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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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...do you actually think that how long a person grieves is a measure of how much they loved someone?
- David Wroblewski
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
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He made me feel unhinged . . . like he could take me apart and put me back together again and again.
- Chelsie Shakespeare
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...what happens when you return
and find nothing
but a hollowed shell,
shingles and floor,
walls and echoes
and the light that lead you here
has now burned out
and the ones who built it
have traveled afar
and you cant go to them,
no matter what shoes you wear.
- Kellie Elmore
Magic in the Backyard
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There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
- Ursula K. Le Guin
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Fairytales by nature only talk about the victors. The survivors. Nobody speaks about what happens to those who failed, except in the abstract: as cautionary tales to guide others onto the path to success. How many brave knights fell to the dragon before he was slayed by the noble prince? How many children burned to a crisp and eaten before the wicked witch received her due? These stories are lost, but the lesson behind them is not: it is not enough to be merely pure and good.
- Nenia Campbell
Evergloom
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I want that. I want that awful intense and serious unhappiness, cos then I might feel better, and then I might be happy.
- David Thewlis
The Late Hector Kipling
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Committing suicide so as not to be murdered is the worst reason I've ever heard of to die.
- Tiffanie DeBartolo
God-Shaped Hole
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The Only Way Out Is To DIE!!!!
- Bullet For My Valentine
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There was no hope in death, only an end.
- Morgan Rhodes
Rebel Spring
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
WIDOW. The word consumes itself, said Sylvia Plath, who consumed herself.
- Lauren Groff
Fates and Furies
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Never underestimate the will of a creature who begins to die at birth.
- Lyn Benedict
Sins & Shadows
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.
- Sylvia Plath
The Collected Poems
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...this is our tragedy, she said in his words, our fictions are killing us, but if we didn’t have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.
- Salman Rushdie
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We've got this idea that there are only two options in grief: you're either going to be stuck in your pain, doomed to spend the rest of your life rocking in a corner in your basement wearing sackcloth, or you're going to triumph over grief, be transformed, and come back even better than you were before.
Just two options. On, off. Eternally broken or completely healed.
It doesn't seem to matter that nothing else in life is like that. Somehow when it comes to grief, the entire breadth of human experience goes out the window.
- Megan Devine
It's OK That You're Not OK
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You thought you had the choice to stay still or move forward, but your didn't. As long as your heart kept pumping an your blood kept blowing and your lungs kept filling, you didn't. The pang she felt for Tibby carried something like envy. You couldn't stand still for anything short of death, and God knew she had tried.
- Ann Brashares
Sisterhood Everlasting
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
- Christina Rossetti
Poems of Christina Rossetti
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is the reward for living
- Sylvia Browne
Life on the Other Side: A Psychic's Tour of the Afterlife
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
- Katherine Anne Porter
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It's unfair."
As a rule, life is unfair," I said.
Yeah, but I think I did say some awful things."
To Dick?"
Yeah."
I pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road and turned off the ignition. "That's just stupid, that kind of thinking," I said, nailing her with my eyes. "Instead of regretting what you did, you could have treated him decently from the beginning. You could've tried to be fair. But you didn't. You don't even have the right to be sorry.
- Haruki Murakami
Dance Dance Dance
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Ah, Momma. I had never looked at death before, peered into its yawning chasm for the face of a beloved. For days my mind staggered out of balance. I reeled on a precipice of knowledge that even if I were rich enough to travel all over the world, I would never find Momma. If I were as good as God’s angels and as pure as the Mother of Christ, I could never have Momma’s rough slow hands pat my cheek or braid my hair.

Death to the young is more than that undiscovered country; despite its inevitability, it is a place having reality only in song or in other people's grief.
- Maya Angelou
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters—it was something about the way they carried themselves, something that had broken too soon and had not mended, marking them in spite of their lightheartedness.
- Jhumpa Lahiri
Unaccustomed Earth
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.
- Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Let your heart shine even more than your face. The beautiful contents of your heart can never be forgotten, but your face will be a history.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The souls of humans have become poor and transparent things.
- Stephen King
Full Dark, No Stars
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...do you actually think that how long a person grieves is a measure of how much they loved someone?
- David Wroblewski
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He made me feel unhinged . . . like he could take me apart and put me back together again and again.
- Chelsie Shakespeare
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...what happens when you return
and find nothing
but a hollowed shell,
shingles and floor,
walls and echoes
and the light that lead you here
has now burned out
and the ones who built it
have traveled afar
and you cant go to them,
no matter what shoes you wear.
- Kellie Elmore
Magic in the Backyard
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
- Ursula K. Le Guin
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Fairytales by nature only talk about the victors. The survivors. Nobody speaks about what happens to those who failed, except in the abstract: as cautionary tales to guide others onto the path to success. How many brave knights fell to the dragon before he was slayed by the noble prince? How many children burned to a crisp and eaten before the wicked witch received her due? These stories are lost, but the lesson behind them is not: it is not enough to be merely pure and good.
- Nenia Campbell
Evergloom
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I want that. I want that awful intense and serious unhappiness, cos then I might feel better, and then I might be happy.
- David Thewlis
The Late Hector Kipling
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Committing suicide so as not to be murdered is the worst reason I've ever heard of to die.
- Tiffanie DeBartolo
God-Shaped Hole
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The Only Way Out Is To DIE!!!!
- Bullet For My Valentine
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There was no hope in death, only an end.
- Morgan Rhodes
Rebel Spring
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
WIDOW. The word consumes itself, said Sylvia Plath, who consumed herself.
- Lauren Groff
Fates and Furies
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Never underestimate the will of a creature who begins to die at birth.
- Lyn Benedict
Sins & Shadows
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.
- Sylvia Plath
The Collected Poems
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...this is our tragedy, she said in his words, our fictions are killing us, but if we didn’t have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.
- Salman Rushdie
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We've got this idea that there are only two options in grief: you're either going to be stuck in your pain, doomed to spend the rest of your life rocking in a corner in your basement wearing sackcloth, or you're going to triumph over grief, be transformed, and come back even better than you were before.
Just two options. On, off. Eternally broken or completely healed.
It doesn't seem to matter that nothing else in life is like that. Somehow when it comes to grief, the entire breadth of human experience goes out the window.
- Megan Devine
It's OK That You're Not OK
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You thought you had the choice to stay still or move forward, but your didn't. As long as your heart kept pumping an your blood kept blowing and your lungs kept filling, you didn't. The pang she felt for Tibby carried something like envy. You couldn't stand still for anything short of death, and God knew she had tried.
- Ann Brashares
Sisterhood Everlasting
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
- Christina Rossetti
Poems of Christina Rossetti
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is the reward for living
- Sylvia Browne
Life on the Other Side: A Psychic's Tour of the Afterlife
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
- Katherine Anne Porter
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It's unfair."
As a rule, life is unfair," I said.
Yeah, but I think I did say some awful things."
To Dick?"
Yeah."
I pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road and turned off the ignition. "That's just stupid, that kind of thinking," I said, nailing her with my eyes. "Instead of regretting what you did, you could have treated him decently from the beginning. You could've tried to be fair. But you didn't. You don't even have the right to be sorry.
- Haruki Murakami
Dance Dance Dance
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Ah, Momma. I had never looked at death before, peered into its yawning chasm for the face of a beloved. For days my mind staggered out of balance. I reeled on a precipice of knowledge that even if I were rich enough to travel all over the world, I would never find Momma. If I were as good as God’s angels and as pure as the Mother of Christ, I could never have Momma’s rough slow hands pat my cheek or braid my hair.

Death to the young is more than that undiscovered country; despite its inevitability, it is a place having reality only in song or in other people's grief.
- Maya Angelou
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters—it was something about the way they carried themselves, something that had broken too soon and had not mended, marking them in spite of their lightheartedness.
- Jhumpa Lahiri
Unaccustomed Earth
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.
- Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Let your heart shine even more than your face. The beautiful contents of your heart can never be forgotten, but your face will be a history.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The souls of humans have become poor and transparent things.
- Stephen King
Full Dark, No Stars
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...do you actually think that how long a person grieves is a measure of how much they loved someone?
- David Wroblewski
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He made me feel unhinged . . . like he could take me apart and put me back together again and again.
- Chelsie Shakespeare
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...what happens when you return
and find nothing
but a hollowed shell,
shingles and floor,
walls and echoes
and the light that lead you here
has now burned out
and the ones who built it
have traveled afar
and you cant go to them,
no matter what shoes you wear.
- Kellie Elmore
Magic in the Backyard
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
- Ursula K. Le Guin
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Fairytales by nature only talk about the victors. The survivors. Nobody speaks about what happens to those who failed, except in the abstract: as cautionary tales to guide others onto the path to success. How many brave knights fell to the dragon before he was slayed by the noble prince? How many children burned to a crisp and eaten before the wicked witch received her due? These stories are lost, but the lesson behind them is not: it is not enough to be merely pure and good.
- Nenia Campbell
Evergloom
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I want that. I want that awful intense and serious unhappiness, cos then I might feel better, and then I might be happy.
- David Thewlis
The Late Hector Kipling
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Committing suicide so as not to be murdered is the worst reason I've ever heard of to die.
- Tiffanie DeBartolo
God-Shaped Hole
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The Only Way Out Is To DIE!!!!
- Bullet For My Valentine
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There was no hope in death, only an end.
- Morgan Rhodes
Rebel Spring
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
WIDOW. The word consumes itself, said Sylvia Plath, who consumed herself.
- Lauren Groff
Fates and Furies
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Never underestimate the will of a creature who begins to die at birth.
- Lyn Benedict
Sins & Shadows
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.
- Sylvia Plath
The Collected Poems
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...this is our tragedy, she said in his words, our fictions are killing us, but if we didn’t have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.
- Salman Rushdie
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We've got this idea that there are only two options in grief: you're either going to be stuck in your pain, doomed to spend the rest of your life rocking in a corner in your basement wearing sackcloth, or you're going to triumph over grief, be transformed, and come back even better than you were before.
Just two options. On, off. Eternally broken or completely healed.
It doesn't seem to matter that nothing else in life is like that. Somehow when it comes to grief, the entire breadth of human experience goes out the window.
- Megan Devine
It's OK That You're Not OK
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You thought you had the choice to stay still or move forward, but your didn't. As long as your heart kept pumping an your blood kept blowing and your lungs kept filling, you didn't. The pang she felt for Tibby carried something like envy. You couldn't stand still for anything short of death, and God knew she had tried.
- Ann Brashares
Sisterhood Everlasting
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
- Christina Rossetti
Poems of Christina Rossetti
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is the reward for living
- Sylvia Browne
Life on the Other Side: A Psychic's Tour of the Afterlife
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
- Katherine Anne Porter
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It's unfair."
As a rule, life is unfair," I said.
Yeah, but I think I did say some awful things."
To Dick?"
Yeah."
I pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road and turned off the ignition. "That's just stupid, that kind of thinking," I said, nailing her with my eyes. "Instead of regretting what you did, you could have treated him decently from the beginning. You could've tried to be fair. But you didn't. You don't even have the right to be sorry.
- Haruki Murakami
Dance Dance Dance
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Ah, Momma. I had never looked at death before, peered into its yawning chasm for the face of a beloved. For days my mind staggered out of balance. I reeled on a precipice of knowledge that even if I were rich enough to travel all over the world, I would never find Momma. If I were as good as God’s angels and as pure as the Mother of Christ, I could never have Momma’s rough slow hands pat my cheek or braid my hair.

Death to the young is more than that undiscovered country; despite its inevitability, it is a place having reality only in song or in other people's grief.
- Maya Angelou
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters—it was something about the way they carried themselves, something that had broken too soon and had not mended, marking them in spite of their lightheartedness.
- Jhumpa Lahiri
Unaccustomed Earth
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.
- Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Let your heart shine even more than your face. The beautiful contents of your heart can never be forgotten, but your face will be a history.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The souls of humans have become poor and transparent things.
- Stephen King
Full Dark, No Stars
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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5
6
7
8
9
 		...