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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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June is gone. For the first time, the enormity of that hits me. Every muscle aches, my heart most of all. I am throbbing with how much I miss her. It hurts worse than anything. I don't know how I'm supposed to be expected to live day to day carrying this kind of pain. I don't know how I'm supposed to go out there, spread her ashes, and let her go.
I want to stop running away from everything.
I want to find something to run toward.
- Hannah Harrington
Saving June
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We are only an instant, that's true. But we are eternal.
- Alice Hoffman
The Foretelling
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When it's my time, and the reaper calls my name, there will be no stink of fear on me, and my only wish will be to die with grace, covered in the blood of my enemies.
- Cedric Nye
Jango's Anthem
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That's what death is, Danny thought: wanting to talk to someone and not being able to.
- Jennifer Egan
The Keep
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A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything’s going to be all right. you’ve made it past Dead Man’s Curve and you’re out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not.
- Haruki Murakami
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
- Philip Larkin
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The sharp knife of a short life, well
I've had, just enough time.
- Kimberly Perry
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Could I tell them I was sorry their loved one was dead, when he’d tried to kill me? There was no rule of etiquette for this; even my grandmother would have been stymied.
- Charlaine Harris
Dead as a Doornail
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.”

“I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all.
- J.M. Coetzee
Disgrace
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
As I would soon learn myself, cleaning up what a parent leaves behind stirs up dust, both literal and metaphorical. It dredges up memories. You feel like you’re a kid again, poking around in your parents’ closet, only this time there’s no chance of getting in trouble, so you don’t have to be so sure that everything gets put back exactly where it was before you did your poking around. Still, you hope to find something, or maybe you fear finding something, that will completely change your conception of the parent you thought you knew.
- Roz Chast
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We can't be sad for her," she murmured. "Only for ourselves at having to say good-bye.
- Dorothy Love
Beyond All Measure
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
die daily.
hourly, if you've
got the energy.
- Sherwin Tjia
The World Is a Heartbreaker
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Like many people, I feel like celebrating. Remember this feeling. It is human, and can help us understand when others express bloodlust.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near
- Andrew Marvell
To His Coy Mistress
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If I should go before the rest of you
Break not a flower nor inscribe a stone,
Nor when I'm gone speak in a Sunday voice
But be the usual selves that I have known.
Weep if you must,
Parting is hell,
But life goes on,
So sing as well.
- Joyce Grenfell
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is my wish to die of unique causes, perhaps in a high-speed tricycle crash, a bizarre stapling incient, or as a result of inadvertently sucking my brains out through my ear while trying to untwist the vacuum hose.
- Paula Poundstone
There's Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Yamamoto sensed a feeling of culmination about the huge success of the first strike, and the same incisive intuition that guided his brilliant moves at the gaming tables told him what the next move on the bridge of Akagi would be. In (Vice Admiral) Nagumo he knew his man. Nagumo had never been committed to the Pearl Harbor mission. He had not been Yamamoto’s choice to command the Striking Force; his assignment was the decision of the Navy Ministry in Tokyo, based on seniority. While the exultation of the officers and sailors on his staff swirled around him, Yamamoto sat quietly. Finally, he fixed a steely gaze on his chief of staff, and in a low, intense voice: “Admiral Nagumo is going to withdraw.
- Dale A. Jenkins
Diplomats & Admirals: From Failed Negotiations and Tragic Misjudgments to Powerful Leaders and Heroic Deeds, the Untold Story of the Pacific War from Pearl Harbor to Midway
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Timor mortis conturbat me.
- William Dunbar
The Complete Works
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe
- Anton Chekhov
The Bet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When you spend any time at all paying attention to the proclivities of the natural world, you realize that nature has no problem including in its sorority the dead, dying, and ailing as fully as the lovely, healthy, and whole.
- Trebbe Johnson
Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth's Broken Places
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The earth was a grave: our life was lent to it by its elements and had to be returned: a time came when the simple elements seemed to long for release from the complicated forms of life, when every element of every cell said, "Enough!" The planet was our mother and our burial ground. No wonder the human spirit wished to leave. Leave this prolific belly. Leave also this great tomb. Passion for the infinite caused by the terror, by timor mortis, needed material appeasement.
- Saul Bellow
Mr. Sammler's Planet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And so we weep for the fallen. We weep for those yet to fall, and in war the screams are loud and harsh and in peace the wail is so drawn-out we tell ourselves we hear nothing.
- Steven Erikson
The Bonehunters
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Being dead's a drug', he says, 'you'll get hooked on it.
- Muriel Spark
The Hothouse by the East River
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He hadn't woken a day since my death when the day wasn’t something to get through. But the truth was, the memorial service day was not the worst kind. At least it was honest. At least it was a day shaped around what they were so preoccupied by: my absence. Today he would not have to pretend he was getting back to normal—whatever normal was.
- Alice Sebold
The Lovely Bones
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
June is gone. For the first time, the enormity of that hits me. Every muscle aches, my heart most of all. I am throbbing with how much I miss her. It hurts worse than anything. I don't know how I'm supposed to be expected to live day to day carrying this kind of pain. I don't know how I'm supposed to go out there, spread her ashes, and let her go.
I want to stop running away from everything.
I want to find something to run toward.
- Hannah Harrington
Saving June
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We are only an instant, that's true. But we are eternal.
- Alice Hoffman
The Foretelling
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When it's my time, and the reaper calls my name, there will be no stink of fear on me, and my only wish will be to die with grace, covered in the blood of my enemies.
- Cedric Nye
Jango's Anthem
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
That's what death is, Danny thought: wanting to talk to someone and not being able to.
- Jennifer Egan
The Keep
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything’s going to be all right. you’ve made it past Dead Man’s Curve and you’re out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not.
- Haruki Murakami
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
- Philip Larkin
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The sharp knife of a short life, well
I've had, just enough time.
- Kimberly Perry
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Could I tell them I was sorry their loved one was dead, when he’d tried to kill me? There was no rule of etiquette for this; even my grandmother would have been stymied.
- Charlaine Harris
Dead as a Doornail
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.”

“I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all.
- J.M. Coetzee
Disgrace
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
As I would soon learn myself, cleaning up what a parent leaves behind stirs up dust, both literal and metaphorical. It dredges up memories. You feel like you’re a kid again, poking around in your parents’ closet, only this time there’s no chance of getting in trouble, so you don’t have to be so sure that everything gets put back exactly where it was before you did your poking around. Still, you hope to find something, or maybe you fear finding something, that will completely change your conception of the parent you thought you knew.
- Roz Chast
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We can't be sad for her," she murmured. "Only for ourselves at having to say good-bye.
- Dorothy Love
Beyond All Measure
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
die daily.
hourly, if you've
got the energy.
- Sherwin Tjia
The World Is a Heartbreaker
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Like many people, I feel like celebrating. Remember this feeling. It is human, and can help us understand when others express bloodlust.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near
- Andrew Marvell
To His Coy Mistress
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If I should go before the rest of you
Break not a flower nor inscribe a stone,
Nor when I'm gone speak in a Sunday voice
But be the usual selves that I have known.
Weep if you must,
Parting is hell,
But life goes on,
So sing as well.
- Joyce Grenfell
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is my wish to die of unique causes, perhaps in a high-speed tricycle crash, a bizarre stapling incient, or as a result of inadvertently sucking my brains out through my ear while trying to untwist the vacuum hose.
- Paula Poundstone
There's Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Yamamoto sensed a feeling of culmination about the huge success of the first strike, and the same incisive intuition that guided his brilliant moves at the gaming tables told him what the next move on the bridge of Akagi would be. In (Vice Admiral) Nagumo he knew his man. Nagumo had never been committed to the Pearl Harbor mission. He had not been Yamamoto’s choice to command the Striking Force; his assignment was the decision of the Navy Ministry in Tokyo, based on seniority. While the exultation of the officers and sailors on his staff swirled around him, Yamamoto sat quietly. Finally, he fixed a steely gaze on his chief of staff, and in a low, intense voice: “Admiral Nagumo is going to withdraw.
- Dale A. Jenkins
Diplomats & Admirals: From Failed Negotiations and Tragic Misjudgments to Powerful Leaders and Heroic Deeds, the Untold Story of the Pacific War from Pearl Harbor to Midway
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Timor mortis conturbat me.
- William Dunbar
The Complete Works
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe
- Anton Chekhov
The Bet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When you spend any time at all paying attention to the proclivities of the natural world, you realize that nature has no problem including in its sorority the dead, dying, and ailing as fully as the lovely, healthy, and whole.
- Trebbe Johnson
Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth's Broken Places
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The earth was a grave: our life was lent to it by its elements and had to be returned: a time came when the simple elements seemed to long for release from the complicated forms of life, when every element of every cell said, "Enough!" The planet was our mother and our burial ground. No wonder the human spirit wished to leave. Leave this prolific belly. Leave also this great tomb. Passion for the infinite caused by the terror, by timor mortis, needed material appeasement.
- Saul Bellow
Mr. Sammler's Planet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And so we weep for the fallen. We weep for those yet to fall, and in war the screams are loud and harsh and in peace the wail is so drawn-out we tell ourselves we hear nothing.
- Steven Erikson
The Bonehunters
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Being dead's a drug', he says, 'you'll get hooked on it.
- Muriel Spark
The Hothouse by the East River
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He hadn't woken a day since my death when the day wasn’t something to get through. But the truth was, the memorial service day was not the worst kind. At least it was honest. At least it was a day shaped around what they were so preoccupied by: my absence. Today he would not have to pretend he was getting back to normal—whatever normal was.
- Alice Sebold
The Lovely Bones
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
June is gone. For the first time, the enormity of that hits me. Every muscle aches, my heart most of all. I am throbbing with how much I miss her. It hurts worse than anything. I don't know how I'm supposed to be expected to live day to day carrying this kind of pain. I don't know how I'm supposed to go out there, spread her ashes, and let her go.
I want to stop running away from everything.
I want to find something to run toward.
- Hannah Harrington
Saving June
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We are only an instant, that's true. But we are eternal.
- Alice Hoffman
The Foretelling
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When it's my time, and the reaper calls my name, there will be no stink of fear on me, and my only wish will be to die with grace, covered in the blood of my enemies.
- Cedric Nye
Jango's Anthem
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
That's what death is, Danny thought: wanting to talk to someone and not being able to.
- Jennifer Egan
The Keep
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything’s going to be all right. you’ve made it past Dead Man’s Curve and you’re out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not.
- Haruki Murakami
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
- Philip Larkin
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The sharp knife of a short life, well
I've had, just enough time.
- Kimberly Perry
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Could I tell them I was sorry their loved one was dead, when he’d tried to kill me? There was no rule of etiquette for this; even my grandmother would have been stymied.
- Charlaine Harris
Dead as a Doornail
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.”

“I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all.
- J.M. Coetzee
Disgrace
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
As I would soon learn myself, cleaning up what a parent leaves behind stirs up dust, both literal and metaphorical. It dredges up memories. You feel like you’re a kid again, poking around in your parents’ closet, only this time there’s no chance of getting in trouble, so you don’t have to be so sure that everything gets put back exactly where it was before you did your poking around. Still, you hope to find something, or maybe you fear finding something, that will completely change your conception of the parent you thought you knew.
- Roz Chast
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We can't be sad for her," she murmured. "Only for ourselves at having to say good-bye.
- Dorothy Love
Beyond All Measure
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
die daily.
hourly, if you've
got the energy.
- Sherwin Tjia
The World Is a Heartbreaker
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Like many people, I feel like celebrating. Remember this feeling. It is human, and can help us understand when others express bloodlust.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near
- Andrew Marvell
To His Coy Mistress
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If I should go before the rest of you
Break not a flower nor inscribe a stone,
Nor when I'm gone speak in a Sunday voice
But be the usual selves that I have known.
Weep if you must,
Parting is hell,
But life goes on,
So sing as well.
- Joyce Grenfell
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is my wish to die of unique causes, perhaps in a high-speed tricycle crash, a bizarre stapling incient, or as a result of inadvertently sucking my brains out through my ear while trying to untwist the vacuum hose.
- Paula Poundstone
There's Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Yamamoto sensed a feeling of culmination about the huge success of the first strike, and the same incisive intuition that guided his brilliant moves at the gaming tables told him what the next move on the bridge of Akagi would be. In (Vice Admiral) Nagumo he knew his man. Nagumo had never been committed to the Pearl Harbor mission. He had not been Yamamoto’s choice to command the Striking Force; his assignment was the decision of the Navy Ministry in Tokyo, based on seniority. While the exultation of the officers and sailors on his staff swirled around him, Yamamoto sat quietly. Finally, he fixed a steely gaze on his chief of staff, and in a low, intense voice: “Admiral Nagumo is going to withdraw.
- Dale A. Jenkins
Diplomats & Admirals: From Failed Negotiations and Tragic Misjudgments to Powerful Leaders and Heroic Deeds, the Untold Story of the Pacific War from Pearl Harbor to Midway
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Timor mortis conturbat me.
- William Dunbar
The Complete Works
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe
- Anton Chekhov
The Bet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When you spend any time at all paying attention to the proclivities of the natural world, you realize that nature has no problem including in its sorority the dead, dying, and ailing as fully as the lovely, healthy, and whole.
- Trebbe Johnson
Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth's Broken Places
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The earth was a grave: our life was lent to it by its elements and had to be returned: a time came when the simple elements seemed to long for release from the complicated forms of life, when every element of every cell said, "Enough!" The planet was our mother and our burial ground. No wonder the human spirit wished to leave. Leave this prolific belly. Leave also this great tomb. Passion for the infinite caused by the terror, by timor mortis, needed material appeasement.
- Saul Bellow
Mr. Sammler's Planet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And so we weep for the fallen. We weep for those yet to fall, and in war the screams are loud and harsh and in peace the wail is so drawn-out we tell ourselves we hear nothing.
- Steven Erikson
The Bonehunters
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Being dead's a drug', he says, 'you'll get hooked on it.
- Muriel Spark
The Hothouse by the East River
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He hadn't woken a day since my death when the day wasn’t something to get through. But the truth was, the memorial service day was not the worst kind. At least it was honest. At least it was a day shaped around what they were so preoccupied by: my absence. Today he would not have to pretend he was getting back to normal—whatever normal was.
- Alice Sebold
The Lovely Bones
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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81
82
83
84
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