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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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Love is bitter, death is sweet.
- Jack Kerouac
Maggie Cassidy
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I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood."

"Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?"

"How else? Though not till I'm done reading.
- George R.R. Martin
A Feast for Crows
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For what blessing may a man hope for but
An immortality in
The loving vigilance of death.
- Robert Penn Warren
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I'm not courting death; I've far too many books left to read.
- Alison Sinclair
Shadowborn
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Death is a part of Life, they are dancing together the dance of infinity in front of the gates of Time. We can live our dreams as we are dreaming our future. Time is the Endless Consciousness
- Grigoris Deoudis
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Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;
If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!
- Dorothy L. Sayers
Catholic Tales and Christian Songs
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Camels can go many weeks without drinking anything at all. The notion that they cache water in their humps is pure myth—their humps are made of fat, and water is stored in their body tissues. While other mammals draw water from bloodstreams when faced with dehydration, leading to death by volume shock, camels tap the water in their tissues, keeping their blood volume stable. Though this reduces the camel’s bulk, they can lose up to a third of their body weight with no ill effects, which they can replace astonishingly quickly, as they are able to drink up to forty gallons in a single watering.” (pp.69-70)
- Michael Benanav
Men of Salt: Crossing the Sahara on the Caravan of White Gold
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This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don't like at all and would like to avoid. It's not as if the whole thing has not happened before, it's not as if people have not been dying all along and each person left behind is the first person ever left behind in the world. What to make of it? Why can’t everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can’t go on and on, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it’s so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you could survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go.
- Jamaica Kincaid
My Brother
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And often the worst thing wasn't the victims--they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen. (Mystic River)
- Dennis LeHane
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The young open the paper to forget about life by reading the funny strips. The old do it to forget about death by reading other people's obits. My advice: don't open the paper and go on with your life.
- Gabriel Bá
Daytripper
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Of all the ways I had imagined my death, getting beaten by my zombified mentor while trapped by a cannibalistic window handle wasn’t one of them
- Anton Strout
Dead To Me
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Keisuke: "It's alright for you to kill someone?"
Akira: "As long as they have tags. According to the rules, if there's three people present, it's an official battle. I'm not sure how you're supposed to start it, though."
Keisuke: "So killing people is just a game, huh?"
Akira: "It's the only way to survive.
- Suguro Chayamachi
Togainu No Chi 1
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Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays cosily tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
- Jean Baudrillard
Cool Memories
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And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten—since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn't as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder!
- Albert Camus
The Stranger
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Because there was only one thing worse than dying. And that was knowing you were going to die. And where. And how. (“Death Ship”)
- Richard Matheson
Collected Stories, Vol. 1
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Can I just say that dying sucks? All that bullshit about seeing the light and having this inner peace, blah, blah, blah. It's crap.
- Julie Kenner
Tainted
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Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.
- Carolyn Kizer
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Like distant music these words that he had written years before were borne towards him from the past.
- James Joyce
The Dead
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Have you ever, for even a second, thought about how hard it is for people like me just to stay alive?
- Inio Asano
A Girl on the Shore
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That's what we're all looking for. A certain peace with the idea of dying. If we know, in the end, that we can ultimately have that peace with dying, then we can finally do the really hard thing." Which is? "Make peace with living.
- Mitch Albom
Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Boredom slays more of existence than war.
- Norman Mailer
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The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.
- George Santayana
The Life of Reason: Five Volumes in One
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
…the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.
- W.G. Sebald
Austerlitz
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I looked at him on the bed. He coughed once and a trail of brownish dead blood came out of his mouth and ran down the side of his chin. Then he stopped breathing. And I thought, I'll make sure I never end up here, either.
- Sebastian Faulks
Engleby
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Love is bitter, death is sweet.
- Jack Kerouac
Maggie Cassidy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood."

"Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?"

"How else? Though not till I'm done reading.
- George R.R. Martin
A Feast for Crows
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For what blessing may a man hope for but
An immortality in
The loving vigilance of death.
- Robert Penn Warren
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'm not courting death; I've far too many books left to read.
- Alison Sinclair
Shadowborn
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is a part of Life, they are dancing together the dance of infinity in front of the gates of Time. We can live our dreams as we are dreaming our future. Time is the Endless Consciousness
- Grigoris Deoudis
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;
If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!
- Dorothy L. Sayers
Catholic Tales and Christian Songs
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Camels can go many weeks without drinking anything at all. The notion that they cache water in their humps is pure myth—their humps are made of fat, and water is stored in their body tissues. While other mammals draw water from bloodstreams when faced with dehydration, leading to death by volume shock, camels tap the water in their tissues, keeping their blood volume stable. Though this reduces the camel’s bulk, they can lose up to a third of their body weight with no ill effects, which they can replace astonishingly quickly, as they are able to drink up to forty gallons in a single watering.” (pp.69-70)
- Michael Benanav
Men of Salt: Crossing the Sahara on the Caravan of White Gold
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don't like at all and would like to avoid. It's not as if the whole thing has not happened before, it's not as if people have not been dying all along and each person left behind is the first person ever left behind in the world. What to make of it? Why can’t everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can’t go on and on, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it’s so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you could survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go.
- Jamaica Kincaid
My Brother
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And often the worst thing wasn't the victims--they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen. (Mystic River)
- Dennis LeHane
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The young open the paper to forget about life by reading the funny strips. The old do it to forget about death by reading other people's obits. My advice: don't open the paper and go on with your life.
- Gabriel Bá
Daytripper
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Of all the ways I had imagined my death, getting beaten by my zombified mentor while trapped by a cannibalistic window handle wasn’t one of them
- Anton Strout
Dead To Me
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Keisuke: "It's alright for you to kill someone?"
Akira: "As long as they have tags. According to the rules, if there's three people present, it's an official battle. I'm not sure how you're supposed to start it, though."
Keisuke: "So killing people is just a game, huh?"
Akira: "It's the only way to survive.
- Suguro Chayamachi
Togainu No Chi 1
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays cosily tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
- Jean Baudrillard
Cool Memories
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten—since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn't as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder!
- Albert Camus
The Stranger
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Because there was only one thing worse than dying. And that was knowing you were going to die. And where. And how. (“Death Ship”)
- Richard Matheson
Collected Stories, Vol. 1
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Can I just say that dying sucks? All that bullshit about seeing the light and having this inner peace, blah, blah, blah. It's crap.
- Julie Kenner
Tainted
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.
- Carolyn Kizer
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Like distant music these words that he had written years before were borne towards him from the past.
- James Joyce
The Dead
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Have you ever, for even a second, thought about how hard it is for people like me just to stay alive?
- Inio Asano
A Girl on the Shore
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
That's what we're all looking for. A certain peace with the idea of dying. If we know, in the end, that we can ultimately have that peace with dying, then we can finally do the really hard thing." Which is? "Make peace with living.
- Mitch Albom
Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Boredom slays more of existence than war.
- Norman Mailer
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.
- George Santayana
The Life of Reason: Five Volumes in One
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
…the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.
- W.G. Sebald
Austerlitz
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I looked at him on the bed. He coughed once and a trail of brownish dead blood came out of his mouth and ran down the side of his chin. Then he stopped breathing. And I thought, I'll make sure I never end up here, either.
- Sebastian Faulks
Engleby
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Love is bitter, death is sweet.
- Jack Kerouac
Maggie Cassidy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood."

"Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?"

"How else? Though not till I'm done reading.
- George R.R. Martin
A Feast for Crows
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For what blessing may a man hope for but
An immortality in
The loving vigilance of death.
- Robert Penn Warren
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'm not courting death; I've far too many books left to read.
- Alison Sinclair
Shadowborn
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is a part of Life, they are dancing together the dance of infinity in front of the gates of Time. We can live our dreams as we are dreaming our future. Time is the Endless Consciousness
- Grigoris Deoudis
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;
If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!
- Dorothy L. Sayers
Catholic Tales and Christian Songs
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Camels can go many weeks without drinking anything at all. The notion that they cache water in their humps is pure myth—their humps are made of fat, and water is stored in their body tissues. While other mammals draw water from bloodstreams when faced with dehydration, leading to death by volume shock, camels tap the water in their tissues, keeping their blood volume stable. Though this reduces the camel’s bulk, they can lose up to a third of their body weight with no ill effects, which they can replace astonishingly quickly, as they are able to drink up to forty gallons in a single watering.” (pp.69-70)
- Michael Benanav
Men of Salt: Crossing the Sahara on the Caravan of White Gold
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don't like at all and would like to avoid. It's not as if the whole thing has not happened before, it's not as if people have not been dying all along and each person left behind is the first person ever left behind in the world. What to make of it? Why can’t everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can’t go on and on, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it’s so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you could survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go.
- Jamaica Kincaid
My Brother
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And often the worst thing wasn't the victims--they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen. (Mystic River)
- Dennis LeHane
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The young open the paper to forget about life by reading the funny strips. The old do it to forget about death by reading other people's obits. My advice: don't open the paper and go on with your life.
- Gabriel Bá
Daytripper
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Of all the ways I had imagined my death, getting beaten by my zombified mentor while trapped by a cannibalistic window handle wasn’t one of them
- Anton Strout
Dead To Me
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Keisuke: "It's alright for you to kill someone?"
Akira: "As long as they have tags. According to the rules, if there's three people present, it's an official battle. I'm not sure how you're supposed to start it, though."
Keisuke: "So killing people is just a game, huh?"
Akira: "It's the only way to survive.
- Suguro Chayamachi
Togainu No Chi 1
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays cosily tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
- Jean Baudrillard
Cool Memories
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten—since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn't as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder!
- Albert Camus
The Stranger
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Because there was only one thing worse than dying. And that was knowing you were going to die. And where. And how. (“Death Ship”)
- Richard Matheson
Collected Stories, Vol. 1
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Can I just say that dying sucks? All that bullshit about seeing the light and having this inner peace, blah, blah, blah. It's crap.
- Julie Kenner
Tainted
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.
- Carolyn Kizer
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Like distant music these words that he had written years before were borne towards him from the past.
- James Joyce
The Dead
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Have you ever, for even a second, thought about how hard it is for people like me just to stay alive?
- Inio Asano
A Girl on the Shore
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
That's what we're all looking for. A certain peace with the idea of dying. If we know, in the end, that we can ultimately have that peace with dying, then we can finally do the really hard thing." Which is? "Make peace with living.
- Mitch Albom
Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Boredom slays more of existence than war.
- Norman Mailer
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.
- George Santayana
The Life of Reason: Five Volumes in One
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
…the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.
- W.G. Sebald
Austerlitz
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I looked at him on the bed. He coughed once and a trail of brownish dead blood came out of his mouth and ran down the side of his chin. Then he stopped breathing. And I thought, I'll make sure I never end up here, either.
- Sebastian Faulks
Engleby
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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