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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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If I could find one word
that would shudder the air
like that frightened sob,
that wordless prayer
of my newly-born,
who drew one breath,
and with unopened eyes
sank back into death;
If I could break the world's cold heart
with that cry,
then this grief would lift
and I could die.
- Kenneth L. Patton
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We owe our very lives to the soil, and, as William Bryant Logan said, “the bodies we give it back are not payment enough.” Though, presumably, they are a start.
- Caitlin Doughty
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.
- Jennifer Egan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I just found this world a hard place to be good in,’ says Bunny, then he closes his eyes and, with an expiration of breath, goes still.
- Nick Cave
The Death of Bunny Munro
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I drop on my back on the bed, panting and sweating. How will I survive this missing? How do others do it? People die all the time. Every day. Every hour. There are families all over the world staring at beds that are no longer slept in, shoes that are no longer worn. Families that no longer have to buy a particular cereal, a kind of shampoo. There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside, their hearts are ripping to shreds. For years. For their whole lives. I don't believe time heals. I don't want it to. If I heal, doesn't that mean I've accepted the world without her?
- Jandy Nelson
The Sky Is Everywhere
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Why is it okay to put someone to death, but it’s not okay for those people to do it themselves?
- Michael Thomas Ford
Suicide Notes
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Մահ ոչ իմացեալ՝ մահ է, մահ իմացեալ՝ անմահութիւն է:
Death, unanticipated, is death; death, anticipated, is immortality.
- Eghishe (Yeghishe)
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The Little War?
How can there be
a little war?

Are some deaths
smaller than others,
leaving mothers
who weep
a little less?
- Margarita Engle
The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It was a mistake to think of houses, old houses, as being empty. They were filled with memories, with the faded echoes of voices. Drops of tears, drops of blood, the ring of laughter, the edge of tempers that had ebbed and flowed between the walls, into the walls, over the years.
Wasn't it, after all, a kind of life?
And there were houses, he knew it, that breathed. They carried in their wood and stone, their brick and mortar a kind of ego that was nearly, very nearly, human.
- Nora Roberts
Key of Knowledge
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there’s something within me that’s ready to believe in life after death. And it’s not the least bit interested in whether there’s any sober evidence for it.
- Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I think...I think its always been you who was dying,"- Delaney
- Megan Miranda
Fracture
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Having second thoughts?” Puck’s voice was soft and dangerous, a far cry from his normal flippancy. “I thought we put this behind us for now.”

“Never,” I said, matching his stare. “I can’t ever take it back, Goodfellow. I’m still going to kill you. I swore to her I would.” Lighting flickered overhead, and thunder rumbled in the distance as we faced each other with narrowed eyes. “One day,” I said softly. “One day you’ll look up, and I’ll be there. That’s the only ending for us. Don’t ever forget.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Just being alive should make you late for everything. In case you've never noticed, the dead are always on time.
- Arlene Ang
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Everything science has taught me strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. I believe in an immortal soul. Science has proved that nothing disintegrates into nothingness. Life and soul, therefore, cannot disintegrate into nothingness, and so are immortal.
- Werner Von Braun
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Achieving the state of SABLE is not, as many people who live with these knitters believe, a reason to stop buying yarn, but for the knitter it is an indication to write a will, bequeathing the stash to an appropriate heir.
- Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
At Knit's End: Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Voi rakkaani
sydän on kylmä
ja sammalta käteni kasvaa
Minun reiteni mullassa hajoovat maaksi
Ja haudalla risti jo lahona on.
Olen maa.
Olen maa johon tahdot.
- Timo K. Mukka
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Grief is paradoxical: you know you must let go, and yet letting go cannot happen all at once. The literature of mourning enacts that dilemma; its solace lies in the ritual of remembering the dead and then saying, There is no solace, and also, This has been going on a long time.
- Meghan O'Rourke
The Long Goodbye
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
এ ভুবনে ডুবল যে চাঁদ সে ভুবনে উঠল কি তা?
হেথায় সাঁঝে ঝরল যে ফুল হোথায় প্রাতে ফুটল কি তা?
এ জীবনের কান্না যত― হয় কি হাসি সে ভুবনে?
হায়! জীবন এত ছোট কেনে?
এ ভুবনে?
- Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay
কবি
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.
- C.S. Lewis
A Grief Observed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When a husband loses his wife, they call him a widower. When a wife loses her husband, they call her a widow. And when somebody’s parents die, they call them an orphan. But there is no name for a parent, a grieving mother, or a devastated father who have lost their child. Because the pain behind the loss is so immeasurable and unbearable, that it cannot be described in a single word. It just cannot be described.
- Bhavya Kaushik
The Other Side of the Bed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In my world death will come chasing. In your world it will start whispering in your ear to destroy yourself. I know this because it started whispering to me when I was in the detention center.
- Chris Cleave
Little Bee
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
L.A. kills people.' Jacaranda said. 'You're lucky you're leaving. You'll be able to write.'
She looked paler, going through another depression, smoking in bed in her lilac room. The walls were the color of her veins. She was getting too thin, even for the modeling. . .Jacaranda died last winter when the flowering trees were bare. You couldn't even tell which ones once cried the purple blossoms she named herself after.
- Francesca Lia Block
Girl Goddess #9: Nine Stories
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Love is like a flower. Its upright when its in harmony and withered when its dead.
- Dalia
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The painful truth about life is not death but death while you are alive.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If I could find one word
that would shudder the air
like that frightened sob,
that wordless prayer
of my newly-born,
who drew one breath,
and with unopened eyes
sank back into death;
If I could break the world's cold heart
with that cry,
then this grief would lift
and I could die.
- Kenneth L. Patton
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We owe our very lives to the soil, and, as William Bryant Logan said, “the bodies we give it back are not payment enough.” Though, presumably, they are a start.
- Caitlin Doughty
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.
- Jennifer Egan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I just found this world a hard place to be good in,’ says Bunny, then he closes his eyes and, with an expiration of breath, goes still.
- Nick Cave
The Death of Bunny Munro
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I drop on my back on the bed, panting and sweating. How will I survive this missing? How do others do it? People die all the time. Every day. Every hour. There are families all over the world staring at beds that are no longer slept in, shoes that are no longer worn. Families that no longer have to buy a particular cereal, a kind of shampoo. There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside, their hearts are ripping to shreds. For years. For their whole lives. I don't believe time heals. I don't want it to. If I heal, doesn't that mean I've accepted the world without her?
- Jandy Nelson
The Sky Is Everywhere
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Why is it okay to put someone to death, but it’s not okay for those people to do it themselves?
- Michael Thomas Ford
Suicide Notes
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Մահ ոչ իմացեալ՝ մահ է, մահ իմացեալ՝ անմահութիւն է:
Death, unanticipated, is death; death, anticipated, is immortality.
- Eghishe (Yeghishe)
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The Little War?
How can there be
a little war?

Are some deaths
smaller than others,
leaving mothers
who weep
a little less?
- Margarita Engle
The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It was a mistake to think of houses, old houses, as being empty. They were filled with memories, with the faded echoes of voices. Drops of tears, drops of blood, the ring of laughter, the edge of tempers that had ebbed and flowed between the walls, into the walls, over the years.
Wasn't it, after all, a kind of life?
And there were houses, he knew it, that breathed. They carried in their wood and stone, their brick and mortar a kind of ego that was nearly, very nearly, human.
- Nora Roberts
Key of Knowledge
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there’s something within me that’s ready to believe in life after death. And it’s not the least bit interested in whether there’s any sober evidence for it.
- Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I think...I think its always been you who was dying,"- Delaney
- Megan Miranda
Fracture
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Having second thoughts?” Puck’s voice was soft and dangerous, a far cry from his normal flippancy. “I thought we put this behind us for now.”

“Never,” I said, matching his stare. “I can’t ever take it back, Goodfellow. I’m still going to kill you. I swore to her I would.” Lighting flickered overhead, and thunder rumbled in the distance as we faced each other with narrowed eyes. “One day,” I said softly. “One day you’ll look up, and I’ll be there. That’s the only ending for us. Don’t ever forget.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Just being alive should make you late for everything. In case you've never noticed, the dead are always on time.
- Arlene Ang
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Everything science has taught me strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. I believe in an immortal soul. Science has proved that nothing disintegrates into nothingness. Life and soul, therefore, cannot disintegrate into nothingness, and so are immortal.
- Werner Von Braun
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Achieving the state of SABLE is not, as many people who live with these knitters believe, a reason to stop buying yarn, but for the knitter it is an indication to write a will, bequeathing the stash to an appropriate heir.
- Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
At Knit's End: Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Voi rakkaani
sydän on kylmä
ja sammalta käteni kasvaa
Minun reiteni mullassa hajoovat maaksi
Ja haudalla risti jo lahona on.
Olen maa.
Olen maa johon tahdot.
- Timo K. Mukka
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Grief is paradoxical: you know you must let go, and yet letting go cannot happen all at once. The literature of mourning enacts that dilemma; its solace lies in the ritual of remembering the dead and then saying, There is no solace, and also, This has been going on a long time.
- Meghan O'Rourke
The Long Goodbye
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
এ ভুবনে ডুবল যে চাঁদ সে ভুবনে উঠল কি তা?
হেথায় সাঁঝে ঝরল যে ফুল হোথায় প্রাতে ফুটল কি তা?
এ জীবনের কান্না যত― হয় কি হাসি সে ভুবনে?
হায়! জীবন এত ছোট কেনে?
এ ভুবনে?
- Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay
কবি
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.
- C.S. Lewis
A Grief Observed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When a husband loses his wife, they call him a widower. When a wife loses her husband, they call her a widow. And when somebody’s parents die, they call them an orphan. But there is no name for a parent, a grieving mother, or a devastated father who have lost their child. Because the pain behind the loss is so immeasurable and unbearable, that it cannot be described in a single word. It just cannot be described.
- Bhavya Kaushik
The Other Side of the Bed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In my world death will come chasing. In your world it will start whispering in your ear to destroy yourself. I know this because it started whispering to me when I was in the detention center.
- Chris Cleave
Little Bee
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
L.A. kills people.' Jacaranda said. 'You're lucky you're leaving. You'll be able to write.'
She looked paler, going through another depression, smoking in bed in her lilac room. The walls were the color of her veins. She was getting too thin, even for the modeling. . .Jacaranda died last winter when the flowering trees were bare. You couldn't even tell which ones once cried the purple blossoms she named herself after.
- Francesca Lia Block
Girl Goddess #9: Nine Stories
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Love is like a flower. Its upright when its in harmony and withered when its dead.
- Dalia
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The painful truth about life is not death but death while you are alive.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If I could find one word
that would shudder the air
like that frightened sob,
that wordless prayer
of my newly-born,
who drew one breath,
and with unopened eyes
sank back into death;
If I could break the world's cold heart
with that cry,
then this grief would lift
and I could die.
- Kenneth L. Patton
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We owe our very lives to the soil, and, as William Bryant Logan said, “the bodies we give it back are not payment enough.” Though, presumably, they are a start.
- Caitlin Doughty
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.
- Jennifer Egan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I just found this world a hard place to be good in,’ says Bunny, then he closes his eyes and, with an expiration of breath, goes still.
- Nick Cave
The Death of Bunny Munro
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I drop on my back on the bed, panting and sweating. How will I survive this missing? How do others do it? People die all the time. Every day. Every hour. There are families all over the world staring at beds that are no longer slept in, shoes that are no longer worn. Families that no longer have to buy a particular cereal, a kind of shampoo. There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside, their hearts are ripping to shreds. For years. For their whole lives. I don't believe time heals. I don't want it to. If I heal, doesn't that mean I've accepted the world without her?
- Jandy Nelson
The Sky Is Everywhere
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Why is it okay to put someone to death, but it’s not okay for those people to do it themselves?
- Michael Thomas Ford
Suicide Notes
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Մահ ոչ իմացեալ՝ մահ է, մահ իմացեալ՝ անմահութիւն է:
Death, unanticipated, is death; death, anticipated, is immortality.
- Eghishe (Yeghishe)
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The Little War?
How can there be
a little war?

Are some deaths
smaller than others,
leaving mothers
who weep
a little less?
- Margarita Engle
The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It was a mistake to think of houses, old houses, as being empty. They were filled with memories, with the faded echoes of voices. Drops of tears, drops of blood, the ring of laughter, the edge of tempers that had ebbed and flowed between the walls, into the walls, over the years.
Wasn't it, after all, a kind of life?
And there were houses, he knew it, that breathed. They carried in their wood and stone, their brick and mortar a kind of ego that was nearly, very nearly, human.
- Nora Roberts
Key of Knowledge
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there’s something within me that’s ready to believe in life after death. And it’s not the least bit interested in whether there’s any sober evidence for it.
- Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I think...I think its always been you who was dying,"- Delaney
- Megan Miranda
Fracture
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Having second thoughts?” Puck’s voice was soft and dangerous, a far cry from his normal flippancy. “I thought we put this behind us for now.”

“Never,” I said, matching his stare. “I can’t ever take it back, Goodfellow. I’m still going to kill you. I swore to her I would.” Lighting flickered overhead, and thunder rumbled in the distance as we faced each other with narrowed eyes. “One day,” I said softly. “One day you’ll look up, and I’ll be there. That’s the only ending for us. Don’t ever forget.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Just being alive should make you late for everything. In case you've never noticed, the dead are always on time.
- Arlene Ang
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Everything science has taught me strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. I believe in an immortal soul. Science has proved that nothing disintegrates into nothingness. Life and soul, therefore, cannot disintegrate into nothingness, and so are immortal.
- Werner Von Braun
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Achieving the state of SABLE is not, as many people who live with these knitters believe, a reason to stop buying yarn, but for the knitter it is an indication to write a will, bequeathing the stash to an appropriate heir.
- Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
At Knit's End: Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Voi rakkaani
sydän on kylmä
ja sammalta käteni kasvaa
Minun reiteni mullassa hajoovat maaksi
Ja haudalla risti jo lahona on.
Olen maa.
Olen maa johon tahdot.
- Timo K. Mukka
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Grief is paradoxical: you know you must let go, and yet letting go cannot happen all at once. The literature of mourning enacts that dilemma; its solace lies in the ritual of remembering the dead and then saying, There is no solace, and also, This has been going on a long time.
- Meghan O'Rourke
The Long Goodbye
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
এ ভুবনে ডুবল যে চাঁদ সে ভুবনে উঠল কি তা?
হেথায় সাঁঝে ঝরল যে ফুল হোথায় প্রাতে ফুটল কি তা?
এ জীবনের কান্না যত― হয় কি হাসি সে ভুবনে?
হায়! জীবন এত ছোট কেনে?
এ ভুবনে?
- Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay
কবি
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.
- C.S. Lewis
A Grief Observed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When a husband loses his wife, they call him a widower. When a wife loses her husband, they call her a widow. And when somebody’s parents die, they call them an orphan. But there is no name for a parent, a grieving mother, or a devastated father who have lost their child. Because the pain behind the loss is so immeasurable and unbearable, that it cannot be described in a single word. It just cannot be described.
- Bhavya Kaushik
The Other Side of the Bed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In my world death will come chasing. In your world it will start whispering in your ear to destroy yourself. I know this because it started whispering to me when I was in the detention center.
- Chris Cleave
Little Bee
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
L.A. kills people.' Jacaranda said. 'You're lucky you're leaving. You'll be able to write.'
She looked paler, going through another depression, smoking in bed in her lilac room. The walls were the color of her veins. She was getting too thin, even for the modeling. . .Jacaranda died last winter when the flowering trees were bare. You couldn't even tell which ones once cried the purple blossoms she named herself after.
- Francesca Lia Block
Girl Goddess #9: Nine Stories
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Love is like a flower. Its upright when its in harmony and withered when its dead.
- Dalia
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The painful truth about life is not death but death while you are alive.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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