Death Quotes

“I wonder if my first breath was as soul-stirring to my mother as her last breath was to me”
― Lisa Goich-Andreadis, 14 Days: A Mother, A Daughter, A Two Week Goodbye

“It was Mina this whole time, wasn’t it?"

I give him the only thing I can: the cold, hard truth. The one that’ll rewrite every memory he has - of him and me, her and me, the two of them, all three of us: "It’ll always be Mina.”
― Tess Sharpe, Far From You

“And I don't believe you dead. How can you be dead if I still feel you? Maybe, like God, you changed into something different that I'll have to speak to in a different way, but you not dead to me Nettie. And never will you be.”
― alice walker, The Color Purple

“We are all dust passing through the air, the difference is, some are flying high in the sky, while others are flying low. But eventually, we all settle on the same ground.”
― Anthony Liccione

“When your people are lying dead around you, don't come crying to me...”
― Sarah J. Maas, Heir of Fire

“What are you doing to me?” he asked the crow, tearful. Teaching you how to fly. “I can’t fly!” You’re flying right now. “I’m falling!” Every flight begins with a fall, the crow said.”
― George R.R. Martin

“People have gotten used to living a botched-up life — to be anxious, insecure, hateful, jealous, and in various states of unpleasantness through the day — slowly humanity has begun to see it as normal. None of these things are normal. These are abnormalities. Once you accept them as part of life they become normal because the majority has joined the gang of unpleasantness. They are all saying, "Unpleasantness is normal. Being nasty to each other is normal. Being nasty to myself is normal." Someone trusted that you would be doing good things at least to yourself and said, "Do unto others what you do unto yourself." I am telling you, never do unto others what you are doing to yourself! By being with people, I know what they are doing to themselves is the worst thing. Fortunately, they are not doing such horrible things to others. Only once in a while they are giving a dose to others, but to themselves they are giving it throughout the day.”
― Jaggi Vasudev, Life and Death in One Breath

“Just like freedom, Truth is not cheap. Yet both are worth more than all the gold in the world. But what is freedom, if there is no truth? And what is truth, if there is no freedom? Both are worth fighting for — because one without the other would be hell.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“We often pity the poor, because they have no leisure to mourn their departed relatives, and necessity obliges them to labor through their severest afflictions: but is not active employment the best remedy for overwhelming sorrow--the surest antidote for despair? It may be a rough comforter: it may seem hard to be harassed with the cares of life when we have no relish for its enjoyments; to be goaded to labor when the heart is ready to break, and the vexed spirit implores for rest only to weep in silence: but is not labor better than the rest we covet? and are not those petty, tormenting cares less hurtful than a continual brooding over the great affliction that oppresses us? Besides, we cannot have cares, and anxieties, and toil, without hope--if it be but the hope of fulfilling our joyless task, accomplishing some needful project, or escaping some further annoyance.”
― Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

“Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.”
― Longfellow, Voices of the Night

“These are the ushers of Martius: before him
He carries noise, and behind him he leaves tears.
Death, that dark spirit, in's nervy arm doth lie,
Which being advanc'd, declines, and then men die.”
― William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

“You can’t avoid the inevitability of death. It comes at you one way or another, and takes us all to the same place in the end. To apologize for it is to apologize for the sun shining or the rain falling. It is what it is.”
― Catherine Doyle

“Life is the only thing which can never be replaced when lost.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“Bargains, bargains, El-ahrairah," he said. "There is not a day or night but a doe offers her life for her kittens, or some honest captain of Owsla his life for his Chief Rabbit's. Sometimes it is taken, sometimes it is not. But there is no bargain, for here what is is what must be.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“Brush snapped. The stag shambled forth from the outer darkness. It loomed above Scobie, its fur rank and steaming. Black blood oozed from gashes along its flanks. Beneath a great jagged crown of antlers its eyes were black, its teeth yellow and broken. Scobie fell to his knees, palms raised in supplication. The stag nuzzled his matted hair and its long tongue lapped at the muddy tears and the streaks of drying blood upon the man’s upturned face. Its muzzle unhinged. The teeth closed and there was a sound like a ripe cabbage cracking apart.”
― Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

“I wanted to listen to him, but I did not want to answer now. That strange responsibility we feel towards others when they speak, to offer them the solace of any answer. Poor humans! And anyway he had not asked a question. He was merely floating there in the room, insubstantial, a living man in the midst of life, dying imperceptibly on his feet, like all of us.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“The battle with the gods thus hinges on our own mortality! Creativity is a yearning for immortality.”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create

“Ah, Lalage! while life is ours,
Hoard not thy beauty rose and white,
But pluck the pretty fleeing flowers
That deck our little path of light:
For all too soon we twain shall tread
The bitter pastures of the dead:
Estranged, sad spectres of the night.”
― Ernest Dowson, The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson

“A tired man lay down his head
in a dusty room so dim,
and for so long his wife did shake
and yell to waken him.

Meanwhile his thoughts, his dreams, did stir
of sandy, red bullfights,
of powder-blasts in the air
and carnival delights.

Yet still his wife was in despair
in a dusty room so dim,
for she knew death was a whore
not far from tempting him.”
― Roman Payne

“I see no end to my misery but the grave.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“I'm on the last great journey here--and people want me to tell them what to pack.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson

“In crime and enmity they lie
Who sin and tell us love can die,
Who say to us in slander's breath
That love belongs to sin and death.”
― John Clare, Poems Chiefly from Manuscript

“Time throws you out of its dimensionless planar like a boomerang. It unites with you again in death.”
― Vishwanath S J

“When you have the power to love, that strength, that courage is infinite; that love is infinite. There is nothing finite about it's presence, for love. never. dies.”
― Solange nicole

“but all life is a symphony of successive losses. You lose your youth, your parents, your loves, your friends, your comforts, your health, and finally your life. To deny loss is to lose it all anyway and to lose, in addition, your self-possession and your peace of mind”
― Isaac Asimov

“All are dead, and ourselves left alone amidst a new generation whom we know not, and who know us not.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Ot minderimle kerevet tahtası arasında sanki kumaşa yapışmış nerdeyse saydamlaşmış bir gazete parçası buldum. Geçmiş bir polis olayını anlatıyordu. Baş tarafı yoktu. Ama, olay herhalde Çekoslovakya'da geçmiş olmalıydı. Adamın biri para kazanmak için bir Çek köyünden ayrılmış. Yirmi beş yıl sonra, zengin olarak, karısı ve bir çocuğuyle birlikte köyüne dönmüş. Annesi kız kardeşiyle birlikte, doğduğu köyde otel işletiyorlarmış. Adam onlara sürpriz yapmak için, karısıyla çocuğunu bir başka otele bırakıp annesinin oteline gitmiş. İçeriye girince annesi kendisini tanımamış. O da, şaka olsun diye bir oda tutmuş, paralarını da göstermiş. Geceleyin, annesiyle kız kardeşi, paralarını almak için kafasına çekiçle vura vura adamcağızı öldürmüşler, cesedini de nehre atmışlar. Sabahleyin, karısı gelip olup bitenden habersiz, yolcunun kim olduğunu söylemiş. Ana kendini asmış, kız kardeşi de kendini kuyuya atmış. Bu öyküyü binlerce kez okudum sanıyorum. Öykü bir yandan gerçeğe uymuyordu, bir yandan olağan bir şeydi. Kısacası, bana kalırsa, yolcu bunu biraz da hak etmişti. İnsan hiçbir zaman böyle oyun oynamamalı.”
― Albert Camus

“So those are the direct answers human wisdom gives when it answers the question of life. "The life of the body is evil and a lie. And therefore the destruction of this life of the body is something good, and we must desire it," says Socrates. "Life is that which ought not be - an evil - and the going into nothingness is the sole good of life," says Schopenhauer. "Everything in the world - folly and wisdom and riches and poverty and happiness and grief - all is vanity and nonsense. Man will die and nothing will remain. And that is foolish," says Solomon. "One must not live with awareness of the inevitability of suffering, weakness, old age, and death - one must free oneself from life, from all possibility of life," says Buddha. And what these powerful intellects said was said and thought and felt by millions and millions of people like them. And I too thought and felt that.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“But me
They cannot touch,
Old age and death. The strange
And ignominious end of old
Dead folk!”
― Adelaide Crapsey, Verse