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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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A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.
- Marina Warner
The Leto Bundle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life.
- Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It's normal to shy away from illness and death. It's natural to gravitate toward laughter and life.
- Ellyn Bache
The Art of Saying Goodbye
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
—Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!
- William Wordsworth
The Works of William Wordsworth
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Having made the decision to love, had I chosen life instead of death?
- Richard Bach
The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story – A New York Times Bestselling Philosophical Memoir of Hope and Intimacy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,' the mage said...'And life is also a terrible thing,' Ged said, 'and must be feared and praised.
- Ursula K. Le Guin
The Farthest Shore
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is always consoling to think of suicide;
it's what gets one through many a bad night.
- Gillian Flynn
Dark Places
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It wasn't his, it wasn't my fault,
we both had nothing except patience,
but Death has none.
I saw him come (how meanly!)
and I watched him as he took and took:
none of it I could claim as mine.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
The Book of Images
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Ahmed looked shocked, his hands digging into my arms. 'But you love him,' he said softly. 'You love him, and you should save him. That' what people do with those they love, Amani -- they save them.' No iT wasn't. Sam had taught me that. Great love stories ended in death. All stories ended in death sooner or later. Ours was ending sooner.
- Alwyn Hamilton
Hero at the Fall
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Saying It Out Loud
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is not a reaper, like they say, nor even a friend. It is a dark, fierce water, an inundation.
- Siobhan Dowd
Bog Child
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
God waits only the separation of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward. Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over, and death is so certain an entrance to happiness -- to glory?
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young.
- A.E. Housman
More Poems
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You have entered an abnormal, lonely, and unwelcome new world where you are nothing but an island of sadness.
- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When men shake hands with time, time crushes
Them like tumblers; little pieces of glass.
- Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri
Birds Through a Ceiling of Alabaster: Three Abbasid Poets
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
- W.B. Yeats
The Wild Swans at Coole
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Afterwards, when it's all over, you meet God. What do you say to God?
- Yann Martel
Beatrice and Virgil
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Being born really isn't that uncommon... Almost everything in this world is meant to die. In this world, a life born is nothing more than an insignificant speck, and shouldn't even be counted as an existence. Death is natural. (Episode 49)
- Johan Liebert
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It used to be thought that hell was a lack of God, but hell is a lack of death.
- Tom Sweterlitsch
The Gone World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Anyone in this world can have the power of life and death over someone else. It's horrible, but true. All you need to do is take it. And once you have -- there is no going back. (The Killer's Cousin)
- Nancy Werlin
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?

Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute?
- Dan Simmons
Drood
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Live to revel in just another twilight. Life may sink and disappear along with the sunset never to rise again
- Munia Khan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
shot in the eye
shot in the brain
shot in the ass
shot like a flower in the dance

amazing how death wins hands down
amazing how much credence is given to idiot forms of
life

amazing how laughter has been drowned out
amazing how viciousness is such a constant

I must soon declare my own war on their war
I must hold to my last piece of ground
I must protect the small space I have made that has
allowed me life

my life not their death
my death not their death

this place, this time, now
I vow to the sun
that I will laugh the good laugh once again
in the perfect place of me
forever.

their death not my life.
- Charles Bukowski
Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You may not believe in life, but I don't believe in death. ... The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity--it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.
- Yann Martel
Life of Pi
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.
- Marina Warner
The Leto Bundle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life.
- Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It's normal to shy away from illness and death. It's natural to gravitate toward laughter and life.
- Ellyn Bache
The Art of Saying Goodbye
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
—Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!
- William Wordsworth
The Works of William Wordsworth
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Having made the decision to love, had I chosen life instead of death?
- Richard Bach
The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story – A New York Times Bestselling Philosophical Memoir of Hope and Intimacy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,' the mage said...'And life is also a terrible thing,' Ged said, 'and must be feared and praised.
- Ursula K. Le Guin
The Farthest Shore
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is always consoling to think of suicide;
it's what gets one through many a bad night.
- Gillian Flynn
Dark Places
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It wasn't his, it wasn't my fault,
we both had nothing except patience,
but Death has none.
I saw him come (how meanly!)
and I watched him as he took and took:
none of it I could claim as mine.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
The Book of Images
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Ahmed looked shocked, his hands digging into my arms. 'But you love him,' he said softly. 'You love him, and you should save him. That' what people do with those they love, Amani -- they save them.' No iT wasn't. Sam had taught me that. Great love stories ended in death. All stories ended in death sooner or later. Ours was ending sooner.
- Alwyn Hamilton
Hero at the Fall
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Saying It Out Loud
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is not a reaper, like they say, nor even a friend. It is a dark, fierce water, an inundation.
- Siobhan Dowd
Bog Child
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
God waits only the separation of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward. Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over, and death is so certain an entrance to happiness -- to glory?
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young.
- A.E. Housman
More Poems
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You have entered an abnormal, lonely, and unwelcome new world where you are nothing but an island of sadness.
- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When men shake hands with time, time crushes
Them like tumblers; little pieces of glass.
- Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri
Birds Through a Ceiling of Alabaster: Three Abbasid Poets
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
- W.B. Yeats
The Wild Swans at Coole
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Afterwards, when it's all over, you meet God. What do you say to God?
- Yann Martel
Beatrice and Virgil
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Being born really isn't that uncommon... Almost everything in this world is meant to die. In this world, a life born is nothing more than an insignificant speck, and shouldn't even be counted as an existence. Death is natural. (Episode 49)
- Johan Liebert
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It used to be thought that hell was a lack of God, but hell is a lack of death.
- Tom Sweterlitsch
The Gone World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Anyone in this world can have the power of life and death over someone else. It's horrible, but true. All you need to do is take it. And once you have -- there is no going back. (The Killer's Cousin)
- Nancy Werlin
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?

Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute?
- Dan Simmons
Drood
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Live to revel in just another twilight. Life may sink and disappear along with the sunset never to rise again
- Munia Khan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
shot in the eye
shot in the brain
shot in the ass
shot like a flower in the dance

amazing how death wins hands down
amazing how much credence is given to idiot forms of
life

amazing how laughter has been drowned out
amazing how viciousness is such a constant

I must soon declare my own war on their war
I must hold to my last piece of ground
I must protect the small space I have made that has
allowed me life

my life not their death
my death not their death

this place, this time, now
I vow to the sun
that I will laugh the good laugh once again
in the perfect place of me
forever.

their death not my life.
- Charles Bukowski
Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You may not believe in life, but I don't believe in death. ... The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity--it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.
- Yann Martel
Life of Pi
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.
- Marina Warner
The Leto Bundle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life.
- Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It's normal to shy away from illness and death. It's natural to gravitate toward laughter and life.
- Ellyn Bache
The Art of Saying Goodbye
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
—Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!
- William Wordsworth
The Works of William Wordsworth
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Having made the decision to love, had I chosen life instead of death?
- Richard Bach
The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story – A New York Times Bestselling Philosophical Memoir of Hope and Intimacy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,' the mage said...'And life is also a terrible thing,' Ged said, 'and must be feared and praised.
- Ursula K. Le Guin
The Farthest Shore
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is always consoling to think of suicide;
it's what gets one through many a bad night.
- Gillian Flynn
Dark Places
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It wasn't his, it wasn't my fault,
we both had nothing except patience,
but Death has none.
I saw him come (how meanly!)
and I watched him as he took and took:
none of it I could claim as mine.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
The Book of Images
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Ahmed looked shocked, his hands digging into my arms. 'But you love him,' he said softly. 'You love him, and you should save him. That' what people do with those they love, Amani -- they save them.' No iT wasn't. Sam had taught me that. Great love stories ended in death. All stories ended in death sooner or later. Ours was ending sooner.
- Alwyn Hamilton
Hero at the Fall
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Saying It Out Loud
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is not a reaper, like they say, nor even a friend. It is a dark, fierce water, an inundation.
- Siobhan Dowd
Bog Child
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
God waits only the separation of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward. Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over, and death is so certain an entrance to happiness -- to glory?
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young.
- A.E. Housman
More Poems
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You have entered an abnormal, lonely, and unwelcome new world where you are nothing but an island of sadness.
- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When men shake hands with time, time crushes
Them like tumblers; little pieces of glass.
- Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri
Birds Through a Ceiling of Alabaster: Three Abbasid Poets
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
- W.B. Yeats
The Wild Swans at Coole
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Afterwards, when it's all over, you meet God. What do you say to God?
- Yann Martel
Beatrice and Virgil
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Being born really isn't that uncommon... Almost everything in this world is meant to die. In this world, a life born is nothing more than an insignificant speck, and shouldn't even be counted as an existence. Death is natural. (Episode 49)
- Johan Liebert
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It used to be thought that hell was a lack of God, but hell is a lack of death.
- Tom Sweterlitsch
The Gone World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Anyone in this world can have the power of life and death over someone else. It's horrible, but true. All you need to do is take it. And once you have -- there is no going back. (The Killer's Cousin)
- Nancy Werlin
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?

Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute?
- Dan Simmons
Drood
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Live to revel in just another twilight. Life may sink and disappear along with the sunset never to rise again
- Munia Khan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
shot in the eye
shot in the brain
shot in the ass
shot like a flower in the dance

amazing how death wins hands down
amazing how much credence is given to idiot forms of
life

amazing how laughter has been drowned out
amazing how viciousness is such a constant

I must soon declare my own war on their war
I must hold to my last piece of ground
I must protect the small space I have made that has
allowed me life

my life not their death
my death not their death

this place, this time, now
I vow to the sun
that I will laugh the good laugh once again
in the perfect place of me
forever.

their death not my life.
- Charles Bukowski
Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You may not believe in life, but I don't believe in death. ... The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity--it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.
- Yann Martel
Life of Pi
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...
113
114
115
116
117
 		...