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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 had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love-- nothing, now, but bones.
- Kim Edwards
The Memory Keeper's Daughter
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Good thing I'm aging, otherwise I'd be dead.
- Ana Monnar
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In the days after my heart attack & before I began to write again, all I could think about was dying. I'd been spared again, and only after the danger had passed did I allow my thoughts to unravel to their inevitable end. I imagined all the ways I could go. Blood clot to the brain. Infarction. Thrombosis. Pneumonia. Grand mal obstruction to the vena cava. I saw myself foaming at the mouth, writhing on the floor. I'd wake up in the night, gripping my throat. And yet. No matter how often I imagined the possible failure of my organs, I found the consequence inconceivable. That it could happen to me. I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.
- Nicole Krauss
The History of Love
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Conner hadn’t liked leaving the gravesite with his father still not buried. But he’d learned from his grandmother’s funeral that you have to go. It’s expected. Nobody hangs around the cemetary. Grief—a little or a lot—is tucked into your pocket and carried away.
- Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson
Gone
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Here we are, alone again. It's all so slow, so heavy, so sad. . . I'll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They've talked. They haven't said much. They've gone away. They've grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world.
- Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Death on the Installment Plan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It's the solitude that slays you. Maybe because you'd expected ruin to arrive in a grander and more romantic form.
- Michael Cunningham
A Wild Swan: And Other Tales
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Just because a person dies doesn't mean it should change the way you feel about them, or the way they really were. Just because they're gone doesn't mean that they weren't a bad person or that they never fucked up.
- Emma Mills
First & Then
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To what purpose should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?
- Anaximenes
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She was lost now, she'd been silenced- another dead branch on Cordova's warped tree.
- Marisha Pessl
Night Film
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When the sun shall be folded up; and when the stars shall fall; and when the mountains shall be made to pass away; and when the camels ten months gone with young shall be neglected; and when the seas shall boil; and when the souls shall be joined again to their bodies; and when the girl who hath been buried alive shall be asked for what crime she was put to death; and when the books shall be laid open; and when the heavens shall be removed; and when hell shall burn fiercely; and when paradise shall be brought near: every soul shall know what it hath wrought.
- Anonymous
القرآن الكريم
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Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.
- Rick Yancey
The Isle of Blood
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
La vida es mi tortura y la muerte será mi descanso.
- William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When it is winter and we must walk in the blizzard snow do not our fingers and toes whisper death  And when winter is at last over. . .can we not hear our bellies whisper death to us  In the dark don't we know  And when we are paralyzed by nightmares  We know what you are.  With our first cries we rail against you.  We see you in every drop of blood in every tear.
- Martine Leavitt
Keturah and Lord Death
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want."
"What do we want?" I asked blurrily.
"Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people wanted."
"What was that?"
He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said.
- Michael Cunningham
A Home at the End of the World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
That's it then. This is how it ends. I haven't even read Proust.
- James Turner
Rex Libris Volume Two: Book Of Monsters
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.
- Gail Caldwell
Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
- Walter Benjamin
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In a world where the dead have returned to life, the word" trouble' loses much of its meaning.
- Dennis Hopper
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Just for a while": Death's opening chat-up line in His great seduction, before he drugged you with soporific comforts, distracted you with minor luxuries and ensnared you with long-term payment plans.

Join the Rat Race "just for a while."

Concentrate on your career "just for a while."

Move in with your girlfriend "just for a while."

Find a bigger place, out in the burbs "just for a while."

Lie down in that wooden box "just for a while.
- Christopher Brookmyre
A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The day she was born,her grandfather made her a ring of silver and a polished stone, because he loved her already.
- Aliki
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Why do we want to kill all the broken people? What is wrong with us, that we think a thing like that can be right?
- Bryan Stevenson
Just Mercy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And the numerous delays due to vandalism on the tracks or leaves on the line or sun on the line or a body under a train
How very inconsiderate, not to her
To choose to throw yourself in front of a mechanical iron beast weighing thousands of tons and racing at a top speed of one hundred and forty miles per hour?
To choose such a brutal and dramatic finale
Carole knows what drives people to such despair, knows what it’s like to appear normal but to feel herself swaying
Just one leap away
From
The amassed crowds on the platforms who carry enough hope in their hearts to stay alive
Swaying
Just one leap away from
Eternal
Peace
- Bernardine Evaristo
Girl, Woman, Other
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When there is both name and reality,
We dwell in the realm of things;
When there is neither name nor reality,
We exist in a vacuity of things.
We can speak and can think,
But the more we speak, the further off we are.
What is not yet born cannot be forbidden,
What is already dead cannot be prevented.
Death and birth are not distant,
It's their principle that cannot be seen.
- Zhuangzi
The Book of Chuang Tzu
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In years past, a person died, and eventually all those with memories of him or her also died, bringing about the complete erasure of that person's existence. Just as the human body returned to dust, mingling with atoms of the natural world, a person's existence would return to nothingness.

How very clean.

Now, as if in belated punishment for the invention of writing, any message once posted on the Internet was immortal. Words as numerous as the dust of the earth would linger forever in their millions and trillions and quadrillions and beyond.
- Minae Mizumura
Inheritance from Mother
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love-- nothing, now, but bones.
- Kim Edwards
The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Good thing I'm aging, otherwise I'd be dead.
- Ana Monnar
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In the days after my heart attack & before I began to write again, all I could think about was dying. I'd been spared again, and only after the danger had passed did I allow my thoughts to unravel to their inevitable end. I imagined all the ways I could go. Blood clot to the brain. Infarction. Thrombosis. Pneumonia. Grand mal obstruction to the vena cava. I saw myself foaming at the mouth, writhing on the floor. I'd wake up in the night, gripping my throat. And yet. No matter how often I imagined the possible failure of my organs, I found the consequence inconceivable. That it could happen to me. I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.
- Nicole Krauss
The History of Love
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Conner hadn’t liked leaving the gravesite with his father still not buried. But he’d learned from his grandmother’s funeral that you have to go. It’s expected. Nobody hangs around the cemetary. Grief—a little or a lot—is tucked into your pocket and carried away.
- Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson
Gone
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Here we are, alone again. It's all so slow, so heavy, so sad. . . I'll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They've talked. They haven't said much. They've gone away. They've grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world.
- Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Death on the Installment Plan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It's the solitude that slays you. Maybe because you'd expected ruin to arrive in a grander and more romantic form.
- Michael Cunningham
A Wild Swan: And Other Tales
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Just because a person dies doesn't mean it should change the way you feel about them, or the way they really were. Just because they're gone doesn't mean that they weren't a bad person or that they never fucked up.
- Emma Mills
First & Then
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To what purpose should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?
- Anaximenes
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She was lost now, she'd been silenced- another dead branch on Cordova's warped tree.
- Marisha Pessl
Night Film
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When the sun shall be folded up; and when the stars shall fall; and when the mountains shall be made to pass away; and when the camels ten months gone with young shall be neglected; and when the seas shall boil; and when the souls shall be joined again to their bodies; and when the girl who hath been buried alive shall be asked for what crime she was put to death; and when the books shall be laid open; and when the heavens shall be removed; and when hell shall burn fiercely; and when paradise shall be brought near: every soul shall know what it hath wrought.
- Anonymous
القرآن الكريم
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.
- Rick Yancey
The Isle of Blood
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
La vida es mi tortura y la muerte será mi descanso.
- William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When it is winter and we must walk in the blizzard snow do not our fingers and toes whisper death  And when winter is at last over. . .can we not hear our bellies whisper death to us  In the dark don't we know  And when we are paralyzed by nightmares  We know what you are.  With our first cries we rail against you.  We see you in every drop of blood in every tear.
- Martine Leavitt
Keturah and Lord Death
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want."
"What do we want?" I asked blurrily.
"Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people wanted."
"What was that?"
He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said.
- Michael Cunningham
A Home at the End of the World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
That's it then. This is how it ends. I haven't even read Proust.
- James Turner
Rex Libris Volume Two: Book Of Monsters
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.
- Gail Caldwell
Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
- Walter Benjamin
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In a world where the dead have returned to life, the word" trouble' loses much of its meaning.
- Dennis Hopper
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Just for a while": Death's opening chat-up line in His great seduction, before he drugged you with soporific comforts, distracted you with minor luxuries and ensnared you with long-term payment plans.

Join the Rat Race "just for a while."

Concentrate on your career "just for a while."

Move in with your girlfriend "just for a while."

Find a bigger place, out in the burbs "just for a while."

Lie down in that wooden box "just for a while.
- Christopher Brookmyre
A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The day she was born,her grandfather made her a ring of silver and a polished stone, because he loved her already.
- Aliki
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Why do we want to kill all the broken people? What is wrong with us, that we think a thing like that can be right?
- Bryan Stevenson
Just Mercy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And the numerous delays due to vandalism on the tracks or leaves on the line or sun on the line or a body under a train
How very inconsiderate, not to her
To choose to throw yourself in front of a mechanical iron beast weighing thousands of tons and racing at a top speed of one hundred and forty miles per hour?
To choose such a brutal and dramatic finale
Carole knows what drives people to such despair, knows what it’s like to appear normal but to feel herself swaying
Just one leap away
From
The amassed crowds on the platforms who carry enough hope in their hearts to stay alive
Swaying
Just one leap away from
Eternal
Peace
- Bernardine Evaristo
Girl, Woman, Other
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When there is both name and reality,
We dwell in the realm of things;
When there is neither name nor reality,
We exist in a vacuity of things.
We can speak and can think,
But the more we speak, the further off we are.
What is not yet born cannot be forbidden,
What is already dead cannot be prevented.
Death and birth are not distant,
It's their principle that cannot be seen.
- Zhuangzi
The Book of Chuang Tzu
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In years past, a person died, and eventually all those with memories of him or her also died, bringing about the complete erasure of that person's existence. Just as the human body returned to dust, mingling with atoms of the natural world, a person's existence would return to nothingness.

How very clean.

Now, as if in belated punishment for the invention of writing, any message once posted on the Internet was immortal. Words as numerous as the dust of the earth would linger forever in their millions and trillions and quadrillions and beyond.
- Minae Mizumura
Inheritance from Mother
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love-- nothing, now, but bones.
- Kim Edwards
The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Good thing I'm aging, otherwise I'd be dead.
- Ana Monnar
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In the days after my heart attack & before I began to write again, all I could think about was dying. I'd been spared again, and only after the danger had passed did I allow my thoughts to unravel to their inevitable end. I imagined all the ways I could go. Blood clot to the brain. Infarction. Thrombosis. Pneumonia. Grand mal obstruction to the vena cava. I saw myself foaming at the mouth, writhing on the floor. I'd wake up in the night, gripping my throat. And yet. No matter how often I imagined the possible failure of my organs, I found the consequence inconceivable. That it could happen to me. I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.
- Nicole Krauss
The History of Love
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Conner hadn’t liked leaving the gravesite with his father still not buried. But he’d learned from his grandmother’s funeral that you have to go. It’s expected. Nobody hangs around the cemetary. Grief—a little or a lot—is tucked into your pocket and carried away.
- Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson
Gone
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Here we are, alone again. It's all so slow, so heavy, so sad. . . I'll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They've talked. They haven't said much. They've gone away. They've grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world.
- Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Death on the Installment Plan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It's the solitude that slays you. Maybe because you'd expected ruin to arrive in a grander and more romantic form.
- Michael Cunningham
A Wild Swan: And Other Tales
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Just because a person dies doesn't mean it should change the way you feel about them, or the way they really were. Just because they're gone doesn't mean that they weren't a bad person or that they never fucked up.
- Emma Mills
First & Then
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To what purpose should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?
- Anaximenes
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She was lost now, she'd been silenced- another dead branch on Cordova's warped tree.
- Marisha Pessl
Night Film
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When the sun shall be folded up; and when the stars shall fall; and when the mountains shall be made to pass away; and when the camels ten months gone with young shall be neglected; and when the seas shall boil; and when the souls shall be joined again to their bodies; and when the girl who hath been buried alive shall be asked for what crime she was put to death; and when the books shall be laid open; and when the heavens shall be removed; and when hell shall burn fiercely; and when paradise shall be brought near: every soul shall know what it hath wrought.
- Anonymous
القرآن الكريم
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.
- Rick Yancey
The Isle of Blood
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
La vida es mi tortura y la muerte será mi descanso.
- William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When it is winter and we must walk in the blizzard snow do not our fingers and toes whisper death  And when winter is at last over. . .can we not hear our bellies whisper death to us  In the dark don't we know  And when we are paralyzed by nightmares  We know what you are.  With our first cries we rail against you.  We see you in every drop of blood in every tear.
- Martine Leavitt
Keturah and Lord Death
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want."
"What do we want?" I asked blurrily.
"Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people wanted."
"What was that?"
He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said.
- Michael Cunningham
A Home at the End of the World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
That's it then. This is how it ends. I haven't even read Proust.
- James Turner
Rex Libris Volume Two: Book Of Monsters
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.
- Gail Caldwell
Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
- Walter Benjamin
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In a world where the dead have returned to life, the word" trouble' loses much of its meaning.
- Dennis Hopper
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Just for a while": Death's opening chat-up line in His great seduction, before he drugged you with soporific comforts, distracted you with minor luxuries and ensnared you with long-term payment plans.

Join the Rat Race "just for a while."

Concentrate on your career "just for a while."

Move in with your girlfriend "just for a while."

Find a bigger place, out in the burbs "just for a while."

Lie down in that wooden box "just for a while.
- Christopher Brookmyre
A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The day she was born,her grandfather made her a ring of silver and a polished stone, because he loved her already.
- Aliki
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Why do we want to kill all the broken people? What is wrong with us, that we think a thing like that can be right?
- Bryan Stevenson
Just Mercy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And the numerous delays due to vandalism on the tracks or leaves on the line or sun on the line or a body under a train
How very inconsiderate, not to her
To choose to throw yourself in front of a mechanical iron beast weighing thousands of tons and racing at a top speed of one hundred and forty miles per hour?
To choose such a brutal and dramatic finale
Carole knows what drives people to such despair, knows what it’s like to appear normal but to feel herself swaying
Just one leap away
From
The amassed crowds on the platforms who carry enough hope in their hearts to stay alive
Swaying
Just one leap away from
Eternal
Peace
- Bernardine Evaristo
Girl, Woman, Other
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When there is both name and reality,
We dwell in the realm of things;
When there is neither name nor reality,
We exist in a vacuity of things.
We can speak and can think,
But the more we speak, the further off we are.
What is not yet born cannot be forbidden,
What is already dead cannot be prevented.
Death and birth are not distant,
It's their principle that cannot be seen.
- Zhuangzi
The Book of Chuang Tzu
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In years past, a person died, and eventually all those with memories of him or her also died, bringing about the complete erasure of that person's existence. Just as the human body returned to dust, mingling with atoms of the natural world, a person's existence would return to nothingness.

How very clean.

Now, as if in belated punishment for the invention of writing, any message once posted on the Internet was immortal. Words as numerous as the dust of the earth would linger forever in their millions and trillions and quadrillions and beyond.
- Minae Mizumura
Inheritance from Mother
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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56
57
58
59
60
 		...