Dying Quotes

Things change after you die, though, I guess because dying is the loneliest thing you can do.

~ Lauren Oliver

Aren't you afraid of dying?Not really. I've watched lots of good-for-nothing, worthless people die, and if people like that can do it, then I should be able to handle it.

~ Haruki Murakami

What happens if a car comes? We die.

~ Nicholas Sparks

Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.

~ The Nightvale Podcast

Death is an inevitability, isn't it? You become more aware of that when you get to my age. I don't worry about it. I'm ready for it. When I go, I want to go doing what I do best. If I died tomorrow, I couldn't complain. It's been good.

~ Lemmy Kilmister

I wish I had a memory of that first violent shove, the shock of cold air, the sting of oxygen into new lungs. Everyone should remember being born. It doesn't seem fair that we only remember dying.

~ Lauren Destefano

Right, well, he'd been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, 'You seem to be feeling better this morning,' and Isben looked at her and said, 'On the contrary,' and then he died.

~ John Green

You can't just make me different and then leave

~ John Green

Nothing, they say is more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than the time of dying

~ Thomas Paine

One hand was behind his back, and he held it out, presenting a bouquet of white and smoky purple lilies. “They’re straight from the underworld, by the way. They are everlasting. They won’t die.

~ Jess C. Scott

THE WEATHER OF LOVELoveHas a way of wiltingOr blossomingAt the strangest,Most unpredictable hour.This is how love is,An uncontrollable beastIn the form of a flower.The sun does not always shine on it.Nor does the rain always pour on itNor should it always get beaten by a storm.Love does not always emit the sweetest scents,And sometimes it can sting with its thorns.Water it.Give it plenty of sunlight.Nurture it,And the flower of love willOutlive you.Neglect it or keep dissecting it,And its petals will quickly curl up and die.This is how love is,Perfection is a delusional vision.So love the person who loves youUnconditionally,And abandon the oneWho only loves youUnder favorableConditions.

~ Suzy Kassem

Girls are always saying things like, “I’m so unhappy that I’m going to overdose on aspirin,” but they’d be awfully surprised if they succeeded. They have no intention of dying. At the first sight of blood, they panic.

~ Rachel Klein

After sixty-one years together, she simply clutched my hand and exhaled.

~ Sara Gruen

When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.

~ Ray Bradbury

When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.

~ Richard Dawkins

Once a flower is picked it immediately begins to die.

~ Nenia Campbell

Sometimes the dying live more fiercely and wisely than the rest of us. (146)

~ Julia Cameron

Smiling at death seems like a pretty bold act. And so I smile like a damned fool.

~ Emm Cole

People are fragile. They die of mistakes, of overdoses, of sickness. But mostly they die of Death.

~ Holly Black

Death is perfectly safe. (55)

~ Stephen Levine

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

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

~ T.s. Eliot

You’ve thrown down the gauntlet. You’ve brought my wrath down upon your house. Now, to prove that I exist I must kill you. As the child outlives the father, so must the character bury the author. If you are, in fact, my continuing author, then killing you will end my existence as well. Small loss. Such a life, as your puppet, is not worth living.But… If I destroy you and your dreck script, and I still exist… then my existence will be glorious, for I will become my own master.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

It can't be that life is so senseless and horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and senseless, why must I die and die in agony? There is something wrong!

~ Leo Tolstoy

I have seen many die, surrounded by loved ones, and their last words were ‘I love you.’ There were some who could no longer speak yet with their eyes and soft smile left behind that same healing message. I have been in rooms where those who were dying made it feel like sacred ground. (26)

~ Stephen Levine

How soon will we accept this opportunity to be fully alive before we die? (88)

~ Stephen Levine

I have seem even those who have long since abjured God die in grace. . . . Atheists don't use their drying to bargain for a better seat at the table, indeed they may not even believe supper is being served. They are not storing up 'merit.', They just smile because their heart is ripe. They are kind for no particular reason, they just love.

~ Stephen Levine

The day after Paul Newman was dead, he was twice as dead.

~ Maurice Sendak

Dreams link us to those who have already left this life.

~ Doug Dillon

And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.

~ Mark Doty

Supermarkets this large and clean and modern are a revelation to me. I spent my life in small steamy delicatessens with slanted display cabinets full of trays that hold soft wet lumpy matter in pale colours. High enough cabinets so you had to stand on tiptoes to give your order. Shouts, accents. In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere. Men shout as they die to be noticed, remembered for a second or two. To die in an apartment instead of a house can depress the soul, I would imagine, for several lives to come. In a town there are houses, plants in bay windows. People notice dying better. The dead have faces, automobiles. If you don't know a name you know a street name, a dog's name. 'He drove an orange Mazda.' You know a couple of useless things about a person that become major facts of identification and cosmic placement when he dies suddenly, after a short illness, in his own bed, with a comforter and matching pillows, on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, feverish, a little congested in the sinuses and chest, thinking about his dry cleaning.

~ Don Delillo

The question of how to spend my life, of what my life is for, is a question posed only to me, and I can no more delegate the responsibility for answering it than I can delegate the task of dying.

~ Anthony T. Kronman

Prate not to me of suicide, Faint heart in battle, not for pride I say Endure, but that such end denied Makes welcomer yet the death that's to be died.

~ Stevie Smith

There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind your gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth's wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death.How would that be? Just how would that be?

~ Stephen King

Silence is a lie that screams at the light.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Part of this experience involves your being able to say to a person who is dying, You are loved. You are beautiful. You are like a newborn babe, going into another realm. Release now anyone, and everything, that is a burden to you. Release everything and know that you have lived your life to the fullest. There is no judgment on you. Go in peace, put a smile on your face, and release any judgments you hold. Relax, and allow your life to have meaning as you embark on the next phase of your identity.

~ Barbara Marciniak

Our life is composed of events and states of mind. How ewe appraise our life from our deathbed will be predicated not only on what came to us in life but how we lived with it. It will not be simply illness or health, riches or poverty, good luck or bad, which ultimately define whether we believe we have had a good life or not, but the quality of our relationship to these situations: the attitudes of our states of mind. (34)

~ Stephen Levine

but as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certain fatal cliffside fall—falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else's degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves.

~ Philip K. Dick

Because there was only one thing worse than dying. And that was knowing you were going to die. And where. And how. (“Death Ship”)

~ Richard Matheson