Quotes about death
page 14

“There had never been a death so foretold.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Source: Crónica de una muerte anunciada

“Stronger than iron
crueler than death
sweeter than springtime
it lives beyond breath”

Juliet Marillier (1948) New Zealand fiction writer

“We Deveauxs preferred to talk you to death, rather than face you in physical combat.”

Maureen Johnson (1973) writer from the USA

Source: The Name of the Star

“George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble--times when I have seen people tempted to deny God--when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

Men, God, People, Suffering

“Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous possessive love that grabs at what it can.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Love, Life, Beauty

“We breathe, sleep, drink, eat, work and then die! The end of life is death. What do you long for? Love? A few kisses and you will be powerless. Money? What for? To gratify your desires. Glory? What coems after it all? Death! Death alone is certain.”

Guy De Maupassant Bel-Ami

Source: Bel-Ami

Love, Life, Money, Drink

“Death should be a celebration. Like a birthday. I want to go up like a rocket when my time comes, and fall down in a cloud of stars, and hear everyone go: ahh!”

Joanne Harris (1964) British author

Star, Birthday, Time

“Coffee goes great with sudden death.”

Gillian Flynn book Dark Places

Source: Dark Places

Coffee

“Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit/Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste/Brought death into the world, and all our woe,/With loss of Eden, till one greater Man/Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,/Sing heavenly muse”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

Source: Paradise Lost

World, Tree, Singing, Loss

“I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: Art and Lies

Dreams, Angels

“The father hesitated only a moment. He felt the vague pain in his chest. If I run, he thought, what will happen? Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts. And we've done fine tonight. Even Death can't spoil it.”

Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes

Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Pain

“I would request that my body in death be buried not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna during my lifetime”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

“Death walks faster than the wind and never returns what he has taken.”

Hans Christian Andersen book The Story of a Mother

Fairy Tales (1835)
Source: The Story of a Mother

“But fate, as Merlin always taught us, is inexorable. Life is a jest of the Gods, Merlin liked to claim, and there is no justice. You must learn to laugh, he once told me, or else you'll just weep yourself to death.”

Bernard Cornwell book The Winter King

Source: The Winter King

Life, God, Fate, Justice

“I envied these women I saw before me, their beauty still intact. Life has its revenge of life. Untimely death is the secret of eternal youth.”

Shan Sa book Empress

Source: Empress

Life, Women, Secret, Youth

“A man begins dying at the moment of his birth. Most People live in denial of Death's patient courtship until, late in life and deep in sickness, they become aware of him sitting bedside.”

Dean Koontz book The Husband

Source: The Husband

Life, People, Birth

“When we see death, we see disaster. When Jesus sees death, he sees deliverance!”

Max Lucado (1955) American clergyman and writer

“If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”

Steven Pressfield (1943) United States Marine

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

Confidence, Chance, Self-confidence

“To be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefor unloveable. Loneliness is a taste of death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget the inner pain.”

Jean Vanier (1928–2019) Canadian humanitarian

From books
Source: Jean Vanier, Becoming Human, 2001

Pain, People, Feeling, Loneliness

“Imagine how different a world might be if more leaders took time to ponder the finality of death before racing off to war.”

Dan Brown book The Lost Symbol

Source: The Lost Symbol

War, World, Imagination, Time

“Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil.”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

Evil, Dead

“Most people are not ready for death, theirs or anybody elses.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship

People

“If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.”

James Baldwin book Giovanni's Room

Source: Giovanni's Room

Love, Time

“I have the death sentence in seven genres.”

Jasper Fforde book The Well of Lost Plots

Source: The Well of Lost Plots

“rain is acid…
sex is death….”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Sex

“Death is the Santa Claus of the adult world. Except Santa Claus in reverse. The guy who takes all the presents away.”

Maria Dahvana Headley (1977) American writer

Source: Magonia

World, Guy

“Despair is deep. An abyss that swallows dreams. A wall at the world's end. Behind it I await death. Because all our work has come to this.”

Catherine Fisher book Incarceron

Source: Incarceron

World, Dreams, Despair

“You live on - in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here… Death ends life, not a relationship.”

Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

Life, Heart

“What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. And there it is… It was death. I chose life.”

Michael Cunningham book The Hours

Source: The Hours

Life

“It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Love, Life, Age, Idea

“I wonder if everyone who faces death hurts like this. It's as though for the first time I realize how much just being alive makes my body ache. But I don't want that ache to stop.”

Shannon Hale book Book of a Thousand Days

Source: Book of a Thousand Days

Time, Hurt

“Is death such a high price to pay, when you will die anyway?”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Circus of the Damned

Source: Circus of the Damned

“To feel forever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever-or else swoon in death.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Feeling

“Death,
I need my little addiction to you.
need that tiny voice who,
even as I rise from the sea,
all woman, all there,
says kill me, kill me.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

"Letters to Dr. Y."
Words for Dr. Y (1978)

Sea

“I had nightmares about what Poseidon might turn me into if I were on the verge of death-plankton maybe."
-Percy Jackson”

Rick Riordan book The Sea of Monsters

Source: The Sea of Monsters

“How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.”

Cormac McCarthy book Suttree

page 153
Source: Suttree (1979)

Memory, Dead

“You live you die and death not ends it.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

An American Prayer (1978)
Variant: We live, we die
and death not ends it
Context: O great creator of being
grant us one more hour to
perform our art
and perfect our lives The moths & atheists are doubly divine
& dying
We live, we die
and death not ends it

“When it seems you have nothing at all to live for, death is not especially frightening.”

Chris Bohjalian book The Sandcastle Girls

Source: The Sandcastle Girls

“I forgive you," I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.”

Alice Sebold book Lucky

Source: Lucky

Forgiveness

“We are Sex Bob-Omb and we are here to make you think about death and get sad and stuff!”

Bryan Lee O'Malley (1979) Artist

Source: Scott Pilgrim, Volume 1: Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life

Sadness, Sex, Thinking

“It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Survivor

Source: Survivor

“With mind distracted, never thinking, "Death is coming,"
To slave away on the pointless business of mundane life,
And then to come out empty--it is a tragic error. (116)
trans by Robert Thurman”

Huston Smith (1919–2016) Religious studies scholar

Source: Tibetan Book of the Dead

Life, Error, Business, Thinking

“Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.”

Orson Scott Card book Shadow of the Hegemon

Source: Shadow of the Hegemon

Life

“In death, they all looked the same. This morning they spoke, they breathed, they kissed their loved ones good-bye. And now they lay dead. Gone forever.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Burns

Love, Kiss, Dead

“Death is something we shouldn't fear because, while we are, death isn't, and when death is, we aren't.”

Antonio Machado (1875–1939) Spanish poet

Fear

“When death captures me," the boy vowed, "he will feel my fist in his face." (31.26)”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Feeling, Boy

“Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Fear, Courageous

“I thought it'd be something cooler, like a van with 'Death to Demons' painted on the outside, or...”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Simon to Jace, pg. 132
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Bones (2007)

Painting

“There is no conclusive evidence of life after death. But there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know.”

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love

So why fret about it?
Source: Time Enough for Love (1973)

Life

“Death, it seems," Garp wrote, "does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.”

John Irving book The World According to Garp

Source: The World According to Garp

Waiting

“Do not fear death, but rather the unlived life. You don't have to live forever. You just have to live.”

Natalie Babbitt (1932–2016) American children's writer and illustrator

Variant: Don't be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don't have to live forever, you just have to live.
Source: Tuck Everlasting: Scholastic Book Guides

Life, Fear

“It is not true that women cannot keep secrets. Where they love, they can be trusted to death and beyond, against all sense and reason. It is their weakness, and their great strength.”

Mary Stewart book The Hollow Hills

Source: The Hollow Hills

Love, Women, Secret, Sense

“The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

Life

“Shura, I’m yours. You may not like it today, you may not want it tonight, you may wish for it all to be different now, but it remains, and I remain, as always, only yours. Nothing can change that. Not your wrath, your fists, your body or your death.”

Paullina Simons book Tatiana and Alexander

Source: Tatiana and Alexander

Change

“The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.”

Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer

Source: The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One

Past, Future

“Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why they write symphonies..”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

People, History, Mathematics

“It was almost funny. Life seemed downright accidental in its brevity, and death a punch line to a lousy joke.”

Maureen Johnson (1973) writer from the USA

Source: The Name of the Star

Life

“Your destiny is shaped by choice, never by chance. Beware the decisions you make, no matter how small, for they will be your salvation… or your death.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Invincible

Decision, Chance

“And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths, / No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.”

Walt Whitman Song of Myself

Source: Song of Myself

Life, Time

“How well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, including several you have shared with me- full rich lives from birth to death, and you just have to have these rest periods in between.”

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

Birth

“I am your Prince and you will marry me," Humperdinck said.
Buttercup whispered, "I am your servant and I refuse."
"I am you Prince and you cannot refuse."
"I am your loyal servant and I just did."
"Refusal means death."
"Kill me then.”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

“Hey, you’re lucky. My cabin is closest to the stables. I can hear her yelling all night: FIRST PLACE OR DEATH! AN A MINUS IS A FAILING GRADE! Leo really needs to design a gag that’s better than my old sock.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Night

“Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.”

Carolyn Kizer (1925–2014) American poet

“For men and women alike, this journey is a the trajectory between birth and death, a human life lived. No one escapes the adventure. We only work with it differently.”

Jon Kabat-Zinn (1944) American academic

Source: Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

Life, Women, Men, Birth

“Sometimes the only answer to death is lunch.”

Jim Harrison (1937–2016) American novelist, poet, essayist

Source: Warlock

“Only by being prepared for your death can you ever truly live.”

Christopher Moore book A Dirty Job

Source: A Dirty Job

“Gods, woman," William said. "Your voice is like death. Can you shut it until I leave the room? Please. Seriously, you're like the one woman in the world Ito resist." -Page 271”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: The Darkest Pleasure

God, World

“Life is full of risks. Death is much simpler.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Princess

Life

“When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.”

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

“That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

Source: White Noise

People

“What do you mean, Araluen? Death?"
Halt made a careless gesture. "The usual, I suppose: the sudden cessation of life. The end of it all. Departure for a happier place. Or oblivion, depending upon your personal beliefs.”

John Flanagan (1873–1938) Irish-American hammer thrower

Source: The Battle for Skandia

Life, Departure, Dependency, Personality

“belief is the death of intelligence.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

Source: Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins

Intelligence

“And then, if you make it to bedtime, you feel the joy of cheating death out of one more day," she said. "Do you see?”

Suzanne Collins book Gregor the Overlander

Source: Gregor the Overlander

Feeling, Joy, Cheating

“Death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)
Variant: It is because the spirit knows deep down that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else. And in that small distance, lives are changed.
Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Meniti Bianglala

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