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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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When I Am Dead, My Dearest

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress-tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.
- Christina Rossetti
The Complete Poems
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If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.
- Fernando Pessoa
Poems of Fernando Pessoa
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It was a hurting tune, resigned, a cry of heartache for all in the world that fell apart. As ash rose black against the brilliant sky, Fire's fiddle cried out for the dead, and for the living who stay behind to say goodbye.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.
- Don DeLillo
White Noise
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path. One that we all must take.
- J.R.R. Tolkien
The Return of the King
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.
- Edgar Allen Poe
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
regret is mostly caused by not having
done anything.
- Charles Bukowski
You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You are so young, Lyra, too young to understand this, but I shall tell you anyway and you'll understand it later: men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. We bear their children, who are witches if they are female, human if not; and then in the blink of an eye they are gone, felled, slain, lost. Our sons, too. When a little boy is growing, he thinks he is immortal. His mother knows he isn't. Each time becomes more painful, until finally your heart is broken. Perhaps that is when Yambe-Akka comes for you. She is older than the tundra. Perhaps, for her, witches' lives are as brief as men's are to us.
- Philip Pullman
The Golden Compass
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
How could the death of someone you had never met affect you so?
- Robert Galbraith
The Cuckoo's Calling
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I am afraid because I can so clearly foresee my own life rotting away of itself, like a leaf that rots without falling, while I pursue my round of existence from day to day.
- Osamu Dazai
The Setting Sun
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Casting aside other things, hold to the precious few; and besides bear in mind that every man lives only the present, which is an indivisible point, and that all the rest of his life is either past or is uncertain. Brief is man's life and small the nook of the earth where he lives; brief, too, is the longest posthumous fame, buoyed only by a succession of poor human beings who will very soon die and who know little of themselves, much less of someone who died long ago.
- Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.
- J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Every instinct that is found in any man is in all men. The strength of the emotion may not be so overpowering, the barriers against possession not so insurmountable, the urge to accomplish the desire less keen. With some, inhibitions and urges may be neutralized by other tendencies. But with every being the primal emotions are there. All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.
- Clarence Darrow
The Story of My Life
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No more let life divide what death can join together.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
Adonais
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Speak, Memory
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
- Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We have only a little time to please the living. But all eternity to love the dead.
- Sophocles
Antigone
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No one goes on, but what we leave behind keeps us alive for someone else.
- Adam Silvera
They Both Die at the End
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
[HAMILTON]
I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory
- Lin-Manuel Miranda
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I always knew, on some level, that I wouldn't live long. It's simply not written in my stars.
- Marie Lu
Champion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'm going to die whatever you do, but I'm not afraid.
- Erin Hunter
Rising Storm
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I know that it's easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible.
- Robert Goolrick
The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When I Am Dead, My Dearest

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress-tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.
- Christina Rossetti
The Complete Poems
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.
- Fernando Pessoa
Poems of Fernando Pessoa
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It was a hurting tune, resigned, a cry of heartache for all in the world that fell apart. As ash rose black against the brilliant sky, Fire's fiddle cried out for the dead, and for the living who stay behind to say goodbye.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.
- Don DeLillo
White Noise
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path. One that we all must take.
- J.R.R. Tolkien
The Return of the King
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.
- Edgar Allen Poe
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
regret is mostly caused by not having
done anything.
- Charles Bukowski
You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You are so young, Lyra, too young to understand this, but I shall tell you anyway and you'll understand it later: men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. We bear their children, who are witches if they are female, human if not; and then in the blink of an eye they are gone, felled, slain, lost. Our sons, too. When a little boy is growing, he thinks he is immortal. His mother knows he isn't. Each time becomes more painful, until finally your heart is broken. Perhaps that is when Yambe-Akka comes for you. She is older than the tundra. Perhaps, for her, witches' lives are as brief as men's are to us.
- Philip Pullman
The Golden Compass
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
How could the death of someone you had never met affect you so?
- Robert Galbraith
The Cuckoo's Calling
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I am afraid because I can so clearly foresee my own life rotting away of itself, like a leaf that rots without falling, while I pursue my round of existence from day to day.
- Osamu Dazai
The Setting Sun
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Casting aside other things, hold to the precious few; and besides bear in mind that every man lives only the present, which is an indivisible point, and that all the rest of his life is either past or is uncertain. Brief is man's life and small the nook of the earth where he lives; brief, too, is the longest posthumous fame, buoyed only by a succession of poor human beings who will very soon die and who know little of themselves, much less of someone who died long ago.
- Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.
- J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Every instinct that is found in any man is in all men. The strength of the emotion may not be so overpowering, the barriers against possession not so insurmountable, the urge to accomplish the desire less keen. With some, inhibitions and urges may be neutralized by other tendencies. But with every being the primal emotions are there. All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.
- Clarence Darrow
The Story of My Life
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No more let life divide what death can join together.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
Adonais
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Speak, Memory
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
- Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We have only a little time to please the living. But all eternity to love the dead.
- Sophocles
Antigone
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No one goes on, but what we leave behind keeps us alive for someone else.
- Adam Silvera
They Both Die at the End
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
[HAMILTON]
I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory
- Lin-Manuel Miranda
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I always knew, on some level, that I wouldn't live long. It's simply not written in my stars.
- Marie Lu
Champion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'm going to die whatever you do, but I'm not afraid.
- Erin Hunter
Rising Storm
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I know that it's easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible.
- Robert Goolrick
The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When I Am Dead, My Dearest

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress-tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.
- Christina Rossetti
The Complete Poems
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.
- Fernando Pessoa
Poems of Fernando Pessoa
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It was a hurting tune, resigned, a cry of heartache for all in the world that fell apart. As ash rose black against the brilliant sky, Fire's fiddle cried out for the dead, and for the living who stay behind to say goodbye.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.
- Don DeLillo
White Noise
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path. One that we all must take.
- J.R.R. Tolkien
The Return of the King
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.
- Edgar Allen Poe
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
regret is mostly caused by not having
done anything.
- Charles Bukowski
You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You are so young, Lyra, too young to understand this, but I shall tell you anyway and you'll understand it later: men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. We bear their children, who are witches if they are female, human if not; and then in the blink of an eye they are gone, felled, slain, lost. Our sons, too. When a little boy is growing, he thinks he is immortal. His mother knows he isn't. Each time becomes more painful, until finally your heart is broken. Perhaps that is when Yambe-Akka comes for you. She is older than the tundra. Perhaps, for her, witches' lives are as brief as men's are to us.
- Philip Pullman
The Golden Compass
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
How could the death of someone you had never met affect you so?
- Robert Galbraith
The Cuckoo's Calling
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I am afraid because I can so clearly foresee my own life rotting away of itself, like a leaf that rots without falling, while I pursue my round of existence from day to day.
- Osamu Dazai
The Setting Sun
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Casting aside other things, hold to the precious few; and besides bear in mind that every man lives only the present, which is an indivisible point, and that all the rest of his life is either past or is uncertain. Brief is man's life and small the nook of the earth where he lives; brief, too, is the longest posthumous fame, buoyed only by a succession of poor human beings who will very soon die and who know little of themselves, much less of someone who died long ago.
- Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.
- J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Every instinct that is found in any man is in all men. The strength of the emotion may not be so overpowering, the barriers against possession not so insurmountable, the urge to accomplish the desire less keen. With some, inhibitions and urges may be neutralized by other tendencies. But with every being the primal emotions are there. All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.
- Clarence Darrow
The Story of My Life
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No more let life divide what death can join together.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
Adonais
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Speak, Memory
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
- Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We have only a little time to please the living. But all eternity to love the dead.
- Sophocles
Antigone
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No one goes on, but what we leave behind keeps us alive for someone else.
- Adam Silvera
They Both Die at the End
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
[HAMILTON]
I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory
- Lin-Manuel Miranda
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I always knew, on some level, that I wouldn't live long. It's simply not written in my stars.
- Marie Lu
Champion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'm going to die whatever you do, but I'm not afraid.
- Erin Hunter
Rising Storm
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I know that it's easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible.
- Robert Goolrick
The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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34
35
36
37
38
 		...