Quotes about death
page 12

“I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Source: La náusea

Life, Idea, Solitude, Suicide

“It was only after her death that I realized who she was: the apparently magical force at the center of our family who'd kept us all invisibly spinning in the powerful orbit around her.”

Cheryl Strayed book Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Family

“Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all.”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

Life

“Only fanatics — in religion as well as in politics — can find a meaning in someone else’s death.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

Source: The Judges

Religion

“If you go to your death rather than do everything you might to prevent what is happening, you are merely committing suicide and trying to make yourself feel better about it. That is the act of a coward. It is beneath contempt.”

Jim Butcher Dead Beat

Source: Dead Beat

Feeling, Suicide

“Death is not such a bad thing. What would be a bad thing would be living without challenges. Without knowing defeat, we cannot know what victory is. There is no life without death.”

Patricia Briggs book River Marked

Source: River Marked

Life, Victory

“If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there… When nothing new can get in, that's death.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

“Death row is a nightmare to serial killers and ax murderers. For an innocent man, it's a life of mental torture that the human spirit is not equipped to survive.”

John Grisham book The Confession

Source: The Confession

Life

“Death is the number two fear that people have and public speaking is the first!”

Sidney Sheldon (1917–2007) American writer

People, Fear

“there is no ascent to the heights without prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death.”

Karen Armstrong (1944) author and comparative religion scholar from Great Britain

Source: A Short History of Myth

Life

“The only cure for a real hangover is death.”

Robert Benchley (1889–1945) American comedian

"Coffee Versus Gin", My Ten Years in a Quandary and How They Grew (1936)

“The day I went into physics class it was death.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Boy

“After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts – like a Chinese nest of boxes – oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front – in our ancestors, back and back until…”

Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) English poet and fiction writer

Source: The Return

Box

“Joe" I said. "It's Stephanie."
"Does this involve death?"
"Not yet."
"Does this involve sex?"
"Not yet."
"I can't imagine why else you'd be calling me.”

Janet Evanovich Four to Score

Source: Four to Score

Sex, Imagination

“I want us to be doing things, prolonging life's duties as much as we can. I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Life

“You don't know how easy death is. It's - it's like a door. A person simply walks through it, and she's lost to you forever.”

Eloisa James (1962) American academic

Source: Duchess By Night

Personality

“Life and death were so unpredictable. So close to each other. We existed moment to moment, never knowing who would be the next to leave this world.”

Richelle Mead Shadow Kiss

Source: Shadow Kiss

Life, World

“Writing is a deeper sleep than death.
Just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave,
I can't be dragged from my desk at night.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

Sleep, Night

“everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death”

Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) Austrian writer

Thinking

“And thus we all are nighing
The truth we fear to know:
Death will end our crying
For friends that come and go.”

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) American poet

Truth, Fear, Cry

“the very fact of the death of someone close to them aroused in all who heard about it, as always, a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn't.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: The Death of Ivan Ilych

Feeling

“Michael could never remember his father ever having uttered a word about death, as if the Don respected death too much to philosophize about it.”

Mario Puzo The Godfather

Source: The Godfather

“Though lovers be lost, love shall not; And death shall have no dominion.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

Variant: Though lovers be lost love shall not.

Love, Lovers, Romantic, love

“Death is the Graduation of the Soul”

Sylvia Browne (1936–2013) American author

Source: The Other Side and Back

Soul

“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence.
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you always open petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously)her first rose or if it be your wish to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly
as the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending; nothing we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries
rendering death and forever with each breathing”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

W [ViVa] (1931) LVII

Life, World, Travel, Imagination

“It takes so little to change everything. If you really thought about it, it would scare you to death.”

Sarah Dessen book The Moon and More

Source: The Moon and More

Change

“Life is a movie; death is a photograph.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Life

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies. To be in the window and watch people being sent to concentration camps or being attacked in the street and do nothing, that's being dead.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

US News & World Report (27 October 1986)

Love, Life, Hate, People

“Whither thou goest, I will go;
Where thou diest, will I die
And there will I be buried:
The Angel do so to me, and more also,
If aught but death part thee and me.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Angels, Parting

“He smiled at me… fondly. ʺAh, my daughter,ʺ
he said. ʺEighteen, and already youʹve been accused of murder, aided felons, and acquired a death count higher than most guardians
will ever see.ʺ He paused. ʺI couldnʹt be prouder.ʺ”

Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice

Variant: Ah, my daughter,ʺ he said. ʺEighteen, and already youʹve been accused of murder, aided felons, and acquired a death count higher than most guardians will ever see.ʺ He paused. ʺI couldnʹt be prouder.
Source: Last Sacrifice

Smile, Daughters

“You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Survivor

Source: Survivor

People, World, Law, Time

“Do-gooding is like treating hemophilia - the real cure is to let hemophiliacs bleed to death… before they breed more hemophiliacs.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Stranger in a Strange Land

Source: Stranger in a Strange Land

“Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud…”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi (2001), Chapter 1, p. 6
Context: The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity — it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.

Love, Life, Beauty

“Do you have any coffee?'…'It stunts my growth, and I'm afraid of death.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Coffee

“Capital T-truth is about life before death.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Source: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

Life, Truth

“What makes you so certain?"
"But I am not certain," I told him. "Nothing is certain. You want certainty?"
"Yes!"
"Then you want death.”

Stephen R. Lawhead book The Silver Hand

Source: The Silver Hand

“I do not cling to life sufficiently to fear death.”

Alexandre Dumas book The Three Musketeers

Source: The Three Musketeers

Life, Fear

“And the moment you care that much, a man has you. He owns a little piece of your soul, and he can beat you to death with it.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Micah

Source: Micah

Soul

“I'm not afraid of death. Death's afraid of me.”

Lee Child book 61 Hours

Source: 61 Hours

“For I have seen it and I have felt it and it is love, not death, that undoes us.”

Jennifer Donnelly book Revolution

Source: Revolution

Love

“Fairness doesn't govern life and death. If it did, no good man would ever die young.”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

Life

“How could you not want to draw breath one more day? How could your own life be such a cheap commodity? But then I started to understand: when your existence is hell, death must be heaven.”

Jodi Picoult book The Storyteller

Source: The Storyteller

Life, Hell, Understanding, Drawing

“Merciful death. How you love your precious guilt”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Love

“Death is an inevitability, isn't it? You become more aware of that when you get to my age. I don't worry about it. I'm ready for it. When I go, I want to go doing what I do best. If I died tomorrow, I couldn't complain. It's been good.”

Lemmy Kilmister (1945–2015) British singer-songwriter

Age

“Death? Why all this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition to life, not an evil.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) American feminist, writer, commercial artist, lecturer and social reformer

Life, World, Imagination, Evil

“Death’s favorites don’t die.”

Holly Black book The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Source: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

“A man doesn't say I will starve myself to death to keep from starving, or that he'd spend all of his money to save money. Why should he be willing to die for the privilege of living?”

Dalton Trumbo book Johnny Got His Gun

Source: Johnny Got His Gun

Money

“There is a legitimate argument over whether the death penalty effectively deters violent crime, although my personal observation is that not one of the criminals who have been executed over the years has ever killed again.”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

Source: Letters to a Young Conservative

Penalty, Personality

“I know beginnings, I know endings too,
and life-in-death, and something else
I'd rather not recall just now.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

"This Cruel Age has deflected me..." (1944)
Source: The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

Life

“Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1940s, The World As I See It (1949)

“Death alone gives meaning to life, and you will never fully live until you know you must die. And make your peace with that knowledge.”

Alice Borchardt (1939–2007) American fiction writer

Source: The Raven Warrior

Life, Peace, Knowledge

“Not if we blow it up," Gale says brusquely. His intent, his full intent, becomes clear. Gale has no interest in preserving the lives of those in the Nut. No interest in caging the pray for later use.
This is one of his death traps.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

People, Thinking, Betrayal

“Every day when I wake I tell myself that it will be my last. If you are not trying to hold on to time, you are not so afraid of losing it… And then, if you make it to bedtime, you feel the joy of cheating death out of one more day.”

Suzanne Collins book Gregor the Overlander

Variant: You see, I tired of constant fear, so I made a decision. Every day when I wake I tell myself that it will be my last. If you are not trying to hold on to time, you are not so afraid of losing it.
Source: Gregor the Overlander

Feeling, Time, Joy, Cheating

“Honey, I plan to marry you the moment the ink is dry on that death certificate.”

Sara Gruen book Water for Elephants

Source: Water for Elephants

“Don't think of death as an ending. Think of it as a really effective way of cutting down your expenses.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Way, Thinking

“Black is the color of night. White is the true color of death”

Melissa de la Cruz Blue Bloods

Source: Blue Bloods

Color, Night

“Punch any of mine, and I’ll break your arm off and beat you to death with it.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Breaks

“Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It's no coincidence we call them 'deadlines.”

Tom Robbins Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

Source: Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994)

“I am not a fate worse than death, dammit!”

Lois McMaster Bujold Captain Vorpatril's Alliance

Source: Captain Vorpatril's Alliance

Fate

“Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Love, Soul, Appearance

“Weave the circle, tightly sewn,
Let nothing evil or unknown
Enter within. Stay without
On pain of death, we cast you out.”

Yasmine Galenorn (1961) American writer

Source: Blood Wyne

Pain, Evil

“There’s an old Ritadarion saying. You’re never more alive than when you walk hand in hand with death. (Syn)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Born of the Night

“Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, And yet a third of life is passed in sleep.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Life, Men, Sleep

“She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.”

Graham Greene (1904–1991) English writer, playwright and literary critic

Memory, Parting

“That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
Context: She died in my arms saying, "I don't want to die." That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we could never have war anymore. (p. 189)

War

“My death will not be penciled on someone's calendar.”

Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice

Source: Last Sacrifice

“What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?”

Audre Lorde book The Cancer Journals

Source: The Cancer Journals

Life

“Only in death will we have our own names since only in death are we no longer part of the effort. In death we become heroes.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Effort, Parting

“Life is a banquet and most poor s. o. b.'s are starving to death." Auntie Mame”

Patrick Dennis (1921–1976) Novelist

Source: Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade

Life

“Soulmates. That was the word. Maggie could sense what it meant. Two people connected, bound to each other forever, soul to soul, in a way that even death couldn't break. Two souls that were destined for each other.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Night World, No. 3

People, Way, Soul, Sense

“Everything that happens before Death is what counts.”

Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes

Variant: Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before death is what counts.
Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes

“I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

Love, Life, Fight, Loneliness

“I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

Source: Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Thinking, Parting

“Most conservatives also believe in the death penalty, but not abortion, which proves they like to procrastinate.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

Source: I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight

Penalty

“Most men fear getting laughed at or humiliated by a romantic prospect while most women fear rape and death.”

Gavin de Becker (1954) American engineer

Source: The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

Women, Men, Fear

“Time and death sleep side by side.”

Garth Nix book Abhorsen

Variant: "Time and death sleep side by side," said the Dog. "Both are in Astrael's Domain."
Source: Old Kingdom series (The Abhorsen Trilogy), Abhorsen (2003), p. 64.

Sleep, Time

“Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book Half of a Yellow Sun

Source: Half of a Yellow Sun

“A man falling off a cliff to certain death will stretch out a hand even to his worst enemy.”

Robert Jordan Lord of Chaos

Source: Lord of Chaos

“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

"War Shrines"
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

Birth, Birthday

“The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one had ever been put to death in Socrates' name. And that is because Socrates' ideas were never made law. Law, in whatever name, protects privilege.”

E.L. Doctorow (1931–2015) novelist, editor, professor

Law, Idea

“Philosophy leads to death, sociology leads to suicide.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

Suicide

“By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be.”

Irvine Welsh book Trainspotting

Source: Trainspotting

Life

“Will we ever stop being afraid of nights and death?

When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Fear, Star, Boy, Night

“Let's have a good clean three-legged death race.”

Rick Riordan book The Hidden Oracle

Source: The Hidden Oracle

“We look into each other's eyes as we shake. His are still full of death and horror, but in them I see my face reflected, and inside my tiny eyes inside his, I think I see some hope.”

Ned Vizzini book It's Kind of a Funny Story

Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story

Hope, Thinking

“It's lovely. If only you could frost someone to death."

"Don't be so superior. You can never tell what you will find in the arena. Say it's a gigantic cake-”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Love

“Man’s wants remain unsatisfied till death.
Then, when his soul is naked, is he one
With the man in the wind, and the west moon,
With the harmonious thunder of the sun”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

Soul, Sun

“My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. I wanted my death to be something the people could relate to, a basis for further mobilization of the community.”

Huey P. Newton book Revolutionary Suicide

Source: Revolutionary Suicide (1973), p. 190

People, Fear, Communication

“Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.”

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926–2004) American psychiatrist

On Death and Dying (1969)

Peace, Star, Light, Night

“A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

We Are Seven, st. 1 (1798).
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)

Life, Feeling, Drawing

“There are any number of magical creatures, mostly female, whose singing can bring about horror and death. Sirens, undines, banshees, Bananarama tribute bands…”

Simon R. Green (1955) British writer

Source: Nightingale's Lament

Singing

“Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;
If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!”

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) English crime writer, playwright, essayist and Christian writer

Source: Catholic Tales and Christian Songs

“Psychologically, the choice "to think or not" is the choice "to focus or not." Existentially, the choice "to focus or not" is the choice "to be conscious or not." Metaphysically, the choice "to be conscious or not" is the choice of life or death.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Source: The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

Life, Thinking

“I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

Source: White Noise (1984)

Question

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

D. H. Lawrence : An Unprofessional Study (1932); also quoted in The Mirror and the Garden : Realism and Reality in the Writings of Anais Nin (1971) by Evelyn J. Hinz, p. 40

Life, People