"To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
“I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.”
― Woody Allen
“DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
“I'm the one that's got to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.”
― Jimi Hendrix, Jimi Hendrix - Axis: Bold as Love
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
― Mark Twain
“Death's got an Invisibility Cloak?" Harry interrupted again.
"So he can sneak up on people," said Ron. "Sometimes he gets bored of running at them, flapping his arms and shrieking...”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
― Oscar Wilde
“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
― Mark Twain
“Unbeing dead isn't being alive.”
― E. E. Cummings
“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967
“I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”
― François Rabelais
“I meant," said Ipslore bitterly, "what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?"
Death thought about it.
CATS, he said eventually. CATS ARE NICE.”
― Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
“Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.”
― Herbert Hoover
“If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
“I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
“If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
“You only live twice:
Once when you are born
And once when you look death in the face”
― Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice
“A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?"
"Well, sweetheart," I tell her, "yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
“Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
“Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
“I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go too! I want to go too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska
“When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
“Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.”
― Edgar Allan Poe
“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories
“When you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
“Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there's a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.”
― Helen Keller
“No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they'd die for.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.”
― Isaac Asimov
“If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.”
― Will Rogers
“One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.”
― Antonio Porchia
“Many people die at twenty five and aren't buried until they are seventy five.”
― Benjamin Franklin
“Here lies Dobby, a free elf.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“A man with outward courage dares to die; a man with inner courage dares to live.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
“He'd been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower.”
― Terry Pratchett, Mort
“I'm gonna kill him," Eve said, or at least that was what it sounded like filtered through the pillow.
Stake him right in the heart, shove garlic up his ass, and-and-"
And what?" (Michael)
When did you get home?" Claire demanded.
Apparently just in time to hear my funeral plans. I especially like the garlic up the ass. It's...different.”
― Rachel Caine, Feast of Fools
“Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.”
― William S. Burroughs
“Reality means you live until you die...the real truth is nobody wants reality.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
“Men should think twice before making widowhood women's only path to power.”
― Gloria Steinem
“Delaying death is one of my favorite hobbies”
― Rick Riordan, The Mark of Athena
“No one here gets out alive.”
― Jim Morrison
“Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
― Joseph Stalin
“You're Hell's Angels, then? What chapter are you from?'
'Revelations. Chapter Six.”
― Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
“If you live each day as it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right”
― Steve Jobs
“No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away...”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
“I'm not afraid of death because I don't believe in it.
It's just getting out of one car, and into another.”
― John Lennon
“You fuck - you ate my cat!”
― Kendare Blake, Anna Dressed in Blood
“Things die. But they don't always stay dead. Believe me, I know.”
― Richelle Mead, Frostbite
“in this land some of us fuck more than
we die but most of us die
better than we fuck”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell
“Life is the tragedy,' she said bitterly. 'You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy. So we're all living tragedies, because we all end the same way, and it isn't with a goddamn wedding.”
― Robyn Schneider, The Beginning of Everything
“I have noticed that even those who assert that everything is predestined and that we can change nothing about it still look both ways before they cross the street”
― Stephen W. Hawking, Black Holes and Baby Universes
“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
“The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes.”
― Courtney Love, Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
― Mark Twain
“I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.”
― George McGovern
“YOU FEAR TO DIE?
"It's not that I don't want... I mean, I've always...it's just that life is a habit that's hard to break...”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
“Stuffed deer heads on walls are bad enough, but it’s worse when you see them wearing dark glasses, having streamers around their necks and a hat on their antlers. Because then you know they were enjoying themselves at a party when they were shot.”
― Ellen DeGeneres
“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
― Robert Oppenheimer
“Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.”
― Edgar Allen Poe
“Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
“Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist- that is, I don't make the mistake of thinking that the... cosmos... gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.”
― H. P. Lovecraft
“Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.”
― R.D. Laing
“If you die in an elevator, be sure to push the up button.”
― Sam Levenson
“Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.”
― Roger Zelazny, Prince of Chaos
“So, have a little fun. Soon enough you'll be dead and burning in Hell with the rest of your family.”
― George Carlin, Brain Droppings
“People who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine.”
― Banksy, Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall
“I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise
“You'll forget it when you're dead, and so will I. When I'm dead, I'm going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
“They say even death can't cure an idiot.
-Ririn”
― Tite Kubo
“There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.”
― T.S. Eliot
“I am still in the land of the dying; I shall be in the land of the living soon. (his last words)”
― John Newton
“What will I be doing in twenty years' time? I'll be dead, darling! Are you crazy?”
― Freddie Mercury
“Dead. Never been that before. Not even once.”
― Jasper Fforde, First Among Sequels
“What happens if you get scared half to death twice?”
― Steven Wright
“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”
― Steve Jobs
“Once you are born in this world you’re old enough to die.”
― Soren Kierkegaard
“Aren't you afraid of dying?
Not really. I've watched lots of good-for-nothing, worthless people die, and if people like that can do it, then I should be able to handle it.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
“No one escapes from life alive.”
― Michael Crichton, Congo
“Death doesn't care about personalities - he's more interested in meeting quotas.”
― Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten
“I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“Life isn't fair. A fair's a place where you eat corn dogs and ride the ferris wheel.”
― Jennifer Brown, Hate List
“I was thinking about how people seem to read the bible a lot more as they get older, and then it dawned on me—they’re cramming for their final exam.”
― George Carlin
“I'm bored with it all.
- Last Words”
― Winston Churchill
“If no one knows when a person is going to die, how can we say he died prematurely?”
― George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?
"Sometimes dead is better."
― Stephen King
“We’d stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You’d think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn’t.”
―Rick Yancey
“Death was a living creature. Death was a man tormented by his past. Death was once a human.”
―S.K.N. Hammerstone
“When it's my time, and the reaper calls my name, there will be no stink of fear on me, and my only wish will be to die with grace, covered in the blood of my enemies.”
―Cedric Nye, Jango's Anthem
“If on thoughts of death we are fed,
Thus, a coffin, became my bed.”
―E.A. Bucchianeri, Phantom Phantasia: Poetry for the Phantom of the Opera Phan
“I thought it was foolish mumbo jumbo when I was alive - then I woke up dead.”
―C.V. Hunt, Danse Macabre
“I'd like to be a handsome corpse. At my funeral, I'd like people to look in my coffin and say, "Wow. He's so handsome when he's dead!" I guess it'd be kind of okay, too, if they made my books required reading in schools or something, but as far as leaving a legacy goes, I just want to be the hottest cadaver in the graveyard.”
―Alistair Cross
“You're so beautiful when you're dead.”
―Alistair Cross, The Crimson Corset
“And what was I if not death's ghostwriter?”
―Poppy Z. Brite, Exquisite Corpse
“Death lurked everywhere. Death was alive and well.”
―Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls
“ 'If life is pain, one could say that killing is an act of compassion. I look forward to my own death, you know. But dying is like losing you virginity. You can only do it once. I'm saving it for the right moment.' ”
―Amanda Steiger, Dark Geist
“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of being well-preserved, but to skid sideways, chocolate in one hand, wine in the other, still screaming, 'Whoo what a ride!”
―Theresa Hollis
“A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
“I'm not afraid of death. Death's afraid of me.”
― Lee Child, 61 Hours
“I wish to live to 150 years old, but the day I die, I wish it to be with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other.”
― Ava Gardner
“If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?”
― Joan Baez
“What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention? A dash, one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone.”
― Eckhart Tolle
“Death, a necessary end, will come when it will come”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
“A tomb now suffices him for whom the world was not enough.
[Alexander's tombstone epitaph]”
― Alexander the Great
“Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.'
Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved
“All through life there were distinctions - toilets for men, toilets for women; clothes for men, clothes for women - then, at the end, the graves are identical.”
― Leila Aboulela, Minaret
“You know how cats do. They hide to die. Dogs come home.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon
“Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
“Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
“Death is nature’s way of saying, ‘Your table is ready.”
― Robin Williams
“Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.”
― William Saroyan
“You're dead, George. You just don't have the sense to lie down.”
― Stephen King, The Dark Half
“Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Death, I had discovered long ago, was available in varying flavors, and none of them particularly palatable. ”
― Jasper Fforde, First Among Sequels
“If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you'll die a lot of times.”
― Dean Smith
“One could argue that it's romantic to die for love. Of course, then you're dead and unable to take that honeymoon trip to the Alps with all the other fashionable young couples, which is a shame.”
― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty
“The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais
“The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
“We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.”
― Liam Callanan, The Cloud Atlas
“The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
“I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, everything should just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment'.”
― Andy Warhol
“You must know that I am made of death, from head to foot, and it is a corpse who loves you and adores you and will never, never leave you!”
― Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera
“Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
“And what does it mean -- dying? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and only the five we know are lost at death, while the other ninety-five remain alive.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
“Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age.”
― Giacomo Leopardi
“In the middle of life, death comes
to take your measurements. The visit
is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit
is being sewn on the sly.”
― Tomas Tranströmer, The Deleted World
“Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives.”
― A. Sachs
“Do you know why hurricanes have names instead of numbers? To keep the killing personal. No one cares about a bunch of people killed by a number. '200 Dead as Number Three Slams Ashore' is not nearly as interesting a headline as 'Charlie kills 200.' Death is much more satisfying and entertaining if you personalize it.
Me, I'm still waitin' for Hurricane Ed. Old Ed wouldn't hurt ya, would he? Sounds kinda friendly. 'Hell no, we ain't evacuatin'. Ed's comin'!”
― George Carlin, Brain Droppings
“Everyone you have ever loved in your life becomes a part of your soul. They never leave. They're always inside you, and you can bring them out whenever you want.”
― Nate Kenyon, Sparrow Rock
“I g-g-guess...I'm dead?" she heard her own voice call out, strangely high-pitched and thin.
For a long time, she heard nothing else. And then:
"Hi, Dead. I'm Dan.”
― Peter Lerangis, The Sword Thief
“Death always wins.”
― Kelly Creagh, Nevermore
“She'll die.'
'Aye. That's a consequence of being alive.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
“I tried to hang myself with a bungee cord. I kept almost dying.”
― Steven Wright
“It struck Mort with sudden, terrible poignancy that Death must be the loneliest creature in the universe. In the great party of Creation, he was always in the kitchen.”
― Terry Pratchett, Mort
“If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.”
― Christopher Hitchens
“When I die,' I said to my friend, 'I'm not going to be embalmed. I'm going to be dipped.' Milk chocolate or bittersweet was the immediate concern.”
― Adrianne Marcus
“Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”
― Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson
“When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of shit”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
“The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
“Reproduction is more pleasurable than death.”
― Herman E. Daly
“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its students."
― Hector Berlioz
“I've seen and swam and climbed and lived and driven and filmed. Should it all end tomorrow, I can definitely say there would be no regrets. I am very lucky, and I know it. I really have lived 5,000 times over.”
― Benedict Cumberbatch
“Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily.”
― La Rochefoucauld
“We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.”
― Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
“You can still be cool when you’re dead. In fact, it’s much easier, because you aren’t getting old and fat and losing your hair.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
“How does one become a butterfly?' she asked pensively.
'You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.'
'You mean to die?' asked Yellow, remembering the three who fell out of the sky.
'Yes and No,' he answered.
'What looks like you will die, but what's really you will still live.”
― Trina Paulus, Hope for the Flowers
“So, what do you do when you know you have two days to live? Eat an entire Bitter Chocolate Death cake all by myself. Reread my favorite novel. Buy eight dozen roses from the best florist in town--the super expensive ones, the ones that smell like roses rather than merely looking like them--and put them all over my apartment. Take a good long look at everyone I love.”
― Robin McKinley, Sunshine
“Dude, you don't want to be dead. Take it from me. No-pussy is bad. But dead is like no-pussy times ten.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“Oh God, Oh God we’re all gonna die doesn’t really fit the definition of banter, now does it?”
― Lilith Saintcrow, Reckoning
“After all Death is a Symbol that there was Life.”
― Mario Benedetti
“Death doesn't really worry me that much, I'm not frightened about it... I just don't want to be there when it happens.”
― Woody Allen
“I'd rather die tomorrow than live a hundred years without knowing you.”
― Walt Disney Company
“He was dead, all right. He had been shot, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled.
Either somebody had really had it in for him or four people had killed him. Or else it was the cleverest suicide I'd ever heard of.”
― Richard S. Prather, Take a Murder, Darling
“They say that just before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that's not how it happened for me.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall
“We have once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create.”
― stephen king, The Green Mile
“Everyone's immortal until they're not.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Gathering of Shadows
“I'm a man who believes that I died 20 years ago. And I live like a man who is dead already. I have no fear whatsoever of anybody or anything.”
― Malcolm X
“I don't care if the New York Times writes an obituary for me. I just want you to write one. ... You say you're not special because the world doesn't know about you, but that's an insult to me. I know about you.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
“The rest, is silence.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet
“That is death - shifting from "is" to "was.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent
“If you love someone, you're not supposed to want them to come back. Better a peaceful sleep in the earth than the life of a zombie--not really dead but not really alive, either.”
― Cassandra Clare, Zombies Vs. Unicorns
“(On his gravestone): "I told you I was ill".”
― Spike Milligan
“Death is the Graduation of the Soul”
― Sylvia Browne, The Other Side and Back
“YOU HAVE REACHED THE END OF CAKE”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
“But you're dead,' said Harry.
'Oh, yes,' said Dumbledore matter-of-factly.
'Then... am I dead too?'
'Ah,' said Dumbledore, smiling still more broadly. 'That is the question, isn't it? On the whole, dear boy, I think not.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses indurate. Both go mouldy.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
“When she expressed a doubtful hope that Tinker Bell would be glad to see her, he said, ‘Who is Tinker Bell?’
‘O Peter,’ she said, shocked; but even when she explained he could not remember.
‘There are such a lot of them,’ he said. ‘I expect she is no more.’
I expect he was right, for fairies don’t live long, but they are so little that a short time seems a good while to them.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
“Life is a predicament which precedes death.”
― Henry James
“The final reward of the dead - to die no more”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
“Death has this much to be said for it:
You don't have to get out of bed for it.
Wherever you happen to be
They bring it to you—free.”
― Kingsley Amis
“I believe that more people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.”
― Nancy Reagan
“That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.”
― Samuel Johnson
“No man should go to Valhalla with brothel rash.”
― Mark Lawrence, Prince of Fools
“I'll stop eating steak when you stop killing spiders." Absurdity: comparing cows to spiders. Arachnids are pure evil. They're like a cigarette manufacturer or a terrorist. They're organized religion on eight legs.”
― Davey Havok, Pop Kids
“A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest's conscience, but remember, the forest eats itself and lives forever.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
“I drive a motorbike, so there is the whiff of the grim reaper round every corner, especially in London.”
― Benedict Cumberbatch
“Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
“Sorry to hear about your Dad."
He shrugged. "He was seventy, and we always told him fast food would kill him."
"Heart attack?"
"He was hit by a Pizza Express truck.”
― J.A. Konrath, Whiskey Sour
“When you have dogs, you witness their uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, their bright desire to make the most of life in spite of the limitations of age and disease, their calm awareness of the approaching end when their final hours come. They accept death with a grace that I hope I will one day be brave enough to muster.”
― Dean Koontz, A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog
“Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood
“Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
“The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.”
― Jean Cocteau
“Odd, isn’t it? You know when your birthday is, but not your death day, even though you pass the date year after year, never suspecting that some day…”
― Mary Downing Hahn, The Ghost of Crutchfield Hall
“The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a tired feeling.
”
― Paula Poundstone
“Cause if you shoot a bullet someone dies. If you drop a bomb many die. You hit a woman, love dies. But if you say the F-word... nothing actually happens.”
― Richard Curtis
“I see black light (his last words)”
― Victor Hugo
“So," he asked. "How's death?"
"Hard," she said. "It just keeps going.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods
“I think it's cool to wear roadkill. If I died and somebody wanted to wear my teeth around their neck to VMAs, I'd feel honored.”
― Ke$ha
“The dead look so terribly dead when they're dead.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
“War is not just the business of death, it is the antitheses of life.”
― joss whedon ( Fray)
“We're all dead the moment we're born. Just, some of us get there faster than others.”
― Alex Scarrow, The Eternal War
“When he said to give him the sword, I don’t think he meant for you to stick it in his guts.”
― Kevin Hearne, Hounded
“His absence is so big it's like he's there.”
― Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go
“Never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”
― John Donne, No man is an island – A selection from the prose
“Selling eternal life is an unbeatable business, with no customers ever asking for their money back after the goods are not delivered.”
― Victor J. Stenger
“And the thing about trying to cheat death is that, in the end, you still lose.”
― Robyn Schneider, Extraordinary Means
“Death was an inverse Big Bang; an impossible magic trick where everything had become nothing in the very same instant, where one state had been replaced so completely by another that no evidence of the first could be detected, and where the catalyst had been vaporized by the sheer shock of the new.”
― Belinda Bauer, Rubbernecker
“Give me liberty or give me death."
― Patrick Henry
“How do you tell if something's alive? You check for breathing.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
“I mean, I really do think that love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops. 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, The Princess Bride
“I'll have that someday, thought Peter. Someone who'll kiss me good-bye at the door. Or maybe just someone to put a blindfold over my head before they shoot me. Depending on how things turn out.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadow of the Hegemon
“I lost my father this past year, and the word feels right because I keep looking for him. As if he were misplaced. As if he could just turn up, like a sock or a set of keys.”
― Mark Slouka
“Wayne's a little attached to that hat," Waxillium said. "He thinks it's lucky."
Wayne: "It is lucky. I ain't never died while wearing that hat."
Marasi frowned. "I ... I'm not sure I know how to respond."
Wax: "That's a common reaction to Wayne.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Alloy of Law
“People are fragile. They die of mistakes, of overdoses, of sickness. But mostly they die of Death.”
― Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
“The human animal is a beast that dies and if he's got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting!--Which it never can be....”
― Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“Sendak is in search of what he calls a "yummy death". William Blake set the standard, jumping up from his death bed at the last minute to start singing. "A happy death," says Sendak. "It can be done." He lifts his eyebrows to two peaks. "If you're William Blake and totally crazy.”
― Maurice Sendak
“I'd heard that if you saw a Reaper, you saw what you expected to see, what you thought the agents of Death would look like. Personally, I wanted to see little, fuzzy pink bunnies, but apparently my subconscious visualized tall, scary, and skeletal. My subconscious and I needed to have a long talk.”
― Lisa Shearin, The Trouble with Demons
“If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood
“The dead are merely the countrymen of my future.”
― Dean Koontz, Fear Nothing
“Since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.”
― David M. Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
“Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn't bother to wipe its boots.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
“Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom...”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate
“(Parody that is often falsely believed to be a true quote of Mariah Carey's) Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that but not with all those flies and death and stuff. ”
― Mad Magazine Editors
“My sister, Judy, has always said that she would like to lie in state, propped up in her coffin with her eyes blared wide open, face fixed in a big grin, and have a taped greeting for all her mourners. Something real upbeat and, well, live-sounding, like: 'He-e-e-ey!Cuteshoestellyomamahi!”
― Jill Conner Browne, The Sweet Potato Queens' Book of Love
“No matter the self-conceited importance of our labors we are all compost for worlds we cannot yet imagine.”
― David Whyte, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
“For 3 million you could give everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we could dig a hole so deep we could hand her over to Satan in person. (on Margaret Thatcher)”
― Frankie Boyle
“I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”
― Mark Twain
“I'm going to get 'I'M NOT FUCKING DEAD' tattooed on my chest."
"That will become inaccurate at some point," Omar pointed out.”
― Domashita Romero, Complicated Creation
“My faceless neighbor spoke up:
“Don’t be deluded. Hitler has made it clear that he will annihilate all Jews before the clock strikes twelve.”
I exploded:
“What do you care what he said? Would you want us to consider him a prophet?
His cold eyes stared at me. At last he said, wearily:
“I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night
“I looked at the stained-glass image of the lamb in the window above me, but that only reminded me that lambs are famous for being led to slaughter, or sometimes hanging out with lions in ill-advised relationships.”
― Maureen Johnson, The Name of the Star
“He thought he saw some horses, too, and a clown, but it was the faces of all those dead raptors that really bothered him. And maybe that clown a little bit.”
― Vernon D. Burns, Gods of the Jungle Planet
“Good thing I'm aging, otherwise I'd be dead.”
― Ana Monnar
“a man was on his way to the gallows when he met another, who asked him: where are you going, my friend? and the condemned man replied: i'm not going anywhere. they're taking me by force.”
― José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
“Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people”
― Heinrich Heine
“Usually the things that kill us are the things we do every single day.”
― J. M. McDermott
“Death is not a checkmate…it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“I'm not courting death; I've far too many books left to read.”
― Alison Sinclair, Shadowborn
“You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.”
“I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace
“Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.”
― Carolyn Kizer
“It is my wish to die of unique causes, perhaps in a high-speed tricycle crash, a bizarre stapling incient, or as a result of inadvertently sucking my brains out through my ear while trying to untwist the vacuum hose.”
― Paula Poundstone, There's Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say
“Once the game is over, the King and the pawn go back in the same box.”
― Italian Proverb
“When my mother passed away several years ago—well, wait a minute. Actually, she didn’t ‘pass away.’ She died. Something about that verb, ‘to pass away’ always sounds to me as if someone just drifted through the wallpaper. No, my mother did not pass away. She definitely died.”
― Steve Allen, How to Be Funny
“WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEART OF MEN?
The Death of Rats looked up from the feast of the potato. SQUEAK, he said.
Death waved a hand dismissively. WELL, YES, OBVIOUSLY ME, he said. I JUST WONDERED IF THERE WAS ANYONE ELSE.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Truth
“The amazing miracle of death, when one second you're walking and talking, and the next second you're an object.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
“Die, die we all pass away,
But don't wear a frown coz it's really okay,
And you might try to hide, And you might try to pray,
But we all end up remains of the day.”
― Danny Elfman - The Corpse Bride
“The over-weight and out of shape guy who owned the house had apparently decided that having a half-million dollar house meant that he couldn’t afford to hire someone to clean out his gutters. Now he was dead with what looked to me like a broken neck after the ladder had slipped. He’d taken the plunge into his fancy landscaping—complete with rock garden. But hey, his fucking gutters were clean.”
― Diana Rowland, My Life as a White Trash Zombie
“Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be
Others will go on speaking and you will not be able to argue back”
― Ram Mohan Roy
“In 5-billion years the Sun will expand & engulf our orbit as the charred ember that was once Earth vaporizes. Have a nice day.”
― Neil Degrasse Tyson
