Famous Quotes

She surveyed the carnage behind him. Did you have fun?He showed her his teeth. Yes.

~ Ilona Andrews

This is how it is in life and love. In life and love we are with people for a while, and then we join other people, people we have not met, and we walk with them, and we leave behind all the things we used to be. Sometimes we leave people behind too... This happens everyday. Everyday this happens and scarcely anybody cares.

~ Daniel Handler

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

~ Marcel Proust

There is uncertainty in hope, but even with its tenuous nature, it summons our strength and pulls us through fear and grief— and even death.

~ Priscille Sibley

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded and loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes

~ Allen Ginsberg

I always say, if you must mount the gallows, give a jest to the crowd, a coin to the hangman, and make the drop with a smile on your lips.

~ Robert Jordan

Every time you take a step, even when you don't want to. . . . When it hurts, when it means you rub chins with death, or even if it means dying, that's good. Anything that moves ahead, wins. No chess game was ever won by the player who sat for a lifetime thinking over his next move.

~ Ray Bradbury

What do you want to do with your life, then?” is often the question I'm asked.To be honest, I don't know. I really don't.Mainly because I don't see myself living long enough for that to make much of a difference.

~ Nenia Campbell

Oh, we do not understand death, we never understand it; creatures are only truly dead when everyone else has died who knew them.

~ Arthur Schnitzler

What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief.

~ Meghan O'rourke

After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts – like a Chinese nest of boxes – oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front – in our ancestors, back and back until...

~ Walter De La Mare

And thus we all are nighingThe truth we fear to know:Death will end our cryingFor friends that come and go.

~ Edwin Arlington Robinson

Everyone was eating, talking softly, glancing at me, hugging me, eating. It was as if someone had turned the volume down. Everything looked normal, but the sound was muted. Death did this, set all this weirdness in motion, made people appear out of nowhere carrying casseroles, saying 'I'm sorry' over and over, death muffled their voices.

~ Joan Abelove

Perhaps because it seems so appropriate, I don't notice the rain. It falls in sheets, a blanket of silvery thread rushing to the hard almost-winter ground. Still, I stand without moving at the side of the coffin.

~ Michelle Zink

But after I got them to leave and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Sweet as the tender fragrance that survives,When martyred flowers breathe out their little lives,Sweet as a song that once consoled our pain,But never will be sung to us again,Is they remembrance. Now the hour of restHath come to thee. Sleep, darling: it is best.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

She collapsed at the bottom of the trail, at the edge of the ghost town. Dekka sat on Edilio and pressed down on the wound. The force of the blood was weaker now. She could almost hold the blood back now, not a good thing, no, because it meant he was almost finished, his brave heart almost done beating.Dekka looked up straight into the glittering eyes of a coyote. She could sense the others around her, closing in. Wary but sensing that a fresh meal was close at hand.

~ Michael Grant

The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man’s sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too.

~ Roberto Bolaño

The fear of death haunted me for a year. I cried whenever anyone dropped a glass or broke a picture. But even then that passed, I was left with a sadness that couldn't be rubbed off. It wasn't that something had happened. It was worse: I'd become aware of what had been with me all along without my notice. I dragged this new awareness around like a stone tied to my ankle. Wherever I went, it followed. I used to make up little sad songs in my head. I eulogized the falling leaves. I imagined my death in a hundred different ways, but the funeral was always the same: from somewhere in my imagination, out rolled a red carpet. Because after every secret death I died, my greatness was always discovered.

~ Nicole Krauss

Death always leaves one singer to mourn.

~ Katherine Anne Porter

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

~ Holly Black

John: 'Have mercy. I don't want to die!'Sita: 'Then you should never have been born.

~ Christopher Pike

Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.

~ E.m. Forster

I see a brightportionunder the overhead lightthat shades intodarknessand then into darkerdarknessand I can't see beyond that.

~ Charles Bukowski

Life is a temporary condition, Henry. And it's uncertain. That's why you have to seize chances when you find them. Pursue what you want. Take risks. Live, love...all of it. Every last one of us is going to die, but if we don't live as we truly want, if we're not with the one we want to be with, we're dead already.

~ Martha Brockenbrough

The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters—it was something about the way they carried themselves, something that had broken too soon and had not mended, marking them in spite of their lightheartedness.

~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Look at your own povertywelcome itcherish itdon't be afraidshare your deathbecause thus you will share your love and your life

~ Jean Vanier

Death is perfectly safe. (55)

~ Stephen Levine

Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death.

~ Albert Camus

Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity *after* their deaths than the eternity that happened before they were born. But it's the same amount of infinity, rolling out in all directions from where we stand.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

The body tries to stop the mind from killing itself, no matter the cost. It is only the lack of strength, the fatigue that lets the jumpers fall at last.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.

~ Jean Cocteau

Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

Death waits for no man - and if he does, he doesn't usually wait for very long.

~ Markus Zusak

The first time is always the hardest

~ Sarwat Chadda

The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish form our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in times of despair.

~ Bertrand Russell

I was sitting at home and had a profound experience. I experienced, in all of my Being, that someday I was going to die, and it wouldn't be like it had been happening, almost dying but somehow staying alive, but I would just die! And two things would happen right before I died: I would regret my entire life; I would want to live it over again. This terrified me. The thought that I would live my entire life, look at it and realize I blew it forced me to do something with my life.

~ Hubert Selby Jr.

Tell her thisAnd more,—That the king of the seasWeeps too, old, helpless man.The bustling fatesHeap his hands with corpsesUntil he stands like a childWith surplus of toys.

~ Stephen Crane

And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!

~ Virginia Woolf

Keep your words. This pain is no life. You only feel pain because you're alive, boy! the keeper thundered. This is the mystery of it. Life is lived on the ragged edge of the cliff. Fall off and you might die, but run from it and you are already dead!

~ Ted Dekker