Death Quotes

I was sitting at home and had a profound experience. I experienced, in all of my Being, that someday I was going to die, and it wouldn't be like it had been happening, almost dying but somehow staying alive, but I would just die! And two things would happen right before I died: I would regret my entire life; I would want to live it over again. This terrified me. The thought that I would live my entire life, look at it and realize I blew it forced me to do something with my life.

~ Hubert Selby Jr.

Tell her thisAnd more,—That the king of the seasWeeps too, old, helpless man.The bustling fatesHeap his hands with corpsesUntil he stands like a childWith surplus of toys.

~ Stephen Crane

And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!

~ Virginia Woolf

Keep your words. This pain is no life. You only feel pain because you're alive, boy! the keeper thundered. This is the mystery of it. Life is lived on the ragged edge of the cliff. Fall off and you might die, but run from it and you are already dead!

~ Ted Dekker

To you, death does not simply end life. It steals away the sunsets you'll never see, the children you'll never hold, the wife you'll never love. It's frightening to almost lose your future, and it's heartbreaking to witness death snuff out other people's tomorrows.

~ Robert Liparulo

No pain, no gain. You can hear the phrase in the world of physical exercise and conditioning. Muscles that feel no pain are probably getting neither stronger, nor more flexible. It presents an analogy for the exercise of the heart. Those who run the risk of genuine love alone must worry about emotional pain. The more friends; the more good-byes - and the more wakes to attend, the more graves to visit, the more deaths to share. Those who truly live life to the fullest will bear the full cup of suffering. Only those who are willing to pay the price in pain and anguish find life full to the brim. Happy people also suffer; they are no more lucky than the rest. They create their own happiness. That's the rule of thumb.Some thumbs, however, don't seem to rule very well. Slogans and catch-words, for all their conventional wisdom, fail to carry the whole weight of truth; they leave too much room for false inferences. No pain, no gain may leave one with nothing but pain - an intolerable amount of it. There is simply no guarantee that pain will bring gain, that hardship will yield happiness, that suffering will make one a better person. It may; but it's not inevitable.

~ Robert Dykstra

Hope is a horrible thing, you know. It's a plague. It's like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and someone just keep pulling it and pulling it.STATE OF WONDER

~ Ann Patchett

He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.

~ Julian Barnes

If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.

~ Margaret Atwood

Life and death- what paltry words, what tarnished bookends,what unjust summation for drawing breath one moment and failing to release it the next.

~ Rebecca Rasmussen

In my life Why do I give valuable time To people who don't care if I live or die ?

~ Morrissey

Well, I always did want to go out in a Braveheart kind of way. I'll just have to think of something cool to yell before they cut my head off.

~ Jenny Trout

Our essence is change. We are movement. Being out of balance is life. Perfect balance. Stasis. That is death. Life yearns for perfection. Death is perfection.

~ Chris Boucher

Phaedra of Alonso’s death was a never-ending pain that gnawed at his insides. It made him a prisoner in his own cottage.

~ Melina Marchetta

The dead are merely the countrymen of my future.

~ Dean Koontz

So I heard the boom of my father's rifle when he shot my best friend. A bullet only costs about two cents, and anybody can afford that.

~ Sherman Alexie

And so I have to live. Because we live for more than just ourselves, Most of the time we live for others, keep putting one foot before the other, left and right, left and right, so that walking becomes a habit, just like breathing. Ina n out, left and right.

~ Thrity Umrigar

Mom always said I was born to sit in the electric chair, but I'm proving her wrong. I'm going to die on my knees, begging for my life.

~ Bauvard

I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.

~ Clarice Lispector

Failures plagued me. Things I had omitted or ignored, neglected. What I should have given and hadn’t. I felt the biting pang of every unfulfillment.

~ Richard Matheson

There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.

~ José Saramago

Each memory was brought to life before me and within me. I could not avoid them. Neither could I rationalize, explain away. I could only re-experience with total cognizance, unprotected by pretense. Self delusion was impossible, truth exposed in this blinding light. Nothing as I thought it had been. Nothing as I hoped it had been. Only as it had been.

~ Richard Matheson

I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the warehouse of good intentions: Can't do it now. Then put it on hold. This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.

~ Saul Bellow

And what of the dead? I own that I thought of myself, at times, almost as dead. Are they not locked below ground in chambers smaller than mine was, in their millions of millions? There is no category of human activity in which the dead do not outnumber the living many times over. Most beautiful children are dead. Most soldiers, most cowards. The fairest women and the most learned men – all are dead. Their bodies repose in caskets, in sarcophagi, beneath arches of rude stone, everywhere under the earth. Their spirits haunt our minds, ears pressed to the bones of our foreheads. Who can say how intently they listen as we speak, or for what word?

~ Gene Wolfe

[B]e comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.

~ P. Harding

Think of the glory. Think of your reputation. Think how great it'll look on your next resume.On my cenotaph, you mean. Nobody will be able to collect enough of my scattered atoms to bury. You going to cover my funeral expenses, son?Splendidly. Banners, dancing girls, and enough beer to float your coffin to Valhalla.- Miles coaxing Ky Tung to agree to an almost suicidal mission

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

It has been a week since Ami died and this morning I woke suddenly hours before dawn, indeed the same hour as when my mother died. It was not a dream that woke me, but a thought. And with that thought I could swear I heard Ami's voice. But I am not frightened. I am joyous. Joyous with realization. For I cannot help but think what a lucky person I am. Imagine that in all the eons of time, in all the possible universes of which Dara speaks, of all the stars in the heavens, Ami and I came together for one brief and shining sliver of time. I stop. I think.Supposing in the grand infinity of this universe two particles of life, Ami and me, swirl endlessly like grains of sand in the oceans of the world -- how much of a chance is there for these two particles, these two grains of sand, to collide, to rest briefly together... at the same moment in time? That is what happened with Ami and me... this miracle of chance.

~ Kathryn Lasky

Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,I had not thought death had undone so many.Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,To where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stock of nine.There I saw one I knew, and stopped him crying: 'Stetson!You, who were with me in the ships at Mylae!That corpse you planted last year in your garden,Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!You! hypocrite lecteur!-mon semblable,-mon frere!

~ T.s. Eliot

I'd heard that if you saw a Reaper, you saw what you expected to see, what you thought the agents of Death would look like. Personally, I wanted to see little, fuzzy pink bunnies, but apparently my subconscious visualized tall, scary, and skeletal. My subconscious and I needed to have a long talk.

~ Lisa Shearin

Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live.

~ Albert Camus

Death is not a reaper, like they say, nor even a friend. It is a dark, fierce water, an inundation.

~ Siobhan Dowd

Sleep: the stepchild of Death.

~ Nancy A. Collins

Death's Diary: 1942 -It was a year for the ages, like 79, like 1346, to just name a few. Forget the scythe, God damn it, I needed a broom or a mop. And I needed a holiday.(...) They say that war is death's best friend, but I must offer you a different point of view on that one. To me, war is like the new boss who expects the impossible. He stands over your shoulder repeating one thing, incessantly. 'Get it done, get it done'. So you work harder. You get the job done. The boss however, does not thank you. He asks for more.

~ Markus Zusak

When a person has lived generously and fought fiercely, she deserves more than sadness at the end.

~ Ruth Reichl

War is being reminded that you are completely at the mercy of death at every moment, without the illusion that you are not. Without the distractions that make life worth living.

~ Francesca Lia Block

Most people don't want to die, but they don't want to live either. I am speaking about men now as much as women. They look for a third way, but there is no third way.

~ Jonathan Rosen

Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,But young men think it is, and we were young.

~ A.e. Housman

And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.

~ Anita Shreve

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.

~ Ernest Hemingway

God waits only the separation of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward. Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over, and death is so certain an entrance to happiness -- to glory?

~ Charlotte Brontë