadow at morning striding behind you // Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you // I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

~ T.s. Eliot

Death is inevitable passion is eternal

~ Allison Van Diepen

You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It wasn't his, it wasn't my fault,we both had nothing except patience,but Death has none. I saw him come (how meanly!)and I watched him as he took and took:none of it I could claim as mine.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Life is a long agonized illness only curable by death.

~ Spike Milligan

I'm not scared of death, I just don't want to seek it out.

~ Thomas James Higgins

If death, said my father, reasoning with himself, is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body;--and if it is true that people can walk about and do their business without brains,--then certes the soul does not inhabit there.

~ Laurence Sterne