Death Quotes

There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world.

Death is the enemy. I spent 10 years of my life singlemindedly studying, practicing, fighting hand to hand in close quarters to defeat the enemy, to send him back bloodied and humble and I am not going to roll over and surrender.

A man should not leave this earth with unfinished business. He should live each day as if it was a pre-flight check. He should ask each morning, am I prepared to lift-off?

I'd rather get my brains blown out in the wild than wait in terror at the slaughterhouse.

The killing was the best part. It was the dying I couldn't take.

It's no accident that the church and the graveyard stand side by side. The city of the dead sleeps encircled by the city of the living.

Be open to your dreams, people. Embrace that distant shore. Because our mortal journey is over all too soon.

I am going to concentrate on what's important in life. I'm going to strive everyday to be a kind and generous and loving person. I'm going to keep death right here, so that anytime I even think about getting angry at you or anybody else, I'll see death and I'll remember.

The fact that when we die we are nothing more than worm meat---I just don't think about it.

It's sad when our daddies die. Makes us one less person inside.

I am not dying, not anymore than any of us are at any moment. We run, hopefully as fast as we can, and then everyone must stop. We can only choose how we handle the race.

When I pass, speak freely of my shortcomings and my flaws. Learn from them, for I'll have no ego to injure.

It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.

We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.

If you live to be one hundred, you've got it made. Very few people die past that age.

I'm afraid I'm being an awful nuisance.

I hope the leaving is joyful; and I hope never to return.

If wild my breast and sore my pride,
I bask in dreams of suicide,
If cool my heart and high my head
I think "How lucky are the dead.

I guess that's how death works. It doesn't matter if we're ready or not. It just happens.

There is some comfort in dying surrounded by one's children.

The dead look so terribly dead when they're dead.

Death can sneak up on you like a silent kitten, surprising you with it's touch and you have a right to act surprised. Other times death stomps in the front door, unwanted and unannounced, and makes it's noisy way to your seat on the sofa.

If you don't think your life is worth more than someone else's, sign your donor card and kill yourself now.

There's a strange sort of quiet when you're dying. It's as if you're in a glass room, and the walls keep getting thicker and thicker.

When you lose someone you love, you die too, and you wait around for your body to catch up.

When we die, no one remembers us for what we weighed. Our weight isn't etched into our headstones.

Being prepared for loss is never the same as being ready for it.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.

There is left us ourselves to end ourselves.

So every bondman in his own hand bears the power to cancel his captivity.

Is it sin to rush into the secret house of death, ere death dare come to us?

Against self-slaughter there is a prohibition so divine that cravens my weak hand.

I know death is coming, and I do not fear it. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting.

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

Death likes it when you play hard to get.

Out of the people that ever were, almost all of them are dead. There are way more dead people, and you're all gonna die and then you're gonna be dead for way longer than you're alive. Like that's mostly what you're ever gonna be. You're just dead people that didn't die yet.

There will come a time, when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything.

If the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.

[Not smoking the cigarette is] a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.

That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people.

You clench your teeth. You look up. You tell yourself that if they see you cry, it will hurt them, and you will be nothing but A Sadness in their lives, and you must not become a mere sadness, so you will not cry, and you say all of this to yourself while looking up at the ceiling, and then you swallow even though your throat does not want to close and you look at the person who loves you and smile.

If you were to go [to the Rijksmuseum], and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.

Nostalgia is a side effect of dying.

I can’t talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get. But, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.

The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.

Thinking you won’t die is yet another side effect of dying.

It’s almost as if the way you imagine my dead self says more about you than it says about either the person I was or the whatever I am now.

I couldn’t kill myself, couldn’t let go like so many others had. I wonder if in their last moments they’d changed their minds, but there was no boulder to grab on to.

How his death hung over that house. It’s part of what I know to be true—your absence is greater than your presence.

We resent the thought that anything can please us when someone we love is no longer here to share the pleasure with us, and we almost feel as if we were unfaithful to our sorrow when we find our interest in life returning to us.

I've accepted that I'm not going to die of natural causes, [but] getting killed 'cuz you're naturally a dick seems like natural causes to me.

Everything we do really is just a little marker on the long road to death. And sometimes that's overwhelmingly depressing to me, and sometimes it makes me feel kinship and forgiveness. We've all got the same ending to the story. The way we make that story more elaborate, I got to respect.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying.

The report of my death was an exaggeration.

I suppose that I shall have to die beyond my means.

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?

Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up.

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

For three days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off.

Never knock on Death's door: ring the bell and run away! Death really hates that!

As men, we are all equal in the presence of death.

Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives.

Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

Let us cross the river, and rest under the trees.

Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.

Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny.

Death is not the worst; rather, in vain
To wish for death, and not to compass it.

Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.

For certain is death for the born
And certain is birth for the dead;
Therefore over the inevitable
Thou shouldst not grieve.

Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man's cottage door and at the palaces of kings.

The fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself.

Think not disdainfully of death, but look on it with favor; for even death is one of the things that Nature wills.

The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.

As we look deeply within, we understand our perfect balance. There is no fear of the cycle of birth, life and death. For when you stand in the present moment, you are timeless.

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily lying down.

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive.

It is impossible to experience one's death objectively and still carry a tune.

Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

He not busy being born is busy dying.

He not busy being born is busy dying.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.