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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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...Despite the mayhem that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel's hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let go.
- John Boyne
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
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Crap.
It's all crap.
Living is crap.
Life has no meaning.
None. Nowhere to be found.
Crap.
Why doesn't anybody realize this?
- K-Ske Hasegawa
Ballad of a Shinigami, Vol. 1
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
. . . owning a dog always ended with this sadness because dogs just don't live as long as people do.
- John Grogan
Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World’s Worst Dog
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The man who kills a man kills a man.
The man who kills himself kills all men.
As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.
- G.K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.
- Neil Gaiman
The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It was a year for the ages, like 79, like 1346, to name just a few. Forget the scythe, Goddamn it, I needed a broom or a mop. And I needed a vacation.
- Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. You follow it a far as you can go.

But finally,the grief goes away and you phase back into the world. Without him.

And you can accept that. What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don't ever completely come back from where you went with him -- a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A cut that never heals.

And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can't feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You'll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you.
- Philip K. Dick
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
***HERE IS A SMALL FACT***
You are going to die.
- Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
They say that war is death's best friend, but I must offer you a different point of view on that one. To me, war is like the new boss who expects the impossible. He stands over your shoulder repeating one thin, incessantly: 'Get it done, get it done.' So you work harder. You get the job done. The boss, however, does not thank you. He asks for more.
- Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
when we were kids
laying around the lawn
on our
bellies

we often talked
about
how
we'd like to
die

and
we all
agreed on the
same
thing;

we'd all
like to die
fucking

(although
none of us
had
done any
fucking)

and now
that
we are hardly
kids
any longer

we think more
about
how
not to
die

and
although
we're
ready

most of
us
would
prefer to
do it
alone

under the
sheets

now
that

most of
us

have fucked
our lives
away.
- Charles Bukowski
You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.
- Svetlana Aleksievich
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No,’ Nico said. ‘Getting a second life is one thing. Making it a better life, that’s the trick.’ As soon as he said it, Nico realized he could’ve been talking about himself. He decided not to bring that up.
- Rick Riordan
The Blood of Olympus
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Many have died; you also will die. The drum of death is being beaten. The world has fallen in love with a dream. Only sayings of the wise will remain.
- Kabir
The Bijak of Kabir
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.
- Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.
- Pablo Neruda
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But he understood at last what Dumbledore had been trying to tell him. It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew — and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents — that there was all the difference in the world.
- J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'm going to put death in all their food and watch them die.
- Shirley Jackson
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself.
- Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Journey to the End of the Night
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.
- Meghan O'Rourke
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
My faceless neighbor spoke up:

“Don’t be deluded. Hitler has made it clear that he will annihilate all Jews before the clock strikes twelve.”

I exploded:

“What do you care what he said? Would you want us to consider him a prophet?
His cold eyes stared at me. At last he said, wearily:

“I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He said, “Sir, we are in a very bad position! We have lost many soldiers KIA (Killed in Action) and many more are wounded. Sir, today is the twenty third of March, and I suggest that we get the hell out of the entire Hoa Binh area before we all end up as dead men!
- Michael G. Kramer
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A tomb now suffices him for whom the world was not enough.

[Alexander's tombstone epitaph]
- Alexander the Great
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I wonder what I will do if she doesn't wake up, and I don't have an answer. As I lie back down next to her and pull her into my arms, my stomach growls, and suddenly I know exactly what I will do. If she doesn't wake up, then I will just lie with her until I don't wake up either.
- Shay Savage
Transcendence
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And the boy whose hair remained the color of lemons forever.
- Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...Despite the mayhem that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel's hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let go.
- John Boyne
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Crap.
It's all crap.
Living is crap.
Life has no meaning.
None. Nowhere to be found.
Crap.
Why doesn't anybody realize this?
- K-Ske Hasegawa
Ballad of a Shinigami, Vol. 1
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
. . . owning a dog always ended with this sadness because dogs just don't live as long as people do.
- John Grogan
Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World’s Worst Dog
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The man who kills a man kills a man.
The man who kills himself kills all men.
As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.
- G.K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.
- Neil Gaiman
The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It was a year for the ages, like 79, like 1346, to name just a few. Forget the scythe, Goddamn it, I needed a broom or a mop. And I needed a vacation.
- Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. You follow it a far as you can go.

But finally,the grief goes away and you phase back into the world. Without him.

And you can accept that. What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don't ever completely come back from where you went with him -- a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A cut that never heals.

And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can't feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You'll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you.
- Philip K. Dick
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
***HERE IS A SMALL FACT***
You are going to die.
- Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
They say that war is death's best friend, but I must offer you a different point of view on that one. To me, war is like the new boss who expects the impossible. He stands over your shoulder repeating one thin, incessantly: 'Get it done, get it done.' So you work harder. You get the job done. The boss, however, does not thank you. He asks for more.
- Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
when we were kids
laying around the lawn
on our
bellies

we often talked
about
how
we'd like to
die

and
we all
agreed on the
same
thing;

we'd all
like to die
fucking

(although
none of us
had
done any
fucking)

and now
that
we are hardly
kids
any longer

we think more
about
how
not to
die

and
although
we're
ready

most of
us
would
prefer to
do it
alone

under the
sheets

now
that

most of
us

have fucked
our lives
away.
- Charles Bukowski
You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.
- Svetlana Aleksievich
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No,’ Nico said. ‘Getting a second life is one thing. Making it a better life, that’s the trick.’ As soon as he said it, Nico realized he could’ve been talking about himself. He decided not to bring that up.
- Rick Riordan
The Blood of Olympus
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Many have died; you also will die. The drum of death is being beaten. The world has fallen in love with a dream. Only sayings of the wise will remain.
- Kabir
The Bijak of Kabir
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.
- Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.
- Pablo Neruda
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But he understood at last what Dumbledore had been trying to tell him. It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew — and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents — that there was all the difference in the world.
- J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'm going to put death in all their food and watch them die.
- Shirley Jackson
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself.
- Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Journey to the End of the Night
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.
- Meghan O'Rourke
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
My faceless neighbor spoke up:

“Don’t be deluded. Hitler has made it clear that he will annihilate all Jews before the clock strikes twelve.”

I exploded:

“What do you care what he said? Would you want us to consider him a prophet?
His cold eyes stared at me. At last he said, wearily:

“I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He said, “Sir, we are in a very bad position! We have lost many soldiers KIA (Killed in Action) and many more are wounded. Sir, today is the twenty third of March, and I suggest that we get the hell out of the entire Hoa Binh area before we all end up as dead men!
- Michael G. Kramer
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A tomb now suffices him for whom the world was not enough.

[Alexander's tombstone epitaph]
- Alexander the Great
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I wonder what I will do if she doesn't wake up, and I don't have an answer. As I lie back down next to her and pull her into my arms, my stomach growls, and suddenly I know exactly what I will do. If she doesn't wake up, then I will just lie with her until I don't wake up either.
- Shay Savage
Transcendence
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And the boy whose hair remained the color of lemons forever.
- Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...Despite the mayhem that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel's hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let go.
- John Boyne
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Crap.
It's all crap.
Living is crap.
Life has no meaning.
None. Nowhere to be found.
Crap.
Why doesn't anybody realize this?
- K-Ske Hasegawa
Ballad of a Shinigami, Vol. 1
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
. . . owning a dog always ended with this sadness because dogs just don't live as long as people do.
- John Grogan
Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World’s Worst Dog
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The man who kills a man kills a man.
The man who kills himself kills all men.
As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.
- G.K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.
- Neil Gaiman
The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It was a year for the ages, like 79, like 1346, to name just a few. Forget the scythe, Goddamn it, I needed a broom or a mop. And I needed a vacation.
- Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. You follow it a far as you can go.

But finally,the grief goes away and you phase back into the world. Without him.

And you can accept that. What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don't ever completely come back from where you went with him -- a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A cut that never heals.

And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can't feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You'll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you.
- Philip K. Dick
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
***HERE IS A SMALL FACT***
You are going to die.
- Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
They say that war is death's best friend, but I must offer you a different point of view on that one. To me, war is like the new boss who expects the impossible. He stands over your shoulder repeating one thin, incessantly: 'Get it done, get it done.' So you work harder. You get the job done. The boss, however, does not thank you. He asks for more.
- Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
when we were kids
laying around the lawn
on our
bellies

we often talked
about
how
we'd like to
die

and
we all
agreed on the
same
thing;

we'd all
like to die
fucking

(although
none of us
had
done any
fucking)

and now
that
we are hardly
kids
any longer

we think more
about
how
not to
die

and
although
we're
ready

most of
us
would
prefer to
do it
alone

under the
sheets

now
that

most of
us

have fucked
our lives
away.
- Charles Bukowski
You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.
- Svetlana Aleksievich
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No,’ Nico said. ‘Getting a second life is one thing. Making it a better life, that’s the trick.’ As soon as he said it, Nico realized he could’ve been talking about himself. He decided not to bring that up.
- Rick Riordan
The Blood of Olympus
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Many have died; you also will die. The drum of death is being beaten. The world has fallen in love with a dream. Only sayings of the wise will remain.
- Kabir
The Bijak of Kabir
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.
- Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.
- Pablo Neruda
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But he understood at last what Dumbledore had been trying to tell him. It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew — and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents — that there was all the difference in the world.
- J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'm going to put death in all their food and watch them die.
- Shirley Jackson
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself.
- Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Journey to the End of the Night
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.
- Meghan O'Rourke
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
My faceless neighbor spoke up:

“Don’t be deluded. Hitler has made it clear that he will annihilate all Jews before the clock strikes twelve.”

I exploded:

“What do you care what he said? Would you want us to consider him a prophet?
His cold eyes stared at me. At last he said, wearily:

“I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He said, “Sir, we are in a very bad position! We have lost many soldiers KIA (Killed in Action) and many more are wounded. Sir, today is the twenty third of March, and I suggest that we get the hell out of the entire Hoa Binh area before we all end up as dead men!
- Michael G. Kramer
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A tomb now suffices him for whom the world was not enough.

[Alexander's tombstone epitaph]
- Alexander the Great
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I wonder what I will do if she doesn't wake up, and I don't have an answer. As I lie back down next to her and pull her into my arms, my stomach growls, and suddenly I know exactly what I will do. If she doesn't wake up, then I will just lie with her until I don't wake up either.
- Shay Savage
Transcendence
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And the boy whose hair remained the color of lemons forever.
- Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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4
5
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