Famous Quotes

You know what love is because you've studied it, not because you've felt it. You never will. You know what love is? It's this insidious thing that infects your eyes and ears, spreads to every inch of skin, the follicles of hair on the skin, the lips, the tongue, a hundred million microscopic organisms crawling on you. They commandeer the hollow of your thorax and your guts, your arms, your legs, your head, and other extremities. You cease to be yourself. You are now a vessel of impressions and thoughts of the person you love, of wishes for her, of dreams of her. You're jealous of the air she breathes because she takes it inside her all day and needs it to live; it becomes her, as you want to. You cast your thoughts of her and you an hour, a day, a week, a year, a hundred years into the future. No thought has the power to push itself as far into the future as the thought of love—not even thoughts of fame, or wealth, or death.

~ Matthew Sharpe

Gone, but only until we get there

~ Jo Royston

You, why are you so afraid of war and slaughter? Even if all the rest of us drop and die around you, grappling for the ships, you’d run no risk of death: you lack the heart to last it out in combat—coward!

~ Homer

All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

~ David Eagleman

The only cure for a real hangover is death.

~ Robert Benchley

Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.

~ Thomas Mcguane

Let him submit to me! Only the god of death is so relentless, Death submits to no one—so mortals hate him most of all the gods. Let him bow down to me! I am the greater king, I am the elder-born, I claim—the greater man.

~ Homer

What branch does not have its leaves and which twig will not have its flowers?

~ Sorin Cerin

The universal pervasion of ugliness, hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language...everything. Unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious.

~ Wilfred Owen

We’re organisms; we’re conceived, we’re born, we live, we die, and we decay. But as we decay we feed the world of the living: plants and bugs and bacteria.

~ William M. Bass

That can happen when people die, the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration

~ Philip Roth

The only advantage of knowledge is that it can justify suffering.

~ Sorin Cerin

Never trust a man who teaches about death but yet had no real experience at all about it.

~ Toba Beta

Whilst the wolflets bayed, A grave was made, And then with the strokes of a silver spade, It was filled to make a mound. And for two cold days and three long nights, The father tended that holy plot; And stayed by where his wife was laid, In the grave within the ground.

~ Roman Payne

For two days I went about my business. I travelled the globe as always, handing souls to the conveyor belt of eternity.

~ Markus Zusak

As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.

~ Roland Barthes

One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too old.

~ George Orwell

Because beauty consits of it's own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their movement and their death.

~ Muriel Barbery

They understand death, they stand there in the church under the skies that have a beginningless past and go into the never-ending future, waiting themselves for death, at the foot of the dead, in a holy temple. - I get a vision of myself and the two little boys hung up in a great endless universe with nothing overhead and nothing under bbut the Infinite Nothingness, the Enormousness of it, the dead without number in all directions of existence whether inward into the atom-worlds of your own body or outward to the universe which may only be one atom in an infinity of atom-worlds and each atom-world only a figure of speech - inward, outward, up and down, nothing but emptiness and divine majesty and silence for the two little boys and me.

~ Jack Kerouac

Who can be worried without the light of a memory?

~ Sorin Cerin

Lieb Liebchen, leg ‘s Händchen aufs Herze mein; -Ach, hörst du, wie’s pochet im Kämmerlein,Da hauset ein Zimmermann schlimm und arg,Der zimmert mir einen Totensarg.Es hämmert und klopfet bei Tag und bei Nacht;Es hat mich schon längst um den Schlaf gebracht.Ach! sputet Euch, Meister Zimmermann,Damit ich balde schlafen kann.

~ Heinrich Heine

It was not right, thought Han Fei-tzu, for his wife to die before him: her ancestor-of-the-heart had outlived her husband. Besides, wives should live longer than husbands. Women were more complete inside themselves. They were also better at living in their children. They were never as solitary as a man alone.

~ Orson Scott Card

That kind of imagination is why we're not dead.

~ Rebecca Mckinsey

We are born and then we die. And in between lies only this strange darkness that we can’t break.

~ Cristian Mihai

Does anyone else day dream about what it would be like if specific age groups just dropped dead all across the world?

~ Christy Leigh Stewart

In the moment before I crossed over, I knew that the priests and magicians of Egypt were fools and charlatans for promising to prolong the beauties of life beyond the world we are give. Death is no enemy, but the foundation of gratitude, sympathy, and art. All of life's pleasures, only love owes no debt to death.

~ Anita Diamant

Life is just one long day separated into sections by sleep. Life never stops happening until you are dead. So whatever happens-love, grief, hate, shame- never disappears. It just gets easier to live with. It just scabs over, waiting for something else significant to happen.

~ Sunshine O'donnell

I'll fall.''You wont fall.''I'll fall. I'll fall and I'll die.'As I said it, I could see it happening. The foot stepping on air, pulling the rest of my body with it, tree limbs breaking as I plummeted down. 'No,' he said, his voice assured, 'You'd never do that to me.

~ Kamila Shamsie

And will 'a not come again? And will 'a not come again? No, no, he is dead, Go to thy death bed: He will never come again.

~ William Shakespeare

He held her and rocked her, believing, rightly or wrongly, that Ellie wept for the very intractability of death, its imperviousness to argument or to a little girl’s tears; that she wept over its cruel unpredictability; and that she wept because of the human being’s wonderful, deadly ability to translate symbols into conclusions that were either fine and noble or blackly terrifying. If all those animals had died and been buried, then Church could die (any time!) and be buried; and if that could happen to Church, it could happen to her mother, her father, her baby brother. To herself. Death was a vague idea; the Pet Sematary was real. In the texture of those rude markers were truths which even a child’s hands could feel.

~ Stephen King

To enter into the realm of contemplation, one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience as joy, as being. [Every form of intuition and experience] die to be born again on a higher level of life.

~ Thomas Merton

One mile farther and I come to a second grave beside the road, nameless like the other, marked only with the dull blue-black stones of the badlands. I do not pause this time. The more often you stop the more difficult it is to continue. Stop too long and they cover you with rocks.

~ Edward Abbey

I am afraid of reduction. After a lifetime's independence- yes, selfish independence- I am terrified of being reduced to childhood once more, to helplessness, to seas of confusion from which the cruel lucid intervals poke up like rock shoals. I don't want to sit in my chair and be fed, much less do I want to be handed over to medical professionals.

~ Rosie Thomas

COSMIC DANCERI was dancing when I was twelveI was dancing when I was aaahI danced myself right out the wombIs it strange to dance so soonI danced myself right out the wombI was dancing when I was eightIs it strange to dance so lateI danced myself into the tombIs it strange to dance so soonI danced myself into the tombIs it wrong to understandThe fear that dwells inside a manWhat's it like to be a loonI liken it to a balloonI danced myself out of the wombIs it strange to dance to soonI danced myself into the tombBut then again once moreI danced myself out of the wombIs it strange to dance so soonI danced myself out of the womb.

~ Marc Bolan

In ten years time I’ll be… (dead) sixty.

~ Neil Gaiman

The moon had risen behind him, the color of a shark's underbelly. It lit the ruined walls, and the skin of his arms and hands, with its sickly light, making him long for a mirror in which to study his face. Surely he'd be able to see the bones beneath the meat; the skull gleaming the way his teeth gleamed when he smiled. After all, wasn't that what a smile said? Hello, world, this is the way I'll look when the wet parts are rotted.

~ Clive Barker

Till her appointed course be run;Till on the darkness faint her breathFlown to the silent void, and DeathSit crowned upon the ashen sun.(“The Testimony of the Suns”)

~ George Sterling

Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.

~ William Goodman

So, sweeting, why were you threatening to throw Tate out of the house? What did he say?”Leather brushed her chin as he tipped it up. Serious dark eyes met hers. “What did he say?”She glanced around; surely the footmen were too far away to hear. “He wanted to join us in our bed.”“I’ll run him through.”“No! Perhaps he only said it to goad you into a duel. Perhaps it was intended as a way to kill you.”“It was an insult to you, love. That can’t be ignored.”“And so you rush inexorably toward death. I don’t care if he stands on a Drury Lane stage and calls me a courtesan, I won’t have you risking your life.

~ Sharon Page

It's not the dead even. They're gone. Nothing you can do about that. It's what's left behind - the echo. These woods you're walking through. There are some old timers who think a sound echoes here forever. Makes sense when you think about it. That Billingham kid. I'm sure he screamed. He screams, it echoes, just bounces back and forth, the sound getting smaller and smaller, but never entirely disappearing. Like a part of his is still calling out, even now.

~ Harlan Coben