Death Quotes

It's better to burn out than to fade away.

~ Neil Young

The meaning of life is that it stops.

~ Franz Kafka

You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.

~ John Green

Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.

~ H. Rider Haggard

When Great Trees FallWhen great trees fall,rocks on distant hills shudder,lions hunker downin tall grasses,and even elephantslumber after safety.When great trees fallin forests,small things recoil into silence,their senseseroded beyond fear.When great souls die,the air around us becomeslight, rare, sterile.We breathe, briefly.Our eyes, briefly,see witha hurtful clarity.Our memory, suddenly sharpened,examines,gnaws on kind wordsunsaid,promised walksnever taken.Great souls die andour reality, bound tothem, takes leave of us.Our souls,dependent upon theirnurture,now shrink, wizened.Our minds, formedand informed by theirradiance,fall away.We are not so much maddenedas reduced to the unutterable ignoranceof dark, coldcaves.And when great souls die,after a period peace blooms,slowly and alwaysirregularly. Spaces fillwith a kind ofsoothing electric vibration.Our senses, restored, neverto be the same, whisper to us.They existed. They existed.We can be. Be and bebetter. For they existed.

~ Maya Angelou

I want words at my funeral. But I guess that means you need life in your life.

~ Markus Zusak

He died that day because his body had served its purpose. His soul had done what it came to do, learned what it came to learn, and then was free to leave.

~ Garth Stein

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

No one here gets out alive.

~ Jim Morrison

If you live each day as it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right

~ Steve Jobs

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

~ Joseph Stalin

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Losing your life is not the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing is to lose your reason for living.

~ Jo Nesbø

After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die.

~ E.b. White

What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.

~ Albert Camus

Enjoy life. There's plenty of time to be dead.

~ Hans Christian Andersen

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

~ David Eagleman

In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Life is the tragedy,' she said bitterly. 'You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy. So we're all living tragedies, because we all end the same way, and it isn't with a goddamn wedding.

~ Robyn Schneider

What do you most value in your friends?Their continued existence.

~ Christopher Hitchens

I've crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I've come to a place I never thought I'd have to come to. And I don't know how I got here. It's a strange place. It's a place where a little harmless dreaming and then some sleepy, early-morning talk has led me into considerations of death and annihilation.

~ Raymond Carver

People rarely bring flowers to a suicide.

~ Jennifer Niven

Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

~ William Shakespeare

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Pulvis et umbra sumus. It's a line from Horace. 'We are dust and shadows'. Appropriate, don't you think? Will said. It's not a long life, killing demons; one tends to die young, and then they burn your body - dust to dust, in the literal sense. And then we vanish into the shadows of history, nary a mark on the page of a mundane book to remind the world that once we existed at all.

~ Cassandra Clare

It was ironic, really - you want to die because you can't be bothered to go on living - but then you're expected to get all energetic and move furniture and stand on chairs and hoist ropes and do complicated knots and attach things to other things and kick stools from under you and mess around with hot baths and razor blades and extension cords and electrical appliances and weedkiller. Suicide was a complicated, demanding business, often involving visits to hardware shops.And if you've managed to drag yourself from the bed and go down the road to the garden center or the drug store, by then the worst is over. At that point you might as well just go to work.

~ Marian Keyes

Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. A legacy is etched into the minds of others and the stories they share about you.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Live or die, but don't poison everything.

~ Anne Sexton

She had been given a wonderful gift: life. Sometimes it was cruelly taken away too soon, but it's what you did with it that counted, not how long it lasted.

~ Cecelia Ahern

The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.

~ Michel Houellebecq

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

~ Henry David Thoreau

There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.

~ Frank Herbert

Our lives can't be measured by our final years, of this I am sure.

~ Nicholas Sparks

YOU FEAR TO DIE?It's not that I don't want... I mean, I've always...it's just that life is a habit that's hard to break...

~ Terry Pratchett

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.

~ Alice Sebold

The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.

~ Samuel Beckett

If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.

~ Fernando Pessoa

He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.

~ Franz Kafka

I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.

~ Daniel Keyes

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.

~ Emil M. Cioran