Quotes about death
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“It is life, more than death, that has no limits.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Life

“But I also have to say, for the umpty-umpth time, that life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

Life, Time

“Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Grey Life.”

Aldous Huxley book Island

Source: Island (1962)

Life, Time

“He could not stand. It was not
That he could not thrive, he was born
With everything but the will –
That can be deformed, just like a limb.
Death was more interesting to him.
Life could not get his attention.”

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) English poet and children's writer

Life

“To his way of thinking, the only thing more natural than death was sex.”

Stephen King book 'Salem's Lot

Source: 'Salem's Lot

Sex, Way, Nature, Thinking

“Why did death make life taste so much sweeter? Why could the heart love only what it could also lose?”

Cornelia Funke Inkheart trilogy

Source: Inkdeath

Love, Life, Heart

“The demigods have left for alaska," Stheno said. "They fly straight to their death. Ah, small "d" death, I mean. Not our prisoner Death. Although, i suppose they're flying to him too.”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Flying

“Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

World, Art

“We shall live even in this state of living death, we shall love, we shall feel, we shall defy all who would judge and destroy us.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Love, Feeling

“I’ll never pause again, never stand still, till either death hath closed these eyes of mine, or fortune given me measure of revenge.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Revenge

“Without death,' he answered, 'life is meaningless. It is a story that can never be told. A song that can never be sung. For how would one finish it?”

Seth Grahame-Smith (1976) US fiction author

Source: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Life

“Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to throw away. Death stands at your elbow. Be good for something while you live and it is in your power.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

“I like to think that when I fall,
A rain-drop in Death's shoreless sea,
This shelf of books along the wall,
Beside my bed, will mourn for me.”

Robert W. Service Ballads of a Bohemian

Source: Ballads of a Bohemian

Books, Thinking, Sea

“love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.”

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

Love

“If I wanted death, Edward would give it to me. Because we both understand that it isn't death that we fear. It's living.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Obsidian Butterfly

Source: Obsidian Butterfly

Fear, Understanding

“There really is only one ending to any story. Human life ends in death. Until then, it keeps going and gets complicated and there's loss. Everything involves loss; every relationship ends in one way or another.”

Charlie Kaufman (1958) American screenwriter

Life, Way, Loss

“Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you”

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

Love, Life, Hate, Secret

“Death waits for no man - and if he does, he doesn't usually wait for very long.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Waiting

“Memory is identity…. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.”

Julian Barnes (1946) English writer

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of

Life, Memory, Forgetting

“Just like the good old days: marching together into the unknown, searching for missing magical weapons and risking painful death. I’d missed my buddies!”

Rick Riordan book The Hammer of Thor

Source: The Hammer of Thor

Pain, Search

“I can imagine myself on my death-bed, spent utterly with lust to touch the next world, like a boy asking for his first kiss from a woman.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

World, Imagination, Boy, Kiss

“Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.”

Donna Tartt book The Secret History

Source: The Secret History

Beauty

“…. it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

Suffering

“Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Flowers

“America is the first culture in jeopardy of amusing itself to death.”

John Piper (1946) American writer

Source: Don't Waste Your Life

“Mine. He was mine, and not even death would take him from me—not if I could help it.”

Patricia Briggs book River Marked

Source: River Marked

Help

“When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Source: Adam Bede

“It has always been this way. Death is followed by birth. To reach paradise, man must pass through inferno. - Bertrand Zobrist”

Dan Brown book Inferno

Source: Inferno

Way, Birth

“I'm going to put death in all their food and watch them die.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Food

“Even as the words came out of my mouth, my heart was dying a million deaths.”

Anthony Kiedis book Scar Tissue

Source: Scar Tissue

Heart

“The only way to remove pain from death is to remove love from life.”

Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer

Source: The Walk

Love, Life, Pain, Way

“I am strong against everything, except against the death of those I love. He who dies gains; he who sees others die loses.”

Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) French writer and dramatist, father of the homonym writer and dramatist

Source: The Man in the Iron Mask

Love, Strong

“The rosy gleam of his lip, the fevered gleam of his eyes. There was not a line anywhere on his face, nothing creased or graying; all crisp. He was spring, golden and bright. Envious death would drink his blood, and grow young again.”

Madeline Miller book The Song of Achilles

Source: The Song of Achilles

Spring, Drink

“Burned and squashed to death in a silver vat of soup. There must be worst ways to go. But not many.”

Jonathan Stroud book Ptolemy's Gate

Source: Ptolemy's Gate

Way

“I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.”

Alison Bechdel (1960) American cartoonist, author

Source: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Truth

“I won’t snatch, harm, or scare to death people with you or use checking up on you as an excuse to cause trouble. You’re worse than my mother, Rachel.”
“Mine, too,” Jenks muttered.”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: White Witch, Black Curse

People

“Storms rumble beyond the horizon, and the fires of heaven purge the earth. There is no salvation without destruction, no hope this side of death.”

Robert Jordan The Fires of Heaven

Source: The Fires of Heaven

Hope

“I've played the powerless in too many dark scenes. I was blessed with a birth and a death and I guess I just want some say in between”

Ani DiFranco (1970) musician and activist

Talk To Me Now
Song lyrics
Variant: I was blessed with a birth and a death, and I guess I just want some say in-between.

Birth

“Finally there is nothing here for death to take away.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

“I stopped. She was bleeding after all. Perfect lines crossed her wrists, not near any crucial veins, but enough to leave wet red tracks across her skin. She hadn; t hit her veins when she did this; death hadn't been her goal.”

Richelle Mead Vampire Academy

Source: Vampire Academy

Perfection

“Fang looked at me, hope in his eyes, and I smirked at him. I save the huge emotional kissy-face for imminent death scenes. This probably didn't qualify.”

James Patterson book Maximum Ride

Source: Max

Hope

“Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

Love, Romantic

“Beauty and love pass, I know… Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

Love, Happiness, Sadness, Beauty

“Death did not play favorites—He loved all equally.
What you cannot escape, you must fight; what you cannot fight, you must endure.
The god's voice—not quite words, just a thread of meaning laid in my receptive mind”

Lilith Saintcrow (1976) American writer

Source: Dead Man Rising

Love, God, Fight

“What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

Source: The God of Small Things

“I was yours once 'till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now - I can't hang about whining forever - and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness?”

E.M. Forster book Maurice

Source: Maurice

Happiness, Way

“Death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice.”

Robin Hobb book Fool's Errand

Source: Fool's Errand

Life

“There would be no chance to get to know death at all… if it happened only once.”

Sogyal Rinpoche (1947–2019) Tibetan Dzogchen lama of the Nyingma tradition

Chance

“Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.”

Toni Morrison book The Bluest Eye

Source: The Bluest Eye

World, Spring, Grass

“Has there ever been an Inquisitor who didn't die a horrible death?" Simon wondered out loud. " It's like being the drummer in Spinal Tap.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

“We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death.”

Thomas Bernhard book Extinction

Source: Extinction

People

“I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.”

Jean Paul Sartre No Exit

Source: No Exit (1944)

Life, Thinking

“Is it fair your life burns so short and bright? Death had asked.

"No such thing as fair," Frank told himself. "If I'm going to burn, it might as well be bright.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

Life

“Apocalypse is a frame of mind." [Nicodemus] said then. "A belief. A surrender to inevitability. It is a despair for the future. It is the death of hope.”

Jim Butcher book Death Masks

Source: Death Masks

Hope, Future, Despair

“Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.”

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

Birth

“I'm not bitter. Why should I be bitter? I'm thrilled to death with life.”

Johnny Cash (1932–2003) American singer-songwriter

CNN interview (2002)
Context: I'm not bitter. Why should I be bitter? I'm thrilled to death with life. Life is — the way God has given it to me was just a platter — a golden platter of life laid out there for me. It's been beautiful.

Life

“Dreams and death were old friends of his. He knew how to navigate their dark borderland.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Dreams

“Internet users, that blue screen of death you were looking at this morning? That's the sky. If you're still confused, look it up on Wikipedia tomorrow.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

“Death isn't peaceful; it is just nothing. Everything is gone. No more sunrises, no more hopes, no more fears. Nothing.”

Linda Howard (1950) American writer

Source: Kill and Tell

Fear, Peace, Hope

“Now he understood. This was death. Death was a silence that gave back no answer.”

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings book The Yearling

Source: The Yearling

Silence

“The early morning belongs to the Church of the risen Christ. At the break of light it remembers the morning on which death and sin lay prostrate in defeat and new life and salvation were given to mankind”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

Life, Light, Christ

“Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them.

[Witness for the Prosecution, also published in The Hound of Death and Other Stories. ]”

Agatha Christie book The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories

Source: The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories

People

“Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Birth

“I can promise you that the world is a factory. The sun stirs it, the humans rule it. And I remain. I carry them away.- spoken by death”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

World, Sun

“Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Ethics of Ambiguity

Source: The Ethics of Ambiguity

Time

“Love and death are everything, Jenny. Danger is the best part of the game. I thought you knew that."
-Julian”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: The Chase

Love, Game, Parting

“For love is as strong as death.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Love, Strong

“When death takes your mother, it steals that word forever.”

Mitch Albom For One More Day

Source: For One More Day

“No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

Source: Leviathan

Life, Fear, Art

“I need some Starbucks. What about you? (Cassandra)
Always game for java. Give me ground-up beans or give me death. (Katra)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Kiss of the Night

Game

“Death Makes Angels of us all.”

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

Angels

“The aims of life are the best defense against death.”

Primo Levi book The Drowned and the Saved

The Drowned and the Saved (1986)

Life

“Fear not, nor be dismayed at the appearance that is darkness, at the disguise that is evil, at the empty cloak that is death, for you have picked these for your challenges. They are stones on which you choose to whet the keen edge of your spirit.”

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

Source: One

Fear, Appearance, Evil

“Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 119
Context: In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia. He did not speak until they asked him for his last request.

Life, Fear, Feeling, Decision

“Usually the threat of death makes people a lot more aware of their lives.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

People

“Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?”

Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian

World

“Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

Time

“I have given my word that only death will take me from you.”

Philippa Gregory (1954) English novelist

“The difference between sex and death is, with death you can do it alone and nobody's going to make fun of you.”

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

Also found in "Quotations According to Woody Allen" http://books.google.com/books?id=kd41AQAAIAAJ&q=%22quotations+according%22#search_anchor from the New York Times, 1 December 1975.

Sex