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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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The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.
- Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Infidel
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Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
- Norman Cousins
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You're Hell's Angels, then? What chapter are you from?'

'REVELATIONS. CHAPTER SIX.
- Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
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These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.
- Alice Sebold
The Lovely Bones
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The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows.
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Pulvis et umbra sumus. It's a line from Horace. 'We are dust and shadows'. Appropriate, don't you think?" Will said. "It's not a long life, killing demons; one tends to die young, and then they burn your body - dust to dust, in the literal sense. And then we vanish into the shadows of history, nary a mark on the page of a mundane book to remind the world that once we existed at all.
- Cassandra Clare
Clockwork Angel
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It's not reasonable to love people who are only going to die," she said.
Nash thought about that for a moment, stroking Small's neck with great deliberation, as if the fate of the Dells depended on that smooth, careful movement.
"I have two responses to that," He said at last. "First, everyone is going to die. Second, love is stupid. It has nothing to do with reason. You love whomever you love. Against all reason I loved my father." He looked at her keenly. "Did you love yours?"
"Yes," she whispered.
He stroked Small's nose. "I love you," he said, "even knowing you'll never have me. And I love my brother, more than I ever realized before you came along. You can't help whom you love, Lady. Nor can you know what it's liable to cause you to do.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?" she asked. "Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?"

"Wouldn't it be great if it did?" I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering.
- Paul Kalanithi
When Breath Becomes Air
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Even in the grave, all is not lost.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour--and in the oddest places!--for the lack of it.
- James Baldwin
Giovanni’s Room
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I think people believe in heaven because they don't like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don't like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish.
- Mark Haddon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
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What does he say?' he asked.
'He’s very sad,’ Úrsula answered, ‘because he thinks that you’re going to die.'
'Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.
- Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude
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No man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping.
- David Hume
Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul
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People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.
- Marcel Proust
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Life is too short when you think of the length of death
- Sean Mangan
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Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you - it’s born with us the day that we are born.
- Homer
The Iliad
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.
- Christopher Hitchens
Hitch 22: A Memoir
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A piece of me is gone," she told me once while we were bra shopping. "I think we're made up of all these different pieces and every time someone goes, you're left with less of yourself.
- Melina Marchetta
Saving Francesca
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
- Irvin D. Yalom
When Nietzsche Wept
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But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying,
If I am dead, as dead I well may be,
You'll come and find the place where I am lying,
And kneel and say Ave there for me,
And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me,
And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be,
For you will bend and tell me that you love me,
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me
- Frederic Weatherly
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I was giving up. I would have given up - if a voice hadn't made itself heard in my heart. The voice said "I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen everyday. I will put in all the hard work necessary. Yes, so long as God is with me, I will not die. Amen.
- Yann Martel
Life of Pi
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
One day you'll call me Death.
For now, Wrath will do.
- Kerri Maniscalco
Kingdom of the Wicked
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You'll forget it when you're dead, and so will I. When I'm dead, I'm going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Cat’s Cradle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.
- Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Infidel
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
- Norman Cousins
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You're Hell's Angels, then? What chapter are you from?'

'REVELATIONS. CHAPTER SIX.
- Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.
- Alice Sebold
The Lovely Bones
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Pulvis et umbra sumus. It's a line from Horace. 'We are dust and shadows'. Appropriate, don't you think?" Will said. "It's not a long life, killing demons; one tends to die young, and then they burn your body - dust to dust, in the literal sense. And then we vanish into the shadows of history, nary a mark on the page of a mundane book to remind the world that once we existed at all.
- Cassandra Clare
Clockwork Angel
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It's not reasonable to love people who are only going to die," she said.
Nash thought about that for a moment, stroking Small's neck with great deliberation, as if the fate of the Dells depended on that smooth, careful movement.
"I have two responses to that," He said at last. "First, everyone is going to die. Second, love is stupid. It has nothing to do with reason. You love whomever you love. Against all reason I loved my father." He looked at her keenly. "Did you love yours?"
"Yes," she whispered.
He stroked Small's nose. "I love you," he said, "even knowing you'll never have me. And I love my brother, more than I ever realized before you came along. You can't help whom you love, Lady. Nor can you know what it's liable to cause you to do.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?" she asked. "Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?"

"Wouldn't it be great if it did?" I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering.
- Paul Kalanithi
When Breath Becomes Air
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Even in the grave, all is not lost.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour--and in the oddest places!--for the lack of it.
- James Baldwin
Giovanni’s Room
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I think people believe in heaven because they don't like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don't like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish.
- Mark Haddon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
What does he say?' he asked.
'He’s very sad,’ Úrsula answered, ‘because he thinks that you’re going to die.'
'Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.
- Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping.
- David Hume
Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.
- Marcel Proust
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life is too short when you think of the length of death
- Sean Mangan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you - it’s born with us the day that we are born.
- Homer
The Iliad
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.
- Christopher Hitchens
Hitch 22: A Memoir
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A piece of me is gone," she told me once while we were bra shopping. "I think we're made up of all these different pieces and every time someone goes, you're left with less of yourself.
- Melina Marchetta
Saving Francesca
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
- Irvin D. Yalom
When Nietzsche Wept
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying,
If I am dead, as dead I well may be,
You'll come and find the place where I am lying,
And kneel and say Ave there for me,
And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me,
And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be,
For you will bend and tell me that you love me,
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me
- Frederic Weatherly
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I was giving up. I would have given up - if a voice hadn't made itself heard in my heart. The voice said "I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen everyday. I will put in all the hard work necessary. Yes, so long as God is with me, I will not die. Amen.
- Yann Martel
Life of Pi
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
One day you'll call me Death.
For now, Wrath will do.
- Kerri Maniscalco
Kingdom of the Wicked
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You'll forget it when you're dead, and so will I. When I'm dead, I'm going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Cat’s Cradle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.
- Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Infidel
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
- Norman Cousins
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You're Hell's Angels, then? What chapter are you from?'

'REVELATIONS. CHAPTER SIX.
- Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.
- Alice Sebold
The Lovely Bones
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Pulvis et umbra sumus. It's a line from Horace. 'We are dust and shadows'. Appropriate, don't you think?" Will said. "It's not a long life, killing demons; one tends to die young, and then they burn your body - dust to dust, in the literal sense. And then we vanish into the shadows of history, nary a mark on the page of a mundane book to remind the world that once we existed at all.
- Cassandra Clare
Clockwork Angel
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It's not reasonable to love people who are only going to die," she said.
Nash thought about that for a moment, stroking Small's neck with great deliberation, as if the fate of the Dells depended on that smooth, careful movement.
"I have two responses to that," He said at last. "First, everyone is going to die. Second, love is stupid. It has nothing to do with reason. You love whomever you love. Against all reason I loved my father." He looked at her keenly. "Did you love yours?"
"Yes," she whispered.
He stroked Small's nose. "I love you," he said, "even knowing you'll never have me. And I love my brother, more than I ever realized before you came along. You can't help whom you love, Lady. Nor can you know what it's liable to cause you to do.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?" she asked. "Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?"

"Wouldn't it be great if it did?" I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering.
- Paul Kalanithi
When Breath Becomes Air
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Even in the grave, all is not lost.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour--and in the oddest places!--for the lack of it.
- James Baldwin
Giovanni’s Room
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I think people believe in heaven because they don't like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don't like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish.
- Mark Haddon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
What does he say?' he asked.
'He’s very sad,’ Úrsula answered, ‘because he thinks that you’re going to die.'
'Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.
- Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping.
- David Hume
Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.
- Marcel Proust
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life is too short when you think of the length of death
- Sean Mangan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you - it’s born with us the day that we are born.
- Homer
The Iliad
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.
- Christopher Hitchens
Hitch 22: A Memoir
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A piece of me is gone," she told me once while we were bra shopping. "I think we're made up of all these different pieces and every time someone goes, you're left with less of yourself.
- Melina Marchetta
Saving Francesca
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
- Irvin D. Yalom
When Nietzsche Wept
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying,
If I am dead, as dead I well may be,
You'll come and find the place where I am lying,
And kneel and say Ave there for me,
And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me,
And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be,
For you will bend and tell me that you love me,
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me
- Frederic Weatherly
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I was giving up. I would have given up - if a voice hadn't made itself heard in my heart. The voice said "I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen everyday. I will put in all the hard work necessary. Yes, so long as God is with me, I will not die. Amen.
- Yann Martel
Life of Pi
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
One day you'll call me Death.
For now, Wrath will do.
- Kerri Maniscalco
Kingdom of the Wicked
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You'll forget it when you're dead, and so will I. When I'm dead, I'm going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Cat’s Cradle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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59
60
61
62
63
 		...