Death Quotes

…but I guess you can never wash anything completely away, not from this dark glass of a world, and now I saw them again, a tangle of names overlying one another, and looking at them was like listening to the dead speak and sing and cry out for mercy.

~ Stephen King

Death has no repeal. It is a brute ending that leaves us the legacy of an inscrutable silence. Therefore, I understand the voice of mercy very well.

~ Janny Wurts

One day a year let’s all pretendthat death is tucked up, fast asleep.That no lives meet a tragic end,no dreams are shattered on the cheap.The world’s at peace, there are no wars,we hug our friend, our former foe.No beggars die outside locked doors,all cells are empty on death row.Nobody’s stabbed, nobody’s shot,no car runs over someone’s friend.This can’t be true! – Well, maybe not.All I’m saying is: let’s pretend.

~ Stig Dagerman

Part of a moon was falling down the west,Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills.Its light poured softly in her lap. She sawAnd spread her apron to it. She put out her handAmong the harp-like morning-glory strings,Taut with the dew from garden bed to eaves,As if she played unheard the tendernessThat wrought on him beside her in the night.

~ Robert Frost

Only those who will love longer than they expected to can truly love pecan pie, which doesn't explain its status as death rows most requested last dessert, or why chopped pecans, corn syrup, directions from the Karo bottle's cherry-red side are what mercy taste like to some. But there you have it.

~ Kate Lebo

White man trying to kill you slow every day, and sometimes trying to kill you fast. Why make it easy for him? That was one kind of work you could say no to.

~ Colson Whitehead

Breathing seemed harder in the cemetery, and selfish, somehow...

~ Sheri Webber

On Earth, Liz was constantly occupied with studying and finding a college and a career and all those other things that the adults in her life deemed terribly important. Since she had died, everything she was doing on Earth had seemed entirely meaningless. From Liz's point of view, the question of what her life would be was now definitively answered. The story of her life is short and pointless: There once was a girl who got hit by a car and died. The end.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

Dolmens constantly remind us to live in harmony with nature, to live within our needs and not in our greed. It reminds us that we should keep on helping everyone in need; not only those who are right in front of our eyes, but everyone and everything that are interconnected in time and space. Only abstract consequences of our good deeds and our kind actions continue to exist as soul and connect us with the past, present and upcoming generations. Rest of it will be molten into nothingness!

~ Kandathil Sebastian

Nothing matters when you are dead, and, you are dead when nothing matters.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A gut full of heroin and the looming possibility of bunking in an overcrowded cell in Kerobokan to await my death makes you feel a bit sorry for some of the things you've done.

~ S.a. Tawks

You laugh as you sing about dying, you drug yourself up, but you can still see clearly, and you die as you break into a fit of laughter, because asi es la vida in this soup of islands stewed in hunger and the desire to be someone else.

~ Mayra Santos-Febres

Like the end, the myth of the beginning overlaps the cycle of birth and death, unfolding like a Möbius strip in ceaseless continuum, which is the paradox that sits above and beyond intellectual explanation in the realm where empirical logic halts.

~ Gwendolyn Taunton

There was no logic or any sense of purpose except that I knew I had to do something other than what I was doing, or I might not make it through this.

~ J.a. Redmerski

He didn’t mind Drake so much. Drake was a creep.It was the girl who made Orc want to cry.She was a monster. Like Orc. Begging for death. Begging for someone to let her go to her Jesus.Kill me, kill me, kill me, she begged every day and every night.Orc took a deep swig.Tears seeped from his human eyes and fell into the rocky crevices of his face.

~ Michael Grant

With my lost saints - I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life! - and if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.

~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

One day when I die, I will take your tears in me; as provision for my long journey to the gods.

~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

I love you, Esmeralda,” he said.“I love you, too,” she whispered back, and he couldn’t help smiling. At least he would die with those words in his ears.

~ Jl Bryanyan

I had survived the work gangs in the ghetto. Baked bread under cover of night. Hidden in a pigeon coop. Had a midnight bar mitzvah in the basement of an abandoned building. I had watched my parents be taken away to their deaths, had avoided Amon Goeth and his dogs, had survived the salt mines of Wieliczka and the sick games of Trzebinia. I had done so much to live, and now, here, the Nazis were going to take all that away with their furnace!I started to cry, the first tears I had shed since Moshe died. Why had I worked so hard to survive if it was always going to end like this? If I had known, I wouldn't have bothered. I would have let them kill me back in the ghetto. It would have been easier that way. All that I had done was for nothing.

~ Alan Gratz

What if all your hard work never pays off? What if I am the outsider to my friends and family? What then? What if all the good you’ve done has been transformed into evil and greed? What if those you help the most, stabbed you in the back? What then? Should I trust again?What if life is unfair, painful and cruel? What if Death invites you to join its tribe? What if death makes you feel at peace and alive! What then? Should I take death’s hand and walk away? What then?

~ Quetzal

Death began to look like a friend.

~ Francine Rivers

A gangster must always be prepared to kill a friend. It is one of the many open secrets of the business, since it is the truest test of his ability to rule and command the respect of his crew. To eliminate a sworn enemy requires little more than opportunity, luck and the willingness to pull a trigger. But to end the life of someone once considered close, regardless of any previous betrayal, requires a determination that few men possess.

~ Lorenzo Carcaterra

-But where are you going to, Helen? Can you see? Do you know?-I believe; I have faith: I am going to God.-Where is God? What is God?-My maker and yours, who will never destroy what He created. I rely implicitly on His power, and confide wholly in His goodness: I count the hours till that eventful one arrives which shall restore me to Him, reveal Him to me.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Do dogs understand death? Do they have souls? Do they go to heaven? I have alway believed so, but this [event] confirmed that all of God's creatures , humans and animals, have a soul and that we will all be reunited in heaven. My pastor once told me, If there are no dogs in heaven, I don't want to go. I agree.

~ Glenwood Mcnabb

I could croak with no warning, and the only tragedy anyone would experience would be showing up on the last day of my estate sale simply to discover that all remaining items had copious amounts of dog hair on them.

~ Laurie Notaro

There are no signs of religion at all; no priest to hear my sins, no God to push open the pearly gates, nor a devil to welcome me with a pitchfork. All of this seems so meaningless.

~ Nicholas A. Mcgirr

We do not, after all, deal in truths, only potentialities. Too much truth can be worse than death, and last longer.

~ Richard Ford

You could fill a catalog with all you long for - for him to come back, for a do-over, for a different ending in which not only were you strong and said good-bye but he lived and made a success of his life and decades later you could look back together on your twenties and laugh at all your follies, for his voice on the other end of the phone call, for one more of those Albuquerque nights when it was easy to fall asleep knowing he was just in the next room.

~ Leigh Stein

I joy, that in these straits I see my west

~ ;John Donne

Life may be scaryBut it’s only temporary.And this is perhaps the most comforting conclusion to be reached if one discounts the possibility of meaning.

~ Quentin S. Crisp

Taylor, listen to me. I could tell you that it’s okay. That she wasn’t a wonderful person, or I didn’t love her. I could tell you that she’s happier now, and her life would’ve been sad and filled with pain and longing to see her love again. I could say that I’m not struggling with her death, as well as the death of the hope that she could once again be part of my life. But instead I’ll just say that I’m sad, too, sweetheart. That way I can spare you the struggle of detecting the lie in my words.

~ Embee

I didn’t know if his art was helping. But Moses’s pictures were like that, glorious and terrible. Glorious because they brought memory to life, terrible for the same reason. Time softens memories, sanding down the rough edges of death. But Moses’s pictures dripped with life and reminded us of our loss.

~ Amy Harmon

He pressed against Master's greatcoat and rubbed him with his shoulder, which meant that he understood everything and was ready for anything, even to die if need be. Ruslan had not yet had to face death himself, but he had seen men and dogs die. There was nothing more terrible, but if he was with Master, it was another matter: that he could stand.

~ Georgi Vladimov

The death of this honorable man upon this battlefield leaves all of us the poorer for his loss, yet so much the richer for the friendship and love and loyalty with which he gifted us in life. May his spirit speed unhindered to the other side to join those already there and to await us until we join him in our own times.

~ Walter C. Conner

Some people would rather that you die for their beliefs than that they re-examine those beliefs.

~ Jay Lake

Death or Samadhi, man's life leads only to the grave. Appreciate your life.

~ Usha Cosmico

Living on through loss seems by contrast as bad or worse; it means experiencing environmental deterioration, steady decline in human well-being, and increasing constraint on future human action consciously and slowly while realizing that they are likely to continue for generations after one is gone.

~ Frederick Buell

Death is the dance of Life.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

That's two full days away. Maybe, if I'm not dead by then, I can still take Sophie.

~ Leslea Wahl

Emma was horrified and transfixed at the same time. She was watching Jonah Kinlock doing what he did best. There was a certain macabre beauty in watching form and function wedded together. In Jonah's case, a dance of beauty and death.

~ Cinda Williams Chima