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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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She's had a long life. Now she's going to the Lord."
"Frankly it creeps me out a little when you say things like that," Simon said.
"It shouldn't. If you don't like 'Lord,' pick another word. She's going home. She's going back to the party. Whatever you like."
"I suppose you have some definite ideas about an afterlife."
"Sure. We get reabsorbed into the earthly and celestial mechanism."
"No heaven?"
"That's heaven."
"What about realms of glory? What about walking around in golden slippers?"
"We abandon consciousness as if we were waking from a bad dream. We throw it off like clothes that never fit us right. It's an ecstatic release we're physically unable to apprehend while we're in our bodies. Orgasm is our best hint, but it's crude and minor by comparison.
- Michael Cunningham
Specimen Days
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The South-wind brings
Life, sunshine and desire,
And on every mount and meadow
Breathes aromatic fire;
But over the dead he has no power,
The lost, the lost, he cannot restore;
And, looking over the hills, I mourn
The darling who shall not return.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be
- John Keats
The Complete Poems
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death.
- Albert Camus
The First Man
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
One time, two years ago, I took a draught of morphia, meaning to end my life. My mother found me before the life was ended, the doctor drew the poison from my stomach with a syringe, and when I woke, it was to the sound of my own weeping. For I had hoped to open my eyes on Heaven, where my father was; and they had only pulled me back to Hell.
- Sarah Waters
Affinity
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live.
- Albert Camus
Lyrical and Critical Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death cannot be struggled against, brother. It ever arrives, defiant of every hiding place, of every frantic attempt to escape. Death is every mortal's shadow, his true shadow, and time is its servant, spinning that shadow slowly round, until what stretched before one now stretched before him.
- Steven Erikson
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.
- Nicole Krauss
Great House
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Horror on earth is real and it is everyday. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.
- Alice Sebold
The Lovely Bones
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Vanye: You're asking me to kill you.
Luthiel: I'm asking you to save her.
- Robert Fanney
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time — so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.
- Donna Tartt
The Goldfinch
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
… for overstrong was the command to hold fast to each smallest particle of time, to the smallest particle of every circumstance, and to embody all of them in memory as if they could be preserved in memory through all deaths for all times.
- Hermann Broch
The Death of Virgil
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washèd it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide and made my pains his prey.
Vain man (said she) that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalise;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wipèd out likewise.
Not so (quod I); let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame;
My verse your virtues rare shall eternise,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where, when as Death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.
- Edmund Spenser
Amoretti And Epithalamion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The people in the hospital had been struck by her calm and the number of questions she had asked. They hadn't appreciated her inability to understand something quite obvious – that Tolya was no longer among the living. Her love was so strong that Tolya's death was unable to affect it: to her, he was still alive.

She was mad, but no one had noticed. Now, at last, she had found Tolya. Her joy was like that of a mother-cat when she finds her dead kitten and licks it all over.

A soul can live in torment for years and years, even decades, as it slowly, stone by stone, builds a mound over a grave; as it moves towards the apprehension of eternal loss and bows down before reality.
- Vasily Grossman
Life and Fate
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Stop sleeping, Get to work! You will have much time to sleep when you die.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A flower bloomed already wilting. Beginning its life with an early ending.
- RJ Gonzales
Mundahlia
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Charitably... I think... sometimes, perhaps, one must change or die. And, in the end, there were, perhaps, limits to how much he could let himself change.
- Neil Gaiman
The Sandman, Vol. 10: The Wake
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is the end of the fear of death. [...] To avoid it we must not stop fearing it and so life is fear. Death is time because time allows us to move toward death which we fear at all times when alive. We move around and that is fear. Movement through space requires time. Without death there is no movement through space and no life and no fear. To be aware of death is to be alive is to fear is to move around in space and time toward death.
- Tao Lin
Bed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Of all the miracles Po had seen in the time and space of its death, Po thought this--the absorption of another, the carrying of it--was the most bewildering and remarkable of all. Whenever Bundle separated again, Po was left with an ache of sadness that reminded the ghost of the body it had left behind.
- Lauren Oliver
Liesl & Po
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
What you know isn't nearly as important as who you know. Who will miss you. Who you will miss.
- Jodi Picoult
The Book of Two Ways
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Nico didn’t like to be touched, but somehow this brief contact with his father felt reassuring – the same way the Chapel of Bones was reassuring. Like death, his father’s presence was cold and often callous, but it was real – brutally honest, inescapably dependable.
- Rick Riordan
The Blood of Olympus
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
With Rue My Heart Is Laden

With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.
- A.E. Housman
A Shropshire Lad
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You people have a religion of death that fills you with the joy and courage to confront it...I do not. I believe the only essential thing is to be alive.- Abrenucio
- Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
Of Love and Other Demons
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We've been very lonely, but we had it easy. Because death is so heavy - we, too young to know about it, couldn't handle it. After this you and I may end up seeing nothing but suffering, difficulty and ugliness, but if only you'll agree to it, I want for us to go on to more difficult places, happier places, what ever comes, together. I want you to make the decision after you're completely better, so take your time thinking about it. In the mean time, though, don't disappear on me.
- Banana Yoshimoto
Kitchen
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She's had a long life. Now she's going to the Lord."
"Frankly it creeps me out a little when you say things like that," Simon said.
"It shouldn't. If you don't like 'Lord,' pick another word. She's going home. She's going back to the party. Whatever you like."
"I suppose you have some definite ideas about an afterlife."
"Sure. We get reabsorbed into the earthly and celestial mechanism."
"No heaven?"
"That's heaven."
"What about realms of glory? What about walking around in golden slippers?"
"We abandon consciousness as if we were waking from a bad dream. We throw it off like clothes that never fit us right. It's an ecstatic release we're physically unable to apprehend while we're in our bodies. Orgasm is our best hint, but it's crude and minor by comparison.
- Michael Cunningham
Specimen Days
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The South-wind brings
Life, sunshine and desire,
And on every mount and meadow
Breathes aromatic fire;
But over the dead he has no power,
The lost, the lost, he cannot restore;
And, looking over the hills, I mourn
The darling who shall not return.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be
- John Keats
The Complete Poems
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death.
- Albert Camus
The First Man
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
One time, two years ago, I took a draught of morphia, meaning to end my life. My mother found me before the life was ended, the doctor drew the poison from my stomach with a syringe, and when I woke, it was to the sound of my own weeping. For I had hoped to open my eyes on Heaven, where my father was; and they had only pulled me back to Hell.
- Sarah Waters
Affinity
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live.
- Albert Camus
Lyrical and Critical Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death cannot be struggled against, brother. It ever arrives, defiant of every hiding place, of every frantic attempt to escape. Death is every mortal's shadow, his true shadow, and time is its servant, spinning that shadow slowly round, until what stretched before one now stretched before him.
- Steven Erikson
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.
- Nicole Krauss
Great House
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Horror on earth is real and it is everyday. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.
- Alice Sebold
The Lovely Bones
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Vanye: You're asking me to kill you.
Luthiel: I'm asking you to save her.
- Robert Fanney
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time — so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.
- Donna Tartt
The Goldfinch
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
… for overstrong was the command to hold fast to each smallest particle of time, to the smallest particle of every circumstance, and to embody all of them in memory as if they could be preserved in memory through all deaths for all times.
- Hermann Broch
The Death of Virgil
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washèd it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide and made my pains his prey.
Vain man (said she) that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalise;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wipèd out likewise.
Not so (quod I); let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame;
My verse your virtues rare shall eternise,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where, when as Death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.
- Edmund Spenser
Amoretti And Epithalamion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The people in the hospital had been struck by her calm and the number of questions she had asked. They hadn't appreciated her inability to understand something quite obvious – that Tolya was no longer among the living. Her love was so strong that Tolya's death was unable to affect it: to her, he was still alive.

She was mad, but no one had noticed. Now, at last, she had found Tolya. Her joy was like that of a mother-cat when she finds her dead kitten and licks it all over.

A soul can live in torment for years and years, even decades, as it slowly, stone by stone, builds a mound over a grave; as it moves towards the apprehension of eternal loss and bows down before reality.
- Vasily Grossman
Life and Fate
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Stop sleeping, Get to work! You will have much time to sleep when you die.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A flower bloomed already wilting. Beginning its life with an early ending.
- RJ Gonzales
Mundahlia
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Charitably... I think... sometimes, perhaps, one must change or die. And, in the end, there were, perhaps, limits to how much he could let himself change.
- Neil Gaiman
The Sandman, Vol. 10: The Wake
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is the end of the fear of death. [...] To avoid it we must not stop fearing it and so life is fear. Death is time because time allows us to move toward death which we fear at all times when alive. We move around and that is fear. Movement through space requires time. Without death there is no movement through space and no life and no fear. To be aware of death is to be alive is to fear is to move around in space and time toward death.
- Tao Lin
Bed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Of all the miracles Po had seen in the time and space of its death, Po thought this--the absorption of another, the carrying of it--was the most bewildering and remarkable of all. Whenever Bundle separated again, Po was left with an ache of sadness that reminded the ghost of the body it had left behind.
- Lauren Oliver
Liesl & Po
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
What you know isn't nearly as important as who you know. Who will miss you. Who you will miss.
- Jodi Picoult
The Book of Two Ways
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Nico didn’t like to be touched, but somehow this brief contact with his father felt reassuring – the same way the Chapel of Bones was reassuring. Like death, his father’s presence was cold and often callous, but it was real – brutally honest, inescapably dependable.
- Rick Riordan
The Blood of Olympus
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
With Rue My Heart Is Laden

With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.
- A.E. Housman
A Shropshire Lad
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You people have a religion of death that fills you with the joy and courage to confront it...I do not. I believe the only essential thing is to be alive.- Abrenucio
- Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
Of Love and Other Demons
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We've been very lonely, but we had it easy. Because death is so heavy - we, too young to know about it, couldn't handle it. After this you and I may end up seeing nothing but suffering, difficulty and ugliness, but if only you'll agree to it, I want for us to go on to more difficult places, happier places, what ever comes, together. I want you to make the decision after you're completely better, so take your time thinking about it. In the mean time, though, don't disappear on me.
- Banana Yoshimoto
Kitchen
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She's had a long life. Now she's going to the Lord."
"Frankly it creeps me out a little when you say things like that," Simon said.
"It shouldn't. If you don't like 'Lord,' pick another word. She's going home. She's going back to the party. Whatever you like."
"I suppose you have some definite ideas about an afterlife."
"Sure. We get reabsorbed into the earthly and celestial mechanism."
"No heaven?"
"That's heaven."
"What about realms of glory? What about walking around in golden slippers?"
"We abandon consciousness as if we were waking from a bad dream. We throw it off like clothes that never fit us right. It's an ecstatic release we're physically unable to apprehend while we're in our bodies. Orgasm is our best hint, but it's crude and minor by comparison.
- Michael Cunningham
Specimen Days
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The South-wind brings
Life, sunshine and desire,
And on every mount and meadow
Breathes aromatic fire;
But over the dead he has no power,
The lost, the lost, he cannot restore;
And, looking over the hills, I mourn
The darling who shall not return.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be
- John Keats
The Complete Poems
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death.
- Albert Camus
The First Man
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
One time, two years ago, I took a draught of morphia, meaning to end my life. My mother found me before the life was ended, the doctor drew the poison from my stomach with a syringe, and when I woke, it was to the sound of my own weeping. For I had hoped to open my eyes on Heaven, where my father was; and they had only pulled me back to Hell.
- Sarah Waters
Affinity
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live.
- Albert Camus
Lyrical and Critical Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death cannot be struggled against, brother. It ever arrives, defiant of every hiding place, of every frantic attempt to escape. Death is every mortal's shadow, his true shadow, and time is its servant, spinning that shadow slowly round, until what stretched before one now stretched before him.
- Steven Erikson
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.
- Nicole Krauss
Great House
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Horror on earth is real and it is everyday. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.
- Alice Sebold
The Lovely Bones
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Vanye: You're asking me to kill you.
Luthiel: I'm asking you to save her.
- Robert Fanney
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time — so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.
- Donna Tartt
The Goldfinch
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
… for overstrong was the command to hold fast to each smallest particle of time, to the smallest particle of every circumstance, and to embody all of them in memory as if they could be preserved in memory through all deaths for all times.
- Hermann Broch
The Death of Virgil
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washèd it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide and made my pains his prey.
Vain man (said she) that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalise;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wipèd out likewise.
Not so (quod I); let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame;
My verse your virtues rare shall eternise,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where, when as Death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.
- Edmund Spenser
Amoretti And Epithalamion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The people in the hospital had been struck by her calm and the number of questions she had asked. They hadn't appreciated her inability to understand something quite obvious – that Tolya was no longer among the living. Her love was so strong that Tolya's death was unable to affect it: to her, he was still alive.

She was mad, but no one had noticed. Now, at last, she had found Tolya. Her joy was like that of a mother-cat when she finds her dead kitten and licks it all over.

A soul can live in torment for years and years, even decades, as it slowly, stone by stone, builds a mound over a grave; as it moves towards the apprehension of eternal loss and bows down before reality.
- Vasily Grossman
Life and Fate
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Stop sleeping, Get to work! You will have much time to sleep when you die.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A flower bloomed already wilting. Beginning its life with an early ending.
- RJ Gonzales
Mundahlia
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Charitably... I think... sometimes, perhaps, one must change or die. And, in the end, there were, perhaps, limits to how much he could let himself change.
- Neil Gaiman
The Sandman, Vol. 10: The Wake
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is the end of the fear of death. [...] To avoid it we must not stop fearing it and so life is fear. Death is time because time allows us to move toward death which we fear at all times when alive. We move around and that is fear. Movement through space requires time. Without death there is no movement through space and no life and no fear. To be aware of death is to be alive is to fear is to move around in space and time toward death.
- Tao Lin
Bed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Of all the miracles Po had seen in the time and space of its death, Po thought this--the absorption of another, the carrying of it--was the most bewildering and remarkable of all. Whenever Bundle separated again, Po was left with an ache of sadness that reminded the ghost of the body it had left behind.
- Lauren Oliver
Liesl & Po
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
What you know isn't nearly as important as who you know. Who will miss you. Who you will miss.
- Jodi Picoult
The Book of Two Ways
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Nico didn’t like to be touched, but somehow this brief contact with his father felt reassuring – the same way the Chapel of Bones was reassuring. Like death, his father’s presence was cold and often callous, but it was real – brutally honest, inescapably dependable.
- Rick Riordan
The Blood of Olympus
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
With Rue My Heart Is Laden

With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.
- A.E. Housman
A Shropshire Lad
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You people have a religion of death that fills you with the joy and courage to confront it...I do not. I believe the only essential thing is to be alive.- Abrenucio
- Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
Of Love and Other Demons
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We've been very lonely, but we had it easy. Because death is so heavy - we, too young to know about it, couldn't handle it. After this you and I may end up seeing nothing but suffering, difficulty and ugliness, but if only you'll agree to it, I want for us to go on to more difficult places, happier places, what ever comes, together. I want you to make the decision after you're completely better, so take your time thinking about it. In the mean time, though, don't disappear on me.
- Banana Yoshimoto
Kitchen
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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