Famous Quotes

When I die, nieces, I want to be cremated, my ashes taken up in a bush plane and sprinkled onto the people in town below. Let them think my body is snowflakes, sticking in their hair and on their shoulders like dandruff.

~ Joseph Boyden

Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,when I come backwe will go out together,we will walk out together among,the ten thousand things,each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.

~ Galway Kinnell

Time erodes us all.

~ Meg Rosoff

Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.

~ Annie Dillard

In her mind's eye she saw it, saw it all at last: the rolling armies and the flames of battle; the graves and pits and dying cries of a hundred million souls; the spreading darkness, like a black wing stretching over the earth; the last, bitter hours of cruelty and sorrow, and the terrible, final flights; death's great dominion over all, and, at the last, empty cities, becalmed by the silence of a hundred years. Already these things were coming to pass.

~ Justin Cronin

In a world where the dead have returned to life, the word trouble' loses much of its meaning.

~ Dennis Hopper

Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a thousand feet high, open to the sky, life a woman undressing before an intruder and provoking him to rape her. We ring Russia's borders with missile-launching pads, and then scream that she's threatening us. In all history there's never been a more lurid mass example of the sadist-masochist expression of the thanatos instinct than the present conduct of the United States. The Nazis by comparison were Eagle Scouts.

~ Herman Wouk

The world begins anew with every birth, my father used to say. He forgot to say, with every death it ends. Or did not think he needed to. Because for a goodly part of his life he worked in a graveyard.

~ Sebastian Barry

There's a gentle sigh which descends like billowing silk upon the soul that accepts its coming death. It's a gentle pocket of air in the turbulence of everyday life... the silk settles around you as if it has been drifting towards the earth forever and has finally found it's target. The flag of defeat has been mercifully dropped and, in this action, the loss is not so bad. Defeat itself is defeated by the embrace of defeat, and death is swallowed up in victory.

~ Andrew Davidson

And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten—since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn't as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder!

~ Albert Camus

My religious beliefs teach me to feel as safe in battle as in bed. God has fixed the time of my death. I do not concern myself with that, but to be always ready whenever it may overtake me. That is the way all men should live, and all men would be equally brave.

~ Stonewall Jackson

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

Can I just say that dying sucks? All that bullshit about seeing the light and having this inner peace, blah, blah, blah. It's crap.

~ Julie Kenner

The day she was born,her grandfather made her a ring of silver and a polished stone, because he loved her already.

~ Aliki

In every person, there is a doer and a devil. With every passing days, the doer dies and a devil has to rise.

~ Santosh Kalwar

The dead do not harm us, only the alive.

~ Rosie Thomas

If you remembered somebody was as real as yourself, how could you kill anybody?

~ Sena Jeter Naslund

If I could make a dream real, I would not kill anything unless it could never be changed at heart.

~ Robert Fanney

It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness alike were really only appreciable with one's legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave.

~ Walter De La Mare

Be sure that head and heart were laidIn wisdom down, content to die.Be sure he faced the Starless SkyUnduped, unmurmuring, unafraid.(“The Passing of Bierce”)

~ George Sterling

When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can’t go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they’re covered with soil or stones?

~ Milan Kundera

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays cosily tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

~ Jean Baudrillard

Life seemed to him to be a narrow cage, and her iron bars were many and dense, and there was only one way out.

~ Leonid Andreyev

But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near

~ Andrew Marvell

Not only did I rediscover every experience of my life, I had to live each unfulfilled desire as well—as though they’d been fulfilled. I saw that what transpires in the mind is just as real as any flesh and blood occurrence. What had only been imagination in life, now became tangible, each fantasy a full reality. I lived them all—while, at the same time, standing to the side, a witness to their, often, intimate squalor. A witness cursed with total objectivity.

~ Richard Matheson

Suicide is an attack on society--an attack on its omnipotence, on its denial of death, and on its own despair.

~ Robert E. Neale

A child's reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its vast sources of recuperation, he is bound to envisage, at once, the very worst; yet at the same time, because of his inability to imagine death, the worst remains totally unreal to him. Gerard went on repeating: Paul's dying; Paul's going to die' but he did not believe it. Paul's death would be part of the dream, a dream of snow, of journeying forever.

~ Jean Cocteau

Just for a while: Death's opening chat-up line in His great seduction, before he drugged you with soporific comforts, distracted you with minor luxuries and ensnared you with long-term payment plans.Join the Rat Race just for a while.Concentrate on your career just for a while.Move in with your girlfriend just for a while.Find a bigger place, out in the burbs just for a while.Lie down in that wooden box just for a while.

~ Christopher Brookmyre

People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?

~ P.d. James

It is my wish to die of unique causes, perhaps in a high-speed tricycle crash, a bizarre stapling incient, or as a result of inadvertently sucking my brains out through my ear while trying to untwist the vacuum hose.

~ Paula Poundstone

The South-wind bringsLife, sunshine and desire,And on every mount and meadowBreathes aromatic fire;But over the dead he has no power,The lost, the lost, he cannot restore;And, looking over the hills, I mournThe darling who shall not return.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

If I should go before the rest of youBreak not a flower nor inscribe a stone, Nor when I'm gone speak in a Sunday voice But be the usual selves that I have known. Weep if you must, Parting is hell, But life goes on, So sing as well.

~ Joyce Grenfell

She was made mostly of coffee and empty spaces.

~ Adelise M. Cullens

I didn't cry when they buried my father - I wouldn't let myself. I didn't cry when they buried my sister. On Thursday night, with my family asleep upstairs, my eyes filled as Agassi and Marcos Baghdatis played out the fifth set of their moving second-round match.

~ Greg Garber

While death and darkness girdle meI grope for immortality.

~ Lionel Pigot Johnson

Again the ranch is on the market and they’ve shipped out the last of the horses, paid everybody off the day before, the owner saying, ‘Give them to the real estate shark, I’m out a here,” dropping the keys in Ennis’s hand. He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks up another job, yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream.

~ Annie Proulx

I could picture how Caprice was before we lost her. Dark hair, beautiful smile, intelligent hazel eyes, quick wit.Now gone.Just gone.Like a chessboard where suddenly one of the knights disappeared. A blank spot on the board of life that could never truly be replaced because no two things were alike, no two beings alike.

~ Cheyenne Mccray

If one does die taking these drugs, the death is likely to be very peaceful. Morphia is, after all, the goddess of dreams.

~ Philip Nitschke

Psychologists have clinically observed that overly prolonged grief in the bereaved usually signifies a poor relationship with the one who died.

~ Robert E. Neale

Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition that really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be their last, inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another.

~ Samuel Butler