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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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Sometimes I hear the world discussed as the realm of men. This is not my experience. I have watched men fall to the ground like leaves. They were swept up as memories, and burned. History owns them. These men were petrified in both senses of the word: paralyzed and turned to stone. Their refusal to express feeling killed them. Anachronistic men. Those poor, poor boys.
- Antonella Gambotto-Burke
The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide
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Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible.
- Lois McMaster Bujold
Barrayar
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Vaporized by the sun! Wasn't that what the universe had in store for all of us? There would come a day when the sun exploded like a red balloon, and everyone on earth would be reduced in less than a camera flash to carbon. Didn't Genesis say as much? For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. This was far more than dull old theology: It was precise scientific observation! Carbon was the Great Leveler--the Grim Reaper.

Diamonds were nothing more than carbon, but carbon in a crystal lattice that made it the hardest known mineral in nature. That was the way we all were headed. I was sure of it. We were destined to be diamonds!
- Alan Bradley
The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag
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Believe it or not each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die
- Tom Schulman
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If I lie down on my bed I must be here,
But if I lie down in my grave I may be elsewhere.
- Stevie Smith
Selected Poems of Stevie Smith
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Yes, I lay in my grave. But if you lie in a grave long enough, you get accustomed to it and you don't want to part from it. He had given me a pill of cyanide, He and his wife and their son also carried such pills. We all lived with death, and I want you to know that one can fall in love with death. Whoever has loved death cannot love anything else any more. When the liberation came and they told me to leave, I didn't want to go. I clung to the threshold like an ox being dragged to the slaughter. ("Hanka")
- Isaac Bashevis Singer
American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Yet for quixotic reasons--namely, that I enjoyed writing obits--I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city's dead. For even less money. It was a strange and inexplicable career move.
- Avi Steinberg
Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
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"Come, my child," I said, trying to lead her away. "Wish good-bye to the poor hare, and come and look for blackberries."

"Good-bye, poor hare!" Sylvie obediently repeated, looking over her shoulder at it as we turned away. And then, all in a moment, her self-command gave way. Pulling her hand out of mine, she ran back to where the dead hare was lying, and flung herself down at its side in such an agony of grief as I could hardly have believed possible in so young a child.

"Oh, my darling, my darling!" she moaned, over and over again. "And God meant your life to be so beautiful!
- Lewis Carroll
Sylvie and Bruno
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Death is never an excuse to stop living.
- Catherine Johnson
A Nest of Vipers
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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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Iris & Ruby
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
The Woods
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How many more times would I have embraced him that night, how many more times would I have kissed him, if I had known the name of that stranger lover who was already in Montreal, who had already bought his stadium ticket from a scalper for the 5,000 tomorrow.
That implacable lover who was going to turn Billy's eyes away from me forever.
- Patricia Nell Warren
The Front Runner
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art:
I warm'd both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks; and I am ready to depart.
- Walter Savage Landor
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The Angel of Death is the invisible Angel of Life.
- Henry Mills Alden
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Sometimes, you can't save someone from themselves.
- Dave Grohl
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If it is true that by death we once more become what we were before being, would it not have been better to abide by that pure possibility, not to stir from it? What use was this detour, when we might have remained forever in an unrealized plenitude?
- Emil M. Cioran
The Trouble With Being Born
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Time and the crabs and the sweethearting crib
Would leave me cold as butter for the flies
- Dylan Thomas
Collected Poems
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In Old High German and in Old English, geist and gaest did not designate a revenant as geist and ghost do today, and scato, "the shadow, did not apply to phantoms. We can deduce from this that revenants were not evanescent: they were not images or mists, but flesh and blood individuals, which is confirmed by the Norse literature and the rare texts from other Germanic countries.
- Claude Lecouteux
The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You never know these days. Uninvited guests may force you to take an unplanned trip to an unknown destination; doesn’t hurt to be in your Sunday clothes.
- Anurag Shourie
Half A Shadow
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Though he plunged into work as another man might have plunged into dissipation, to drown the thought of her, you could see that he had no longer any interest in it; he no longer loved it. He attacked it with a fury that had more hate in it than love.
- May Sinclair
The Token
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Sometimes I hear the world discussed as the realm of men. This is not my experience. I have watched men fall to the ground like leaves. They were swept up as memories, and burned. History owns them. These men were petrified in both senses of the word: paralyzed and turned to stone. Their refusal to express feeling killed them. Anachronistic men. Those poor, poor boys.
- Antonella Gambotto-Burke
The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible.
- Lois McMaster Bujold
Barrayar
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Vaporized by the sun! Wasn't that what the universe had in store for all of us? There would come a day when the sun exploded like a red balloon, and everyone on earth would be reduced in less than a camera flash to carbon. Didn't Genesis say as much? For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. This was far more than dull old theology: It was precise scientific observation! Carbon was the Great Leveler--the Grim Reaper.

Diamonds were nothing more than carbon, but carbon in a crystal lattice that made it the hardest known mineral in nature. That was the way we all were headed. I was sure of it. We were destined to be diamonds!
- Alan Bradley
The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Believe it or not each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die
- Tom Schulman
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If I lie down on my bed I must be here,
But if I lie down in my grave I may be elsewhere.
- Stevie Smith
Selected Poems of Stevie Smith
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Yes, I lay in my grave. But if you lie in a grave long enough, you get accustomed to it and you don't want to part from it. He had given me a pill of cyanide, He and his wife and their son also carried such pills. We all lived with death, and I want you to know that one can fall in love with death. Whoever has loved death cannot love anything else any more. When the liberation came and they told me to leave, I didn't want to go. I clung to the threshold like an ox being dragged to the slaughter. ("Hanka")
- Isaac Bashevis Singer
American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Yet for quixotic reasons--namely, that I enjoyed writing obits--I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city's dead. For even less money. It was a strange and inexplicable career move.
- Avi Steinberg
Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
"Come, my child," I said, trying to lead her away. "Wish good-bye to the poor hare, and come and look for blackberries."

"Good-bye, poor hare!" Sylvie obediently repeated, looking over her shoulder at it as we turned away. And then, all in a moment, her self-command gave way. Pulling her hand out of mine, she ran back to where the dead hare was lying, and flung herself down at its side in such an agony of grief as I could hardly have believed possible in so young a child.

"Oh, my darling, my darling!" she moaned, over and over again. "And God meant your life to be so beautiful!
- Lewis Carroll
Sylvie and Bruno
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is never an excuse to stop living.
- Catherine Johnson
A Nest of Vipers
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Iris & Ruby
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
The Woods
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
How many more times would I have embraced him that night, how many more times would I have kissed him, if I had known the name of that stranger lover who was already in Montreal, who had already bought his stadium ticket from a scalper for the 5,000 tomorrow.
That implacable lover who was going to turn Billy's eyes away from me forever.
- Patricia Nell Warren
The Front Runner
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art:
I warm'd both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks; and I am ready to depart.
- Walter Savage Landor
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The Angel of Death is the invisible Angel of Life.
- Henry Mills Alden
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Sometimes, you can't save someone from themselves.
- Dave Grohl
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If it is true that by death we once more become what we were before being, would it not have been better to abide by that pure possibility, not to stir from it? What use was this detour, when we might have remained forever in an unrealized plenitude?
- Emil M. Cioran
The Trouble With Being Born
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Time and the crabs and the sweethearting crib
Would leave me cold as butter for the flies
- Dylan Thomas
Collected Poems
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In Old High German and in Old English, geist and gaest did not designate a revenant as geist and ghost do today, and scato, "the shadow, did not apply to phantoms. We can deduce from this that revenants were not evanescent: they were not images or mists, but flesh and blood individuals, which is confirmed by the Norse literature and the rare texts from other Germanic countries.
- Claude Lecouteux
The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You never know these days. Uninvited guests may force you to take an unplanned trip to an unknown destination; doesn’t hurt to be in your Sunday clothes.
- Anurag Shourie
Half A Shadow
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Though he plunged into work as another man might have plunged into dissipation, to drown the thought of her, you could see that he had no longer any interest in it; he no longer loved it. He attacked it with a fury that had more hate in it than love.
- May Sinclair
The Token
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Sometimes I hear the world discussed as the realm of men. This is not my experience. I have watched men fall to the ground like leaves. They were swept up as memories, and burned. History owns them. These men were petrified in both senses of the word: paralyzed and turned to stone. Their refusal to express feeling killed them. Anachronistic men. Those poor, poor boys.
- Antonella Gambotto-Burke
The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible.
- Lois McMaster Bujold
Barrayar
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Vaporized by the sun! Wasn't that what the universe had in store for all of us? There would come a day when the sun exploded like a red balloon, and everyone on earth would be reduced in less than a camera flash to carbon. Didn't Genesis say as much? For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. This was far more than dull old theology: It was precise scientific observation! Carbon was the Great Leveler--the Grim Reaper.

Diamonds were nothing more than carbon, but carbon in a crystal lattice that made it the hardest known mineral in nature. That was the way we all were headed. I was sure of it. We were destined to be diamonds!
- Alan Bradley
The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Believe it or not each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die
- Tom Schulman
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If I lie down on my bed I must be here,
But if I lie down in my grave I may be elsewhere.
- Stevie Smith
Selected Poems of Stevie Smith
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Yes, I lay in my grave. But if you lie in a grave long enough, you get accustomed to it and you don't want to part from it. He had given me a pill of cyanide, He and his wife and their son also carried such pills. We all lived with death, and I want you to know that one can fall in love with death. Whoever has loved death cannot love anything else any more. When the liberation came and they told me to leave, I didn't want to go. I clung to the threshold like an ox being dragged to the slaughter. ("Hanka")
- Isaac Bashevis Singer
American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Yet for quixotic reasons--namely, that I enjoyed writing obits--I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city's dead. For even less money. It was a strange and inexplicable career move.
- Avi Steinberg
Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
"Come, my child," I said, trying to lead her away. "Wish good-bye to the poor hare, and come and look for blackberries."

"Good-bye, poor hare!" Sylvie obediently repeated, looking over her shoulder at it as we turned away. And then, all in a moment, her self-command gave way. Pulling her hand out of mine, she ran back to where the dead hare was lying, and flung herself down at its side in such an agony of grief as I could hardly have believed possible in so young a child.

"Oh, my darling, my darling!" she moaned, over and over again. "And God meant your life to be so beautiful!
- Lewis Carroll
Sylvie and Bruno
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is never an excuse to stop living.
- Catherine Johnson
A Nest of Vipers
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Iris & Ruby
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
The Woods
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
How many more times would I have embraced him that night, how many more times would I have kissed him, if I had known the name of that stranger lover who was already in Montreal, who had already bought his stadium ticket from a scalper for the 5,000 tomorrow.
That implacable lover who was going to turn Billy's eyes away from me forever.
- Patricia Nell Warren
The Front Runner
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art:
I warm'd both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks; and I am ready to depart.
- Walter Savage Landor
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The Angel of Death is the invisible Angel of Life.
- Henry Mills Alden
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Sometimes, you can't save someone from themselves.
- Dave Grohl
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If it is true that by death we once more become what we were before being, would it not have been better to abide by that pure possibility, not to stir from it? What use was this detour, when we might have remained forever in an unrealized plenitude?
- Emil M. Cioran
The Trouble With Being Born
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Time and the crabs and the sweethearting crib
Would leave me cold as butter for the flies
- Dylan Thomas
Collected Poems
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In Old High German and in Old English, geist and gaest did not designate a revenant as geist and ghost do today, and scato, "the shadow, did not apply to phantoms. We can deduce from this that revenants were not evanescent: they were not images or mists, but flesh and blood individuals, which is confirmed by the Norse literature and the rare texts from other Germanic countries.
- Claude Lecouteux
The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You never know these days. Uninvited guests may force you to take an unplanned trip to an unknown destination; doesn’t hurt to be in your Sunday clothes.
- Anurag Shourie
Half A Shadow
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Though he plunged into work as another man might have plunged into dissipation, to drown the thought of her, you could see that he had no longer any interest in it; he no longer loved it. He attacked it with a fury that had more hate in it than love.
- May Sinclair
The Token
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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11
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