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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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But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
- Andrew Marvell
To His Coy Mistress
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Dying is the only way/ For you to float free: / Nomonhan
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WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEART OF MEN?

The Death of Rats looked up from the feast of the potato. SQUEAK, he said.

Death waved a hand dismissively. WELL, YES, OBVIOUSLY ME, he said. I JUST WONDERED IF THERE WAS ANYONE ELSE.
- Terry Pratchett
The Truth: Stage Adaptation
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In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground.
- Tea Obreht
The Tiger's Wife
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The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where we would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights, I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.

- Anne Hathaway
- Carol Ann Duffy
The World's Wife
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.
- Peter Heller
The Dog Stars
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Dark circles under my eyes sink deeper and deeper into my skull, in contrast to my pale skin there is an undeniable resemblance to a fresh corpse.
- Dee Remy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The kiss. Oh, the kiss. What a perfect, unnerving, luscious kiss. He made me feel unhinged . . . like he could take me apart and put me back together again and again.
- Chelsie Shakespeare
The Pull
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Everything- even me, and one day even Charlotte- must come to end.
- Avery Williams
The Alchemy of Forever
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'm not afraid of being dead. I'm just afraid of what you might have to go through to get there.
- Pamela Bone
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You cannot be buried in obscurity: you are exposed upon a grand theater to the view of the world. If your actions are upright and benevolent, be assured they will augment your power and happiness.
- Cyrus the Great
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It’s natural to die. The fact that we make such a big hullabaloo over it is all because we don’t see ourselves as part of nature. We think because we’re human we’re something above nature.
- Morrie Schwartz
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.
- Henry Adams
The Education of Henry Adams
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We’re organisms; we’re conceived, we’re born, we live, we die, and we decay. But as we decay we feed the world of the living: plants and bugs and bacteria.
- Bill Bass
Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It would be well to realize that the talk of ‘humane methods of warfare’, of the ‘rules of civilized warfare’, and all such homage to the finer sentiments of the race are hypocritical and unreal, and only intended for the consumption of stay-at-homes. There are no humane methods of warfare, there is no such thing as civilized warfare; all warfare is inhuman, all warfare is barbaric; the first blast of the bugles of war ever sounds for the time being the funeral knell of human progress… What lover of humanity can view with anything but horror the prospect of this ruthless destruction of human life. Yet this is war: war for which all the jingoes are howling, war to which all the hopes of the world are being sacrificed, war to which a mad ruling class would plunge a mad world.
- James Connolly
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'll fall.'
'You wont fall.'
'I'll fall. I'll fall and I'll die.'
As I said it, I could see it happening. The foot stepping on air, pulling the rest of my body with it, tree limbs breaking as I plummeted down.
'No,' he said, his voice assured, 'You'd never do that to me.
- Kamila Shamsie
Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
COSMIC DANCER"

"I was dancing when I was twelve
I was dancing when I was aaah
I danced myself right out the womb
Is it strange to dance so soon
I danced myself right out the womb

I was dancing when I was eight
Is it strange to dance so late
I danced myself into the tomb
Is it strange to dance so soon
I danced myself into the tomb

Is it wrong to understand
The fear that dwells inside a man
What's it like to be a loon
I liken it to a balloon

I danced myself out of the womb
Is it strange to dance to soon
I danced myself into the tomb
But then again once more
I danced myself out of the womb
Is it strange to dance so soon
I danced myself out of the womb.
- Marc Bolan
Marc Bolan Lyric Book
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and the understanding of them cease first.
- Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Across Ackar and Lett, the ordinary folk were tired of the wars of aggression of the Dewar dynasty. They had lost too many fathers, brothers and sons on foreign soil. It was clear that the new King was no warrior, and most of the population thought that a good thing. Maybe for the first time in generations they could have a good king rather than a warrior king.
I now commit as my coronation promise that whilst I am King, no armies from Ackar and Lett will seek domination over our neighbours. The treaties are written in ink. I will now seal them with my blood.
- Robert Reid
White Light Red Fire
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Open questions like love, life, death, struggle and sex are our experiences, our opinions are not answers but they still remain mysterious unanswered questions. Let it be Open.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For me death is a wolf…
- John Ajvide Lindqvist
Handling the Undead
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Trees still grow after letting dead things go.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You had once asked me if I was afraid of death.

I said I was afraid of not living.

I don’t want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.
- Jeanette Winterson
The PowerBook
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
..And because he was still able to move his hands - Morrie always spoke with both hands waving - he showed great passion when explaining how you face the end of life.
- Mitch Albom
Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
- Andrew Marvell
To His Coy Mistress
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Dying is the only way/ For you to float free: / Nomonhan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEART OF MEN?

The Death of Rats looked up from the feast of the potato. SQUEAK, he said.

Death waved a hand dismissively. WELL, YES, OBVIOUSLY ME, he said. I JUST WONDERED IF THERE WAS ANYONE ELSE.
- Terry Pratchett
The Truth: Stage Adaptation
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground.
- Tea Obreht
The Tiger's Wife
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where we would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights, I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.

- Anne Hathaway
- Carol Ann Duffy
The World's Wife
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.
- Peter Heller
The Dog Stars
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Dark circles under my eyes sink deeper and deeper into my skull, in contrast to my pale skin there is an undeniable resemblance to a fresh corpse.
- Dee Remy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The kiss. Oh, the kiss. What a perfect, unnerving, luscious kiss. He made me feel unhinged . . . like he could take me apart and put me back together again and again.
- Chelsie Shakespeare
The Pull
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Everything- even me, and one day even Charlotte- must come to end.
- Avery Williams
The Alchemy of Forever
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'm not afraid of being dead. I'm just afraid of what you might have to go through to get there.
- Pamela Bone
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You cannot be buried in obscurity: you are exposed upon a grand theater to the view of the world. If your actions are upright and benevolent, be assured they will augment your power and happiness.
- Cyrus the Great
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It’s natural to die. The fact that we make such a big hullabaloo over it is all because we don’t see ourselves as part of nature. We think because we’re human we’re something above nature.
- Morrie Schwartz
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.
- Henry Adams
The Education of Henry Adams
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We’re organisms; we’re conceived, we’re born, we live, we die, and we decay. But as we decay we feed the world of the living: plants and bugs and bacteria.
- Bill Bass
Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It would be well to realize that the talk of ‘humane methods of warfare’, of the ‘rules of civilized warfare’, and all such homage to the finer sentiments of the race are hypocritical and unreal, and only intended for the consumption of stay-at-homes. There are no humane methods of warfare, there is no such thing as civilized warfare; all warfare is inhuman, all warfare is barbaric; the first blast of the bugles of war ever sounds for the time being the funeral knell of human progress… What lover of humanity can view with anything but horror the prospect of this ruthless destruction of human life. Yet this is war: war for which all the jingoes are howling, war to which all the hopes of the world are being sacrificed, war to which a mad ruling class would plunge a mad world.
- James Connolly
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'll fall.'
'You wont fall.'
'I'll fall. I'll fall and I'll die.'
As I said it, I could see it happening. The foot stepping on air, pulling the rest of my body with it, tree limbs breaking as I plummeted down.
'No,' he said, his voice assured, 'You'd never do that to me.
- Kamila Shamsie
Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
COSMIC DANCER"

"I was dancing when I was twelve
I was dancing when I was aaah
I danced myself right out the womb
Is it strange to dance so soon
I danced myself right out the womb

I was dancing when I was eight
Is it strange to dance so late
I danced myself into the tomb
Is it strange to dance so soon
I danced myself into the tomb

Is it wrong to understand
The fear that dwells inside a man
What's it like to be a loon
I liken it to a balloon

I danced myself out of the womb
Is it strange to dance to soon
I danced myself into the tomb
But then again once more
I danced myself out of the womb
Is it strange to dance so soon
I danced myself out of the womb.
- Marc Bolan
Marc Bolan Lyric Book
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and the understanding of them cease first.
- Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Across Ackar and Lett, the ordinary folk were tired of the wars of aggression of the Dewar dynasty. They had lost too many fathers, brothers and sons on foreign soil. It was clear that the new King was no warrior, and most of the population thought that a good thing. Maybe for the first time in generations they could have a good king rather than a warrior king.
I now commit as my coronation promise that whilst I am King, no armies from Ackar and Lett will seek domination over our neighbours. The treaties are written in ink. I will now seal them with my blood.
- Robert Reid
White Light Red Fire
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Open questions like love, life, death, struggle and sex are our experiences, our opinions are not answers but they still remain mysterious unanswered questions. Let it be Open.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For me death is a wolf…
- John Ajvide Lindqvist
Handling the Undead
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Trees still grow after letting dead things go.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You had once asked me if I was afraid of death.

I said I was afraid of not living.

I don’t want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.
- Jeanette Winterson
The PowerBook
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
..And because he was still able to move his hands - Morrie always spoke with both hands waving - he showed great passion when explaining how you face the end of life.
- Mitch Albom
Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
- Andrew Marvell
To His Coy Mistress
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Dying is the only way/ For you to float free: / Nomonhan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEART OF MEN?

The Death of Rats looked up from the feast of the potato. SQUEAK, he said.

Death waved a hand dismissively. WELL, YES, OBVIOUSLY ME, he said. I JUST WONDERED IF THERE WAS ANYONE ELSE.
- Terry Pratchett
The Truth: Stage Adaptation
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground.
- Tea Obreht
The Tiger's Wife
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where we would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights, I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.

- Anne Hathaway
- Carol Ann Duffy
The World's Wife
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.
- Peter Heller
The Dog Stars
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Dark circles under my eyes sink deeper and deeper into my skull, in contrast to my pale skin there is an undeniable resemblance to a fresh corpse.
- Dee Remy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The kiss. Oh, the kiss. What a perfect, unnerving, luscious kiss. He made me feel unhinged . . . like he could take me apart and put me back together again and again.
- Chelsie Shakespeare
The Pull
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Everything- even me, and one day even Charlotte- must come to end.
- Avery Williams
The Alchemy of Forever
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'm not afraid of being dead. I'm just afraid of what you might have to go through to get there.
- Pamela Bone
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You cannot be buried in obscurity: you are exposed upon a grand theater to the view of the world. If your actions are upright and benevolent, be assured they will augment your power and happiness.
- Cyrus the Great
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It’s natural to die. The fact that we make such a big hullabaloo over it is all because we don’t see ourselves as part of nature. We think because we’re human we’re something above nature.
- Morrie Schwartz
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.
- Henry Adams
The Education of Henry Adams
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We’re organisms; we’re conceived, we’re born, we live, we die, and we decay. But as we decay we feed the world of the living: plants and bugs and bacteria.
- Bill Bass
Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It would be well to realize that the talk of ‘humane methods of warfare’, of the ‘rules of civilized warfare’, and all such homage to the finer sentiments of the race are hypocritical and unreal, and only intended for the consumption of stay-at-homes. There are no humane methods of warfare, there is no such thing as civilized warfare; all warfare is inhuman, all warfare is barbaric; the first blast of the bugles of war ever sounds for the time being the funeral knell of human progress… What lover of humanity can view with anything but horror the prospect of this ruthless destruction of human life. Yet this is war: war for which all the jingoes are howling, war to which all the hopes of the world are being sacrificed, war to which a mad ruling class would plunge a mad world.
- James Connolly
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'll fall.'
'You wont fall.'
'I'll fall. I'll fall and I'll die.'
As I said it, I could see it happening. The foot stepping on air, pulling the rest of my body with it, tree limbs breaking as I plummeted down.
'No,' he said, his voice assured, 'You'd never do that to me.
- Kamila Shamsie
Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
COSMIC DANCER"

"I was dancing when I was twelve
I was dancing when I was aaah
I danced myself right out the womb
Is it strange to dance so soon
I danced myself right out the womb

I was dancing when I was eight
Is it strange to dance so late
I danced myself into the tomb
Is it strange to dance so soon
I danced myself into the tomb

Is it wrong to understand
The fear that dwells inside a man
What's it like to be a loon
I liken it to a balloon

I danced myself out of the womb
Is it strange to dance to soon
I danced myself into the tomb
But then again once more
I danced myself out of the womb
Is it strange to dance so soon
I danced myself out of the womb.
- Marc Bolan
Marc Bolan Lyric Book
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and the understanding of them cease first.
- Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Across Ackar and Lett, the ordinary folk were tired of the wars of aggression of the Dewar dynasty. They had lost too many fathers, brothers and sons on foreign soil. It was clear that the new King was no warrior, and most of the population thought that a good thing. Maybe for the first time in generations they could have a good king rather than a warrior king.
I now commit as my coronation promise that whilst I am King, no armies from Ackar and Lett will seek domination over our neighbours. The treaties are written in ink. I will now seal them with my blood.
- Robert Reid
White Light Red Fire
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Open questions like love, life, death, struggle and sex are our experiences, our opinions are not answers but they still remain mysterious unanswered questions. Let it be Open.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For me death is a wolf…
- John Ajvide Lindqvist
Handling the Undead
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Trees still grow after letting dead things go.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You had once asked me if I was afraid of death.

I said I was afraid of not living.

I don’t want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.
- Jeanette Winterson
The PowerBook
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
..And because he was still able to move his hands - Morrie always spoke with both hands waving - he showed great passion when explaining how you face the end of life.
- Mitch Albom
Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...
81
82
83
84
85
 		...