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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 person should be buried only half a meter, or two feet, below the surface. Then a tree should be planted there. He should be buried in a coffin that decays so that when you plant a tree on top the tree will take something out of his substance and change it into tree-substance. When you visit the grave you don’t visit a dead man, you visit a living being who was just transformed into a tree. You say, “This is my grandfather, the tree is growing well, fantastic.” You can develop a beautiful forest that will be more beautiful than a normal forest because the trees will have their roots in graves. It will be a park, a place for pleasure, a place to live, even a place to hunt.
- Friedensreich Hundertwasser
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Death's Diary: 1942 -
It was a year for the ages, like 79, like 1346, to just name a few. Forget the scythe, God damn it, I needed a broom or a mop. And I needed a holiday.
(...) 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 thing, 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
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Well, I always did want to go out in a Braveheart kind of way. I'll just have to think of something cool to yell before they cut my head off.
- Jennifer Armintrout
Ashes to Ashes
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There would be no chance to get to know death at all ...if it happened only once.
- Sogyal Rinpoche
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The Hill

Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.
You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old..." "And when we die
All's over that is ours; and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips," said I,
—"Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!"

"We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here.
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said;
"We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness!"... Proud we were,
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.
—And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.
- Rupert Brooke
The Complete Poems
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Tonight I want to stand on the side of a cliff and look down, dare the wind to gust and knock me off. Everyone thinks that falling to your death is the worst thing that can happen. But that’s a lie. The worst thing is to be alive for no reason.
- Tammara Webber
Good For You
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Love doesn't go anywhere when you die, you know. The person passes on, the body withers, but love, it survives.
- Sarah Strohmeyer
Kindred Spirits
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
What we call 'time' isn't chronological but spatial; what we call 'death' is merely a transition between different kinds of matter.
- STEPHANE AUDEGUY
The Theory of Clouds
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She was someone who heard each grain in the hour-glass, she felt the passing seconds like sandpaper against her softest skin. Time actually seemed to hurt her, and people helped her get through it. [..] Sometimes it seemed to Nathan that her life was just that, a feat of held breath, just another ten seconds, just another five, and then death would flood her lungs like water, a string of glass bubbles to the surface and then nothing. She was scared in a way that he could understand. The kind of fear that sends you running across a six-lane highway or jumping into rapids. She was someone who ran towards her fear, screaming. Who tried to frighten it. Who, in another period of history, would have been worshipped as a saint or burned as a witch.
- Rupert Thomson
The Five Gates of Hell
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.
- E.M. Forster
Howards End
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Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When, at last, I ceased to be myself, I came to be.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She was still clutching the book. She was holding desperately on to the words who had saved her life.
- Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...there's not enough of anything to go around except people and death.
- Saša Stanišić
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.
- Christopher Hitchens
Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It’s not that we have to quit
this life one day, but it’s how
many things we have to quit
all at once: music, laughter,
the physics of falling leaves,
automobiles, holding hands,
the scent of rain, the concept
of subway trains... if only one
could leave this life slowly!
- Roman Payne
Rooftop Soliloquy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'm Allen Walker!"
My life....is over...I'm going to die....
- Katsura Hoshino
D.Gray-man, Vol. 11
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition that really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be their last, inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another.
- Samuel Butler
The Way of All Flesh
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.
- Siri Hustvedt
The Summer Without Men
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever."

"Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Go and be fish again.
- Ernest J. Gaines
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Had I truly thought I would not die when he kissed me? But I did. For a moment the breath and life went out of me and there was no time and no tomorrow but only my lips against his.
- Martine Leavitt
Keturah and Lord Death
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A person should be buried only half a meter, or two feet, below the surface. Then a tree should be planted there. He should be buried in a coffin that decays so that when you plant a tree on top the tree will take something out of his substance and change it into tree-substance. When you visit the grave you don’t visit a dead man, you visit a living being who was just transformed into a tree. You say, “This is my grandfather, the tree is growing well, fantastic.” You can develop a beautiful forest that will be more beautiful than a normal forest because the trees will have their roots in graves. It will be a park, a place for pleasure, a place to live, even a place to hunt.
- Friedensreich Hundertwasser
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death's Diary: 1942 -
It was a year for the ages, like 79, like 1346, to just name a few. Forget the scythe, God damn it, I needed a broom or a mop. And I needed a holiday.
(...) 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 thing, 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
Well, I always did want to go out in a Braveheart kind of way. I'll just have to think of something cool to yell before they cut my head off.
- Jennifer Armintrout
Ashes to Ashes
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There would be no chance to get to know death at all ...if it happened only once.
- Sogyal Rinpoche
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The Hill

Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.
You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old..." "And when we die
All's over that is ours; and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips," said I,
—"Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!"

"We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here.
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said;
"We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness!"... Proud we were,
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.
—And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.
- Rupert Brooke
The Complete Poems
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Tonight I want to stand on the side of a cliff and look down, dare the wind to gust and knock me off. Everyone thinks that falling to your death is the worst thing that can happen. But that’s a lie. The worst thing is to be alive for no reason.
- Tammara Webber
Good For You
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Love doesn't go anywhere when you die, you know. The person passes on, the body withers, but love, it survives.
- Sarah Strohmeyer
Kindred Spirits
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
What we call 'time' isn't chronological but spatial; what we call 'death' is merely a transition between different kinds of matter.
- STEPHANE AUDEGUY
The Theory of Clouds
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She was someone who heard each grain in the hour-glass, she felt the passing seconds like sandpaper against her softest skin. Time actually seemed to hurt her, and people helped her get through it. [..] Sometimes it seemed to Nathan that her life was just that, a feat of held breath, just another ten seconds, just another five, and then death would flood her lungs like water, a string of glass bubbles to the surface and then nothing. She was scared in a way that he could understand. The kind of fear that sends you running across a six-lane highway or jumping into rapids. She was someone who ran towards her fear, screaming. Who tried to frighten it. Who, in another period of history, would have been worshipped as a saint or burned as a witch.
- Rupert Thomson
The Five Gates of Hell
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.
- E.M. Forster
Howards End
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When, at last, I ceased to be myself, I came to be.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She was still clutching the book. She was holding desperately on to the words who had saved her life.
- Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...there's not enough of anything to go around except people and death.
- Saša Stanišić
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.
- Christopher Hitchens
Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It’s not that we have to quit
this life one day, but it’s how
many things we have to quit
all at once: music, laughter,
the physics of falling leaves,
automobiles, holding hands,
the scent of rain, the concept
of subway trains... if only one
could leave this life slowly!
- Roman Payne
Rooftop Soliloquy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'm Allen Walker!"
My life....is over...I'm going to die....
- Katsura Hoshino
D.Gray-man, Vol. 11
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition that really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be their last, inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another.
- Samuel Butler
The Way of All Flesh
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.
- Siri Hustvedt
The Summer Without Men
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever."

"Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Go and be fish again.
- Ernest J. Gaines
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Had I truly thought I would not die when he kissed me? But I did. For a moment the breath and life went out of me and there was no time and no tomorrow but only my lips against his.
- Martine Leavitt
Keturah and Lord Death
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A person should be buried only half a meter, or two feet, below the surface. Then a tree should be planted there. He should be buried in a coffin that decays so that when you plant a tree on top the tree will take something out of his substance and change it into tree-substance. When you visit the grave you don’t visit a dead man, you visit a living being who was just transformed into a tree. You say, “This is my grandfather, the tree is growing well, fantastic.” You can develop a beautiful forest that will be more beautiful than a normal forest because the trees will have their roots in graves. It will be a park, a place for pleasure, a place to live, even a place to hunt.
- Friedensreich Hundertwasser
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death's Diary: 1942 -
It was a year for the ages, like 79, like 1346, to just name a few. Forget the scythe, God damn it, I needed a broom or a mop. And I needed a holiday.
(...) 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 thing, 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
Well, I always did want to go out in a Braveheart kind of way. I'll just have to think of something cool to yell before they cut my head off.
- Jennifer Armintrout
Ashes to Ashes
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There would be no chance to get to know death at all ...if it happened only once.
- Sogyal Rinpoche
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The Hill

Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.
You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old..." "And when we die
All's over that is ours; and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips," said I,
—"Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!"

"We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here.
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said;
"We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness!"... Proud we were,
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.
—And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.
- Rupert Brooke
The Complete Poems
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Tonight I want to stand on the side of a cliff and look down, dare the wind to gust and knock me off. Everyone thinks that falling to your death is the worst thing that can happen. But that’s a lie. The worst thing is to be alive for no reason.
- Tammara Webber
Good For You
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Love doesn't go anywhere when you die, you know. The person passes on, the body withers, but love, it survives.
- Sarah Strohmeyer
Kindred Spirits
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
What we call 'time' isn't chronological but spatial; what we call 'death' is merely a transition between different kinds of matter.
- STEPHANE AUDEGUY
The Theory of Clouds
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She was someone who heard each grain in the hour-glass, she felt the passing seconds like sandpaper against her softest skin. Time actually seemed to hurt her, and people helped her get through it. [..] Sometimes it seemed to Nathan that her life was just that, a feat of held breath, just another ten seconds, just another five, and then death would flood her lungs like water, a string of glass bubbles to the surface and then nothing. She was scared in a way that he could understand. The kind of fear that sends you running across a six-lane highway or jumping into rapids. She was someone who ran towards her fear, screaming. Who tried to frighten it. Who, in another period of history, would have been worshipped as a saint or burned as a witch.
- Rupert Thomson
The Five Gates of Hell
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.
- E.M. Forster
Howards End
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When, at last, I ceased to be myself, I came to be.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She was still clutching the book. She was holding desperately on to the words who had saved her life.
- Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...there's not enough of anything to go around except people and death.
- Saša Stanišić
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.
- Christopher Hitchens
Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It’s not that we have to quit
this life one day, but it’s how
many things we have to quit
all at once: music, laughter,
the physics of falling leaves,
automobiles, holding hands,
the scent of rain, the concept
of subway trains... if only one
could leave this life slowly!
- Roman Payne
Rooftop Soliloquy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'm Allen Walker!"
My life....is over...I'm going to die....
- Katsura Hoshino
D.Gray-man, Vol. 11
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition that really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be their last, inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another.
- Samuel Butler
The Way of All Flesh
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.
- Siri Hustvedt
The Summer Without Men
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever."

"Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Go and be fish again.
- Ernest J. Gaines
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Had I truly thought I would not die when he kissed me? But I did. For a moment the breath and life went out of me and there was no time and no tomorrow but only my lips against his.
- Martine Leavitt
Keturah and Lord Death
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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18
19
20
21
22
 		...