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QUOTES ABOUT DEATH

Death is one of the few experiences that unites every human life, yet it remains deeply personal and profoundly mysterious. Across cultures, generations, and beliefs, writers, philosophers, and artists have tried to capture its meaning in words. The following quotes explore death from many angles—grief and acceptance, fear and peace, endings and new beginnings.   ◀ Back
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It’s when I have to acknowledge the past and all of those nameless, faceless people I’d assassinated, that I unravel inside.
- Cheyenne McCray
The First Sin
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Death frees us from the sickness of modern life.
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Why are you crying? This isn't the end. Death isn't goodbye forever.
- Julie Kagawa
Night of the Dragon
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Remember me when I am dead
and simplify me when I'm dead.
- Keith Douglas
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I am no longer knocking at death’s door but the path is still familiar.
- M.E. Aster
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Lee Strunk made a funny ghost sound, a kind of moaning, yet very happy, and right then, when Strunk made that high happy moaning sound, when he went Ahhooooo, right then Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing. He lay with his mouth open. The teeth were broken. There was a swollen black bruise under his left eye. The cheekbone was gone. Oh shit, Rat Kiley said, the guy's dead. The guy's dead, he kept saying, which seemed profound - the guy's dead. I mean really.
- Tim O'Brien
The Things They Carried
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After you passed away, the people who miss you all became connected.
- Hiro Arikawa
The Travelling Cat Chronicles
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Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is—Love, forgive us!—cinders, ashes, dust.
Love in a palace is perhaps at last
More grievous torment than a hermit's fast.
- John Keats
Lamia
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Fie had never expected to die quiet.

Young, maybe. On the end of a sword, also likely. And doing what she did best: picking a fight over something easier left alone.
- Margaret Owen
The Merciful Crow
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It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me... And now it's all over. Nothing left but to die!"

"So what's it all about? What's it for? It's not possible. It's not possible that life could have been as senseless and sickening as this. And if it has really been as sickening and senseless as this why do I have to die, and die in agony? There's something wrong. Maybe I didn't live as I should have done?" came the sudden thought. "But how can that be when I did everything properly?" he wondered, instantly dismissing as a total impossibility the one and only solution to the mystery of life and death.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would vanish. We would need no personal names of the old sort in the sidereal future, nothing being fixed. We would be designated by other nouns. Days and nights would belong to the museums. The earth a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery. The seas powdering our bones like quartz, making sand, grinding our peace for us by the aeon. Well, that would be good - a melancholy good.
- Saul Bellow
Mr. Sammler's Planet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You can’t avoid the inevitability of death. It comes at you one way or another, and takes us all to the same place in the end. To apologize for it is to apologize for the sun shining or the rain falling. It is what it is.
- Catherine Doyle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In crime and enmity they lie
Who sin and tell us love can die,
Who say to us in slander's breath
That love belongs to sin and death.
- John Clare
Poems Chiefly from Manuscript
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
but all life is a symphony of successive losses. You lose your youth, your parents, your loves, your friends, your comforts, your health, and finally your life. To deny loss is to lose it all anyway and to lose, in addition, your self-possession and your peace of mind
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!
- Hunter S. Thompson
The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life is for the living.
Death is for the dead.
Let life be like music.
And death a note unsaid.
- Langston Hughes
The Collected Poems
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I go to seek a Great Perhaps.
- François Rabelais
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.
- Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I carried [Rudy] softly through the broken street...with him I tried a little harder [at comforting]. I watched the contents of his soul for a moment and saw a black-painted boy calling the name Jesse Owens as he ran through an imaginary tape. I saw him hip-deep in some icy water, chasing a book, and I saw a boy lying in bed, imagining how a kiss would taste from his glorious next-door neighbor. He does something to me, that boy. Every time. It's his only detriment. He steps on my heart. He makes me cry.
- Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.
- James Baldwin
The Fire Next Time
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No one can say that death found in me a willing comrade, or that I went easily.
- Cassandra Clare
Clockwork Princess
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.
- Dean Koontz
The Darkest Evening of the Year
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It’s when I have to acknowledge the past and all of those nameless, faceless people I’d assassinated, that I unravel inside.
- Cheyenne McCray
The First Sin
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death frees us from the sickness of modern life.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Why are you crying? This isn't the end. Death isn't goodbye forever.
- Julie Kagawa
Night of the Dragon
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Remember me when I am dead
and simplify me when I'm dead.
- Keith Douglas
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I am no longer knocking at death’s door but the path is still familiar.
- M.E. Aster
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Lee Strunk made a funny ghost sound, a kind of moaning, yet very happy, and right then, when Strunk made that high happy moaning sound, when he went Ahhooooo, right then Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing. He lay with his mouth open. The teeth were broken. There was a swollen black bruise under his left eye. The cheekbone was gone. Oh shit, Rat Kiley said, the guy's dead. The guy's dead, he kept saying, which seemed profound - the guy's dead. I mean really.
- Tim O'Brien
The Things They Carried
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
After you passed away, the people who miss you all became connected.
- Hiro Arikawa
The Travelling Cat Chronicles
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is—Love, forgive us!—cinders, ashes, dust.
Love in a palace is perhaps at last
More grievous torment than a hermit's fast.
- John Keats
Lamia
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Fie had never expected to die quiet.

Young, maybe. On the end of a sword, also likely. And doing what she did best: picking a fight over something easier left alone.
- Margaret Owen
The Merciful Crow
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me... And now it's all over. Nothing left but to die!"

"So what's it all about? What's it for? It's not possible. It's not possible that life could have been as senseless and sickening as this. And if it has really been as sickening and senseless as this why do I have to die, and die in agony? There's something wrong. Maybe I didn't live as I should have done?" came the sudden thought. "But how can that be when I did everything properly?" he wondered, instantly dismissing as a total impossibility the one and only solution to the mystery of life and death.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would vanish. We would need no personal names of the old sort in the sidereal future, nothing being fixed. We would be designated by other nouns. Days and nights would belong to the museums. The earth a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery. The seas powdering our bones like quartz, making sand, grinding our peace for us by the aeon. Well, that would be good - a melancholy good.
- Saul Bellow
Mr. Sammler's Planet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You can’t avoid the inevitability of death. It comes at you one way or another, and takes us all to the same place in the end. To apologize for it is to apologize for the sun shining or the rain falling. It is what it is.
- Catherine Doyle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In crime and enmity they lie
Who sin and tell us love can die,
Who say to us in slander's breath
That love belongs to sin and death.
- John Clare
Poems Chiefly from Manuscript
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
but all life is a symphony of successive losses. You lose your youth, your parents, your loves, your friends, your comforts, your health, and finally your life. To deny loss is to lose it all anyway and to lose, in addition, your self-possession and your peace of mind
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!
- Hunter S. Thompson
The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life is for the living.
Death is for the dead.
Let life be like music.
And death a note unsaid.
- Langston Hughes
The Collected Poems
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I go to seek a Great Perhaps.
- François Rabelais
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.
- Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I carried [Rudy] softly through the broken street...with him I tried a little harder [at comforting]. I watched the contents of his soul for a moment and saw a black-painted boy calling the name Jesse Owens as he ran through an imaginary tape. I saw him hip-deep in some icy water, chasing a book, and I saw a boy lying in bed, imagining how a kiss would taste from his glorious next-door neighbor. He does something to me, that boy. Every time. It's his only detriment. He steps on my heart. He makes me cry.
- Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.
- James Baldwin
The Fire Next Time
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No one can say that death found in me a willing comrade, or that I went easily.
- Cassandra Clare
Clockwork Princess
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.
- Dean Koontz
The Darkest Evening of the Year
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It’s when I have to acknowledge the past and all of those nameless, faceless people I’d assassinated, that I unravel inside.
- Cheyenne McCray
The First Sin
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death frees us from the sickness of modern life.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Why are you crying? This isn't the end. Death isn't goodbye forever.
- Julie Kagawa
Night of the Dragon
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Remember me when I am dead
and simplify me when I'm dead.
- Keith Douglas
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I am no longer knocking at death’s door but the path is still familiar.
- M.E. Aster
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Lee Strunk made a funny ghost sound, a kind of moaning, yet very happy, and right then, when Strunk made that high happy moaning sound, when he went Ahhooooo, right then Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing. He lay with his mouth open. The teeth were broken. There was a swollen black bruise under his left eye. The cheekbone was gone. Oh shit, Rat Kiley said, the guy's dead. The guy's dead, he kept saying, which seemed profound - the guy's dead. I mean really.
- Tim O'Brien
The Things They Carried
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
After you passed away, the people who miss you all became connected.
- Hiro Arikawa
The Travelling Cat Chronicles
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is—Love, forgive us!—cinders, ashes, dust.
Love in a palace is perhaps at last
More grievous torment than a hermit's fast.
- John Keats
Lamia
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Fie had never expected to die quiet.

Young, maybe. On the end of a sword, also likely. And doing what she did best: picking a fight over something easier left alone.
- Margaret Owen
The Merciful Crow
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me... And now it's all over. Nothing left but to die!"

"So what's it all about? What's it for? It's not possible. It's not possible that life could have been as senseless and sickening as this. And if it has really been as sickening and senseless as this why do I have to die, and die in agony? There's something wrong. Maybe I didn't live as I should have done?" came the sudden thought. "But how can that be when I did everything properly?" he wondered, instantly dismissing as a total impossibility the one and only solution to the mystery of life and death.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would vanish. We would need no personal names of the old sort in the sidereal future, nothing being fixed. We would be designated by other nouns. Days and nights would belong to the museums. The earth a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery. The seas powdering our bones like quartz, making sand, grinding our peace for us by the aeon. Well, that would be good - a melancholy good.
- Saul Bellow
Mr. Sammler's Planet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You can’t avoid the inevitability of death. It comes at you one way or another, and takes us all to the same place in the end. To apologize for it is to apologize for the sun shining or the rain falling. It is what it is.
- Catherine Doyle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In crime and enmity they lie
Who sin and tell us love can die,
Who say to us in slander's breath
That love belongs to sin and death.
- John Clare
Poems Chiefly from Manuscript
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
but all life is a symphony of successive losses. You lose your youth, your parents, your loves, your friends, your comforts, your health, and finally your life. To deny loss is to lose it all anyway and to lose, in addition, your self-possession and your peace of mind
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!
- Hunter S. Thompson
The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life is for the living.
Death is for the dead.
Let life be like music.
And death a note unsaid.
- Langston Hughes
The Collected Poems
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I go to seek a Great Perhaps.
- François Rabelais
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.
- Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I carried [Rudy] softly through the broken street...with him I tried a little harder [at comforting]. I watched the contents of his soul for a moment and saw a black-painted boy calling the name Jesse Owens as he ran through an imaginary tape. I saw him hip-deep in some icy water, chasing a book, and I saw a boy lying in bed, imagining how a kiss would taste from his glorious next-door neighbor. He does something to me, that boy. Every time. It's his only detriment. He steps on my heart. He makes me cry.
- Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.
- James Baldwin
The Fire Next Time
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No one can say that death found in me a willing comrade, or that I went easily.
- Cassandra Clare
Clockwork Princess
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.
- Dean Koontz
The Darkest Evening of the Year
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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