Death Quotes

War is like night, she said. It covers everything.

~ Elie Wiesel

For appearances. Now there's a lovely thing to die for.

~ Gerald Morris

Whatever you are, do not even assume that you will be surrounded and gnawed by luxurious worms of an exquisite breed.

~ Alexander Zalan

Because seeing someone’s heart ripped out, presumably for the first time, is something a person should accept naturally, like finding out there’s no Santa Clause.

~ Katrina Monroe

If you are reading this, I'm dead. Don't celebrate too much. Jesus is watching.

~ Katie Graykowski

I was dead, and I hadn't even been able to attend my own funeral.

~ Meg Cabot

Never has nostalgia held stronger sway, never has the belief in the redemptive possibilities of the future seemed so laughable.

~ Ann Marlowe

And in this moment of pale dawn in the hours before we leave California, I finally realize what has been the hardest thing for me about Matt’s death. It isn’t that I lost a brother, like Frankie, or a son, like Aunt Jayne and Uncle Red. The hardest thing is that I’ll never know exactly what I lost, how much it should hurt, how long I should keep thinking about him. He took that mystery with him when he died, and a hundred thousand one-sided letters in my journal wouldn’t have brought me any closer to the truth than I was the night I pressed my fingers to the sea glass he wore around his neck and kissed him back. For over a year, the letters were my only connection to him; the only evidence that I didn’t imagine our brief time as other. When I first saw my journal helplessly floating on the waves, I felt a loss so immediate and overwhelming it was like being back in the hospital lobby when the doctor told us they couldn’t fix him. One minute, the journal was in my hands, soft and familiar and real; the next minute, it was gone. Just like Matt. And just like Matt, I need to let it go.

~ Sarah Ockler

Still others reflected on how quickly the food could be snatched from a man's table, or the child from a woman's breast, or the wife from a man's bedcloset, that no strength of grasp could hold these goods in place. And others remarked to themselves how sweet these goods were, in spite of that, and saw that pleasure lost in every moment is pleasure lost forever.

~ Jane Smiley

We waddled through life blindly, hoping to find something—and someone—worth fighting for.

~ Susan Dennard

When we lose someone we love the pang we experience seems irresistible at first; but gradually it dies out. This is an undeniable fact. Yet, this does not mean that our love object has vanished into thin air; no, it is simply instilled and integrated into our being. Thus two have become one!”By T. Afsin Ilgar - Ted`s Tale

~ T. Afsin Ilgar

For what blessing may a man hope for butAn immortality inThe loving vigilance of death.

~ Robert Penn Warren

And this love between Henry and Fora . . . at first, it was a small, uncertain thing, like the glow of the morning sunos the horizon. And then it was its own wild animal, bucking against the world and anything that threatened it, so hot it could burn and sometimes did. And then it was quiet, as quiet as a snowfall, covering everything, certain of its place, even as it was certain it could not last forever.

~ Martha Brockenbrough

Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time. When he asked what had happened to her heat for him, she gestured to the west.The sun was setting. The sky was a body of fire.

~ Louise Erdrich

The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity--it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.

~ Yann Martel

Death follows stagnation

~ T.f. Hodge

There must be other leaps in life - as momentous as the mirror stage - that Lacan didn't mention. Some are universal; others, culturally particular. To understand that your parents are human (and not an element of the natural world), that they're separate from you, that they were children once, that they were born and came into the world, is another leap. It's as if you hadn't seen who they were earlier - just as, before you were ten months old, you didn't know it was you in the mirror. This happens when you're sixteen or seventeen. Not long after - maybe a year - you find out your parents will die. It's not as if you haven't encountered death already. But, before now, your precocious mind can't accommodate your parents' death except as an academic nicety - to be dismissed gently as too literary and sentimental. After that day, your parents' dying suddenly becomes simple. It grows clear that you're alone and always have been, though certain convergences start to look miraculous - for instance, between your father, mother, and yourself. Though your parents don't die immediately - what you've had is a realisation, not a premonition - you'll carry around this knowledge for their remaining decades or years. You won't think, looking at them, You're going to die. It'll be an unspoken fact of existence. Nothing about them will surprise you anymore.

~ Amit Chaudhuri

They were good parents. The worst thing they ever did to us was die.

~ David Leavitt

There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow - that, in short, we are all going.

~ John Green

And what this is, I realize, is life. I don't want it. I want my parents and I have for weeks. I've been trying to claw my way back to them, and now I am so close and he is telling me not to.

~ Veronica Roth

Sonia lives her life fully. If she dies tomorrow, she'll die happy. If she lives the way you want her to live, she'll die miserable. So leave her alone, okay?

~ Sonia Sotomayor

But where corpses were buried secretly, there the grass grows thick; such signs (and there are ever so many others!) may be read by those to whom truth is more important than beauty.

~ William T. Vollmann

No one wanted to die with secrets in their grave.

~ Shannon A. Thompson

Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off forever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.

~ Anthony Burgess

If you continue to dig the same hole in the same place in your life, eventually you will be standing in a grave.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.

~ Colum Mccann

Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries he would like to bag?

~ Don Delillo

I have also figured out that for many people death is a difficult subject, not at all as simple as it is for me.

~ Maija Haavisto

Being crazy, for the rest of us, is a form of sanity.

~ Dave Matthes

Let me ask you this: How many days do you have left, if any, in the life you promised for yourself yesterday?

~ Dave Matthes

So you mean to tell me you won't fuck anyone you don't share some kind of deep emotional connection with? What a sad, depressing, truly horrible life you must lead...

~ Dave Matthes

An empty bottle of Jack is almost just as beautiful as a new and unopened bottle...in the same sense as looking down at muddied feet, and looking back the way you came. The journey you've taken to get to this point, the experiences and sights and music listened to, the shit scrolled down on paper. An empty bottle may hold more promise than a full one in that regard...

~ Dave Matthes

To die famous is the goal of the immortal. To die young is the goal of the healthy. To die memorably is the goal of the survivor.

~ Bauvard

And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another.

~ Samuel Beckett

People cannot escape the looming specter of a deathwatch and the imposing emptiness that comes with the termination of their existence. People resist going silently into the night. We seek to howl at the moon and make known our search for a diagrammatic overture that voices our unquantifiable existence.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.

~ John Barrymore

I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both. Still, they have one thing I envy. Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.

~ Markus Zusak

You know? Ain’t it ironic how we live our entire lives without the luxury of time, only to spend an eternity in death.

~ Jason Medina

Frankly speaking, I'm not afraid of death. I don't endeavour to avert its advent. But I don't want to be a witness of it.

~ Alexander Zalan

Curley's wife lay with a half-covering of yellow hay. And the meanness and the plannings and the discontent and the ache for attention were all gone from her face. She was pretty and simple, and her face was sweet and young. Now her rouged cheeks and reddened lips made her seem alive and sleeping very lightly. The curls, tiny little sausages, were spread on the hay behind her head and her lips were parted

~ John Steinbeck