Death Quotes

Till her appointed course be run;Till on the darkness faint her breathFlown to the silent void, and DeathSit crowned upon the ashen sun.(“The Testimony of the Suns”)

~ George Sterling

Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.

~ William Goodman

So, sweeting, why were you threatening to throw Tate out of the house? What did he say?”Leather brushed her chin as he tipped it up. Serious dark eyes met hers. “What did he say?”She glanced around; surely the footmen were too far away to hear. “He wanted to join us in our bed.”“I’ll run him through.”“No! Perhaps he only said it to goad you into a duel. Perhaps it was intended as a way to kill you.”“It was an insult to you, love. That can’t be ignored.”“And so you rush inexorably toward death. I don’t care if he stands on a Drury Lane stage and calls me a courtesan, I won’t have you risking your life.

~ Sharon Page

It's not the dead even. They're gone. Nothing you can do about that. It's what's left behind - the echo. These woods you're walking through. There are some old timers who think a sound echoes here forever. Makes sense when you think about it. That Billingham kid. I'm sure he screamed. He screams, it echoes, just bounces back and forth, the sound getting smaller and smaller, but never entirely disappearing. Like a part of his is still calling out, even now.

~ Harlan Coben

Why is edamame always ready to expire? It´s so urgent for a vegetable. Edamame. It sounds like an assisted form of suicide. Is there an advertising concept in this?

~ Suzanne Finnamore

The desire of death will not always lead you to death but the fear of death will.

~ Santosh Kalwar

All primitive people are frightened of owls,' said Harley. 'The villagers here are scared to death of the gufo. Birds of ill omen. If they see one, they think they'll die. But they never do. See one, I mean, of course,' he added with a laugh.

~ Francis Brett Young

Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.

~ Don Delillo

This showed once again that everyone had something different to lose in this battle. Some were concerned for their lives, and some for those they cared most about: rays, sea horses, even the chickens that ran free in the streets of the city because they couldn't all be caught in time.

~ Kai Meyer

Some of us hover when we weep for the other who wasdying since the day they were born.

~ Lisa Loeb

Dr. Beall gave him the first shot, followed closely by the second.He said, I'll check for a heartbeat.I said, You don't need to. I can see it in his eyes.Dewey was gone.

~ Vicki Myron

We're so old that the winds of age echo along our ribs and pick at our eye sockets. We could be gone tomorrow. A chill, say, or a little slip on the cliff side. I feel as fragile as a dried flower. I rattle a little in the moving air, but I'm only coherent dust-a shape of what once was. My essence is going.

~ Sheri S. Tepper

Wherever you look there is so much loss and folly to contemplate.

~ Rosie Thomas

Then, already, it had brought to his mind the silence brooding over beds in which he had let men die. There as here it was the same solemn pause, the lull that follows battle; it was the silence of defeat. But the silence now enveloping his dead friend, so dense, so much akin to the nocturnal silence of the streets and of the town set free at last, made Rieux cruelly aware that this defeat was final, the last disastrous battle that ends a war and makes peace itself an ill beyond all remedy. The doctor could not tell if Tarrou had found peace, now that all was over, but for himself he had a feeling that no peace was possible to him henceforth, any more than there can an armistice for a mother bereaved of a son or for a man who buries his friend.

~ Albert Camus

The conversation progressed, bumper-car style, to a very heated discussion about death and the survival of the soul. It amazes me that we, as a species, can argue so fervently over something that is, when all is said and done, unknowable and unprovable. Nonetheless, we all arrive at conclusions and cleave to our certainties: that there is nothing but the Void; or that we will find ourselves writing an admissions exam at the Pearly Gates.

~ Bill Richardson

We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and the understanding of them cease first.

~ Marcus Aurelius

Each day death corrodes what we call living, and life ceaselessly swallows our desire for the void.

~ Jindřich Štyrský

…Not that it was unjust; not that the scales were forced out of balance. Where there had been good, it showed as clearly. Kindnesses, accomplishments, all those were present, too.

~ Richard Matheson

Yes, he is here in thisopen field, in sunlight, amongthe few young trees set outto modify the bare facts--he's here, but onlybecause we are here.When we go, he goes with usto be your hands that neverdo violence, your eyesthat wonder, your livesthat daily praise lifeby living it, by laughter.He is never alone here,never cold in the field of graves.

~ Denise Levertov

We read off the ancient Hebrew words, with no idea of what they might mean, and the congregation responds with more words that they don't understand either. We are gathered together on a Saturday morning to speak gibberish to each other, and you would think, in these godless times, that the experience would be empty, but somehow it isn't. The five of us, huddled together shoulder to shoulder over the bima, read the words aloud slowly, and the congregation, these old friends and acquaintances and strangers, all respond, and for reasons I can't begin to articulate, it feels like something is actually happening. It's got nothing to do with God or souls, just the palpable sense of goodwill and support emanating in waves from the pews around us, and I can't help but be moved by it. When we reach the end of the page, and the last amen has been said, I'm sorry that' it's over. I could stay up here a while longer. And as we step down to make our way back to the pews, a quick survey of the sadness in my family's wet eyes tells me that I'm not the only one who feels that way. I don't feel any closer to my father than I did before, but for a moment there I was comforted, and that's more than I expected.

~ Jonathan Tropper

The lapse of ages changes all things - time - language - the earth - the bounds of the sea - the stars of the sky, and everything 'about, around, and underneath' man, except man himself, who has always been and always will be, an unlucky rascal. The infinite variety of lives conduct but to death, and the infinity of wishes lead but to disappointment. All the discoveries which have yet been made have multiplied little but existence.

~ George Gordon Byron

It is when we are faced with death that we turn most bookish.

~ Jules Renard

They had...finished their lives before their death – which is not always the end of life and often comes long before the end.

~ Jules Barbey D'aurevilly

Everybody was dying, or already dead, or leaving other people, and the year was dying into winter, and the only thing to do was make some noise.

~ Marina Endicott

As he watches the sun rise, what grieves him is that he failed her. He thinks of the terror she felt. They tell him it was quick, as if that will somehow confine the horror.

~ Nancy Horan

Corpses sour you. They are bad for objectivity.

~ Bertolt Brecht

Auntie Phyl's last months in the care home were extra pieces. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate enough to die swiftly and suddenly, in full possession of our faculties and our fate, but more and more of us will be condemned to linger, at the mercy of anxious or indifferent relatives, careless strangers, unwanted medical interventions, increasing debility, incontinence, memory loss. We live too long, but, like the sibyl hanging in her basket in the cave at Cumae, we find it hard to die.

~ Margaret Drabble

A dead dog is more quiet than a house on the steppes, a chair in a empty room.

~ Per Petterson

Erik, Erik! I saved your life! Remember? You were scentenced to death! But for me you would be dead by now.

~ Gaston Leroux

I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death.

~ William Saroyan

The man now retrieved a linen cloth and stuffed it deep into Katherine’s mouth. “Death,” hewhispered to her, “should be a quiet thing.

~ Dan Brown

Death always knew how to connect vice with misfortune.

~ Jindřich Štyrský

While he was waiting, leaning on the counter at a coffee place, he remembered the dream he'd had the night before about Antonio Jones, who had been dead for several years now. As before, he asked himself what Jones could have died of, and the one answer that occurred to him was old age. One day, walking down some street in Brooklyn, Antonio Jones had felt tired, sat down on the sidewalk, and a second later stopped existing.

~ Roberto Bolaño

It’s when I have to acknowledge the past and all of those nameless, faceless people I’d assassinated, that I unravel inside.

~ Cheyenne Mccray

The sum of his life was a unique melody, hauntingly beautiful and powerful.

~ Ann Marston

Open questions like love, life, death, struggle and sex are our experiences, our opinions are not answers but they still remain mysterious unanswered questions. Let it be Open.

~ Santosh Kalwar

Awareness of mortality exerts a unique power to focus the mind and heart on essentials.

~ Columba Stewart

I wonder if my first breath was as soul-stirring to my mother as her last breath was to me. – From 14 Days: A Mother, A Daughter, A Two-Week Goodbye

~ Lisa Goich

When your people are lying dead around you, don't come crying to me...

~ Sarah J. Maas

It was Mina this whole time, wasn’t it? I give him the only thing I can: the cold, hard truth. The one that’ll rewrite every memory he has - of him and me, her and me, the two of them, all three of us: It’ll always be Mina.

~ Tess Sharpe