Death Quotes

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!