c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The fish is my friend too...I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars. Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky; he thought
— Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
For he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.
— Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Poems
If you want to call it that. But it is a very specific sort of magic. There's a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.
— Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
A life is not a waste of time
— Nalini Singh, Angels' Blood
In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting. I've thought a great deal about my life and my country. I think there is little that can be truly known. My family has been fortunate. Others were less so. As they are often quick to point out.
— Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
When the suicide arrived at the sky, the people there asked him: "Why?" He replied: "Because no one admired me.
— Stephen Crane, Complete Poems of Stephen Crane
If it is perfectly acceptable for a widow to disfigure herself or commit suicide to save face for her husband's family, why should a mother not be moved to extreme action by the loss of a child or children? We are their caretakers. We love them. We nurse them when they are sick. . . But no woman should live longer than her children. It is against the law of nature. If she does, why wouldn't she wish to leap from a cliff, hang from a branch, or swallow lye?
— Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
And then I crawled into his unmade bed, wrapping myself in his comforter like a cocoon, surrounding myself with his smell. I took out my cannula so I could smell better, breathing him and out, the scent fading even as I lay there, my chest burning until I couldn't distinguish among the pains.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Where music thundered let the mind be still,Where the will triumphed let there be no will,What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.
— May Sarton
For death is life. It is only living that is lifeless.
— Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan
It is good that a man's enemies want him dead, for it proves he has lived a life of worth.
— Forrest Carter, The Outlaw Josey Wales
A breeze blows up, touching my cheek like a little child's kiss. It flutters a piece of paper. "Trash, out there? Must belong to one of us." We move closer, and when I reached for it, I find...... a perfect paper airplane.
— Ellen Hopkins
When his brain died, all of the memoriesheld in his gray matter, along with all of the knowledge he had acquired, would simply evaporatein a flood of chemical reactions.
— Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol
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
After us they'll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they'll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, "Oh! Life is so hard!" and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.
— Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters: A Translation Of The Play By Anton Chekhov
Bu dağlarda bin kere ölmeden, bir kere dirilemezsin.
— Yaşar Kemal, İnce Memed 4
Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change
— Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
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
Our lives are mere flashes of light in an infinitely empty universe. In 12 years of education the most important lesson I have learned is that what we see as “normal” living is truly a travesty of our potential. In a society so governed by superficiality, appearances, and petty economics, dreams are more real than anything anything in the “real world”. Refuse normalcy. Beauty is everywhere, love is endless, and joy bleeds from our everyday existence. Embrace it. I love all of you, all my friends, family, and community. I am ceaselessly grateful from the bottom of my heart for everyone. The only thing I can ask of you is to stay free of materialism. Remember that every day contains a universe of potential; exhaust it. Live and love so immensely that when death comes there is nothing left for him to take. Wealth is love, music, sports, learning, family and freedom. Above all, stay gold.
— Dominic Owen Mallary
The rest, is silence.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
That is death - shifting from "is" to "was.
— Veronica Roth, Divergent
How terrible," said Eragon, "to die alone, separate even from the one who is closest to you."
— Christopher Paolini, Eldest
the worst thing," he told me,"is bitterness, people end up sobitter.
— Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
But somebody else had spoken Snape’s name, quite softly.“Severus . . .”The sound frightened Harry beyond anything he had experienced all evening. For the first time, Dumbledore was pleading.Snape gazed for a moment at Dumbledore, and there was revulsion and hatred etched in the harsh lines of his face.“Severus . . . please . . .”Snape raised his wand and pointed it directly at Dumbledore.	”A jet of green light shot from the end of Snape’s wand and hit Dumbledore squarely in the chest. Harry’s scream of horror never left him; silent and unmoving, he was forced to watch as Dumbledore was blasted into the air. For a split second, he seemed to hang suspended beneath the shining skull, and then he fell slowly backward, like a great rag doll, over the battlements and out of sight.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.
— Andrew Sean Greer, The Story of a Marriage
Maybe you should say goodbye, Cal.''No.''It might be important.''It might make her die.
— Jenny Downham, Before I Die
He told himself a story. Not at first. At first, there wasn’t time for thoughts that came in the shape of words. His head was blessedly empty of stories then. War was coming. It was upon him. Arin had been born in the year of the god of death, and he was finally glad of it. He surrendered himself to his god, who smiled and came close. Stories will get you killed, he murmured in Arin’s ear. Now, you just listen. Listen to me.
— Marie Rutkoski, The Winner's Kiss
You can't just make me different and then leave
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.
— Oscar Wilde
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
Our knowledge of life is limited to death
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Shapeshifting requires the ability to transcend your attachments, in particular your ego attachments to identity and who you are. If you can get over your attachment to labeling yourself and your cherishing of your identity, you can be virtually anybody. You can slip in and out of different shells, even different animal forms or deity forms.
— Zeena Schreck
One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It's one of the oldest urges in mankind. It's a way of stalling death.
— Carlos Fuentes
The truth is that I feel totally helpless, or totally inconsolable, to be more honest. I’m not trying to hide it, but it’s something you’re not to worry about.
— Jostein Gaarder, The Orange Girl
[Children] just cannot be sad too long, it is not in them, as children mourn in little bits here and there like patchwork in their lives.
— Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901
Clown: Good Madonna, why mournest thou?Olivia: Good Fool, for my brother's death.Clown:I think his soul is in hell, Madonna.Olivia:I know his soul is in heaven, Fool.Clown: The more fool, Madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul being in heaven.
— William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
I'm not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun... let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus... Aphrodite to the extent of the will of each one.
— Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy
Death is the Graduation of the Soul
— Sylvia Browne, The Other Side and Back
Does it make you brave to stick your hand in a bear's mouth? Would you do it again just because you didn't die?
— Robert Jordan, The Dragon Reborn
I wonder if it hurts to live,And if they have to try,And whether, could they choose between,They would not rather die.
— Emily Dickinson
(On his gravestone): "I told you I was ill".
— Spike Milligan
The steel door of the incinerator went up and the muted hum of the eternal fire became a red roaring. The heat lunged out at them like a famished beast. Then Rahel's Ammu was fed to it. Her hair, her skin, her smile. Her voice. They way she used Kipling to love her children before putting them to bed: We be of one blood, though and I. Her goodnight kiss. The way she held their faces steady with one hand (squashed-cheeked, fish-mouthed) while she parted and combed their hair with the other. The way she held knickers out for Rahel to climb into. Left leg, right leg. All this was fed to the beast, and it was satisfied.She was their Ammu and their Baba and she had loved them Double.
— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Darkling I listen; and, for many a timeI have been half in love with easeful Death,Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,To take into the air my quiet breath.
— John Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters
Then Thalia Grace became their leader and started recruiting even more young women to their cause, which grated on Nico – as if Bianca’s death could be forgotten. As if she could be replaced.
— Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
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
Cada suspiro es como un sorbo de vida del que uno se deshace.
— Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo
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 endurate. 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
when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.
— William S. Burroughs
The dead know only one thing, it is better to be alive
— Stanley Kubrick
He was becoming unstuck, he was sure of that - his bones were no longer wrapped in flesh but in clouds of dust, in hummingbirds, dragonflies, and luminous moths - but so perfect was his equilibrium that he felt no fear. He was vast, he was many, he was dynamic, he was eternal.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
I am forever walking upon these shores,Betwixt the sand and the foam,The high tide will erase my food prints,And the wind will blow away the foam,But the sea and the shore will remain forever.
— Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam
Fireheart dashed to the warrior's side. Cloudtail was standing stiff-legged, every hair in his pelt on end as if he were facing an enemy. His eyes were fixed on the limp heap of tabby fur huddled at his paws."Why, Fireheart?" Cloudtail wailed. "Why her?"Fireheart knew, but rage and grief made it hard to speak. "Because Tigerstar wants the pack to get a taste of cat blood," he rasped. The dead cat lying in front of them was Brindleface.
— Erin Hunter, A Dangerous Path
Take what comes and live life without complaint. What will be, will be. Life is a woman's gift; death is God's.
— Nancy McKenzie, Queen of Camelot
Life is a predicament which precedes death.
— Henry James
Damn it! How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?
— Simón Bolívar
But often life asks much of you, and you either honor life by answering with all your heart, or you cower your way into your grave.
— James Clemens, Hinterland
There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain. 
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
I was with a friend of mine recently who was dying and while he was lying there with his family around his bed, I just knew that was it, that was the best you can hope for in life - to have your family and the people who love you around you at the end.
— Ewan McGregor
I love you Anna Covey,' he said, his voice barely audible. And slowly, clumsily, he leant forward, and his lips found hers, and Anna felt him kiss her awkwardly, she knew that she wasn't a Surplus any more. And nor was Peter.
— Gemma Malley, The Declaration
Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Nothing, they say is more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than the time of dying
— Thomas Paine
Dr. Urbino caught the parrot around the neck with a triumphant sigh: ça y est. But he released him immediately because the ladder slipped from under his feet and for an instant he was suspended in the air and then he realized that he had died without Communion, without time to repent of anything or to say goodbye to anyone, at seven minutes after four on Pentecost Sunday.Fermina Daza was in the kitchen tasting the soup for supper when she heard Digna Pardo's horrified shriek and the shouting of the servants and then of the entire neighborhood. She dropped the tasting spoon and tried to run despite the invincible weight of her age, screaming like a madwoman without knowing yet what had happened under the mango leaves, and her heart jumped inside her ribs when she saw her man lying on his back in the mud, dead to this life but still resisting death's final blow for one last minute so that she would have time to come to him. He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked for her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful that she had ever seen them in the half century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath:"Only God knows how much I loved you.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Death had to take her little by little, bit by bit, dragging her along to the bitter end of the miserable existence she'd made for herself. They never even knew what she did die of. Some spoke of a chill. But the truth was that she died from poverty, from the filth and the weariness of her wretched life.
— Émile Zola, L'Assommoir (The Dram Shop)
Death has this much to be said for it:You don't have to get out of bed for it.Wherever you happen to beThey bring it to you—free.
— Kingsley Amis
Fox was here first, and his brother was the wolf. Fox said, people will live forever. If they die they will not die for long. Wolf said, no, people will die, people must die, all things that live must die, or they will spread and cover the world, and eat all the salmon and the caribou and the buffalo, eat all the squash and all the corn. Now one day Wolf died, and he said to the fox, quick, bring me back to life. And Fox said, No, the dead must stay dead. You convinced me. And he wept as he said this. But he said it, and it was final. Now Wolf rules the world of the dead and Fox lives always under the sun and the moon, and he still mourns his brother.
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
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
The final reward of the dead - to die no more
— Friedrich Nietzsche
No man should go to Valhalla with brothel rash.
— Mark  Lawrence, Prince of Fools
Once to swim I sought the sea-side,There to sport among the billows;With the stone of many colorsSank poor Aino to the bottomOf the deep and boundless blue-sea,Like a pretty son-bird, perished.Never come a-fishing, father,To the borders of these waters,Never during all thy life-time,As thou lovest daughter Aino.Mother dear, I sought the sea-side,There to sport among the billows;With the stone of many colors,Sank poor Aino to the bottomOf the deep and boundless blue-sea,Like a pretty song-bird perished.Never mix thy bread, dear mother,With the blue-sea's foam and waters,Never during all thy life-time,As thou lovest daughter Aino.Brother dear, I sought the sea-side,There to sport among the billows;With the stone of many colorsSank poor Aino to the bottomOf the deep and boundless blue-sea,Like a pretty song-bird perished.Never bring thy prancing war-horse,Never bring thy royal racer,Never bring thy steeds to water,To the borders of the blue-sea,Never during all thy life-time,As thou lovest sister Aino.Sister dear, I sought the sea-side,There to sport among the billows;With the stone of many colorsSank poor Aino to the bottomOf the deep and boundless blue-sea,Like a pretty song-bird perished.Never come to lave thine eyelidsIn this rolling wave and sea-foam,Never during all thy life-time,As thou lovest sister Aino.All the waters in the blue-seaShall be blood of Aino's body;All the fish that swim these watersShall be Aino's flesh forever;All the willows on the sea-sideShall be Aino's ribs hereafter;All the sea-grass on the marginWill have grown from Aino's tresses.
— Elias Lönnrot, The Kalevala
Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretence.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
I loved my mother too,' I said. 'I still do. That's the thing - it never goes away, even if the person does.
— Anna Carey, Eve
One hand was behind his back, and he held it out, presenting a bouquet of white and smoky purple lilies. “They’re straight from the underworld, by the way. They are everlasting. They won’t die.
— Jess C. Scott, The Devilin Fey
Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.
— Mary Karr, Lit
I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act.I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.
— James     Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
My life closed twice before its close; It yet remains to seeIf Immortality unveil A third event to me,So huge, so hopeless to conceive, As these that twice befell.Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell.
— Emily Dickinson, Dickinson: Poems
There was once a tiger-striped cat. This cat died a million deaths, and lived a million lives, and in those lives, various people owned him. None of those people he cared for. This cat was not afraid of death. One life, the cat became a stray cat, which meant it was free. And it met a white female cat. They became mates, and lived together. Time passed, the white cat passed away of old age. And the tiger- striped cat cried a million times. Eventually, the cat died again. But this time, it didn't come back to life.
— Keiko Nobumoto
true apothecary thy drugs art quick
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
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
He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death.
— Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter
I drive a motorbike, so there is the whiff of the grim reaper round every corner, especially in London.
— Benedict Cumberbatch
I was tired of being me.
— Rachel Ward, Numbers
The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation's problems would be another 100 Year War.
— Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century
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
Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
We are all resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.
— Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter
Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
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
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!
— Edgar Allan Poe
Death alone gives meaning to life, and you will never fully live until you know you must die. And make your peace with that knowledge.
— Alice Borchardt, The Raven Warrior
When a man sees a dying animal, horror comes over him: that which he himself is, his essence, is obviously being annihilated before his eyes--is ceasing to be. But when the dying one is a person, and a beloved person, then, besides a sense of horror at the annihilation of life, there is a feeling of severance and a spiritual wound which, like a physical wound, sometimes kills and sometimes heals, but always hurts and fears any external, irritating touch.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.
— Ian McEwan, Amsterdam
Now I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark
— Thomas Hobbes
The boy was lying, fast asleep, on a rude bed upon the floor; so pale with anxiety, and sadness, and the closeness of his prison, that he looked like death; not death as it shews in shroud and coffin, but in the guise it wears when life has just departed; when a young and gentle spirit has, but an instant, fled to Heaven: and the gross air of the world has not had time to breathe upon the changing dust it hallowed.
— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.
— Epicurus
He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!
— Albert Camus, The Fall
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
She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, a tiny, bloody angel in the snow, and they were going to destroy her.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Shiver
The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
— Jean Cocteau
Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
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
At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same, that when my book ended I'd end, a great wind would sweep through my rooms carrying the pages away, and when the air cleared of all those fluttering white sheets the room would be silent, the chair where I sat empty.
— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
They don't make morgues with windows. In fact, if the geography allows for it, they hardly ever make morgues above the ground. I guess it's partly because it must be eisier to refrigerate a bunch of coffin-sized chambers in a room insulated by the earth. But that can't be all there is to it. Under the earth means a lot more than relative altitude. It's where dead things fit. Graves are under the earth. So are Hell, Gehenna, Hades, and a dozen other reported afterlives.Maybe it says somthing about people. Maybe for us, under the earth is a subtle and profound statement. Maybe ground level provides us with a kind of symbolic boundary marker, an artificial construct that helps us remember that we are alive. Mabye it helps us push death's shadow back from our lives.I live in a basement apartment and like it. What does that say about me?Probably that I overanalyze things.
— Jim Butcher, Death Masks
What is a man's life but a prelude to his death? And what is death but a long sleep, a most welcome forgetfulness.
— Lisa M. Klein, Ophelia
I used to love youI still doSo SelfishI love the old youThe you that didnt shoot drugs...The you that didnt get beat on by menYou laugh in my face and call me a foolBut its trueI still love youSometimes,I can see the old youWhen your eyes flashWhen you almost look alive
— Henry Rollins
The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a tired feeling.
— Paula Poundstone
Self-destruction would be a brief, almost autoerotic free-fall into a great velvet darkness.
— Mark Mirabello, The Cannibal Within
Fireheart tensed, waiting for whatever had hunted down these apprentices to emerge from the trees and attack, but nothing stirred. Feeling as if his legs hardly belonged to him, he sprang down and stumbled across to Swiftpaw.The apprentice lay on his side, his legs splayed out. His black-and-white fur was torn, and his body was covered with dreadful wounds, ripped by teeth far bigger than any cat's. His jaws still snarled and his eyes glared. He was dead, and Fireheart could see that he had died fighting.
— Erin Hunter, A Dangerous Path
whats here a cup closed in my true loves hand poisin i see hath been his timeless end. oh churl drunk all and left no friendly drop to help me after. i will kiss thy lips some poisin doth hang on them, to help me die with a restorative. thy lips are warm.yea noise then ill be brief oh happy dagger this is thy sheath. there rust and let me die.
— William Shakespeare
I find relief from the questions only when I concede that I am not obliged to know everything. I remind myself it is sufficient to know what I know, and that what I know, may not always be true.
— Maya Angelou
Thinking of death--strange, beautiful, terrible and a long way off--made me feel happier than ever.
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
Tonight I saw myself in the dark window asthe image of my father, whose lifewas spent like this,thinking of death, to the exclusionof other sensual matters,so in the end that lifewas easy to give up, sinceit contained nothing: evenmy mother's voice couldn't make himchange or turn backas he believedthat once you can't love another human beingyou have no place in the world. 
— Louise Glück
Perhaps it's better if I live in your heart, where the world can't see me. If I'm dead, there will be no stain on our love.
— Greta Garbo
Please don't die.
— Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
I’d give in to the grief but make sure I wasn’t loud enough to draw attention from those who think words will make me feel better.
— Adam Silvera, History Is All You Left Me
One grave in every graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it - water stained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonment. It may be colder than the other gravestones, too, and the name on the stone is all too often impossible to read. If there is a statue on the grave it will be headless or so scabbed with fungus and lichens as to look like fungus itself. If one grave in a graveyard looks like a target for petty vandals, that is the ghoul-gate. If the grave wants to make you be somewhere else, that is the ghoul-gate.
— Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
Tell me not in mournful numbers,Life is but an empty dream!For the soul is dead that slumbers,And things are not what they seem.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Voices of the Night
and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality.
— Gabriel García Márquez
Then there’s the kind of zombie I’ve become now: the one who has lost everything—his brain, his heart, his light, his direction. He wanders the world, bumping into this, tripping over that, but keeps going and going. That is life after death.
— Adam Silvera, History Is All You Left Me
Um..." Hazel faltered. "You mean you won't... you're not going to-" "Claim your life?" Thantos asked. "Well, let's see..."  He pulled a pure-black iPad from thin air. Death, tapped the screen a few times, and all Frank could think was: Please don't let there be an app for reaping souls.  "I don't see you on the list," Thantos said. "Pluto gives me specific orders for escaped souls, you see. For some reason, he has not issued a warrant for yours. Perhaps he feels your life is not finished, or it could be n oversight. If you'd like me to call and ask-" "No!" Hazel yelped. "That's okay." "Are you sure?" Death asked helpfully. "I have video-conferencing enabled. I have his Skype address here somewhere...
— Rick Riordan, The Son of Neptune
Then one morning she’d begun to feel her sorrow easing, like something jagged that had cut into her so long it had finally dulled its edges, worn itself down. That same day Rachel couldn’t remember which side her father had parted his hair on, and she’d realized again what she’d learned at five when her mother left – that what made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting the small things first, the smell of the soap her mother had bathed with, the color of the dress she’d worn to church, then after a while the sound of her mother’s voice, the color of her hair. It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief that was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree’s heartwood. (51)
— Ron Rash, Serena
And then his noise falls completely silent-And he stops struggling-And looking right into my eyes-He dies.My Todd dies.
— Patrick Ness, Monsters of Men
Death is just the last scene of the last act.
— Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde
As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions
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
Every day is a lie. But you are dying. That is not a lie. 
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Someone once said that death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside of us while we live. I could tell you who said it, but who the hell really cares.
— One tree hill haley james scott
The dead look so terribly dead when they're dead.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
When she fucked up all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she fell onto the enigma of herself.
— John Green
I see black light (his last words)
— Victor Hugo
Let me tell you something about dying: it's not as bad as they says.it's the coming-back-to-life part that hurts.
— Lauren Oliver, Requiem
Still, they have one thing I envy. Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
— Søren Kierkegaard
Embrace the probability of your imminent death....and know there is nothing i can do to save you.
— Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
Surplus meant unnecessary. Not required.You couldn’t be a Surplus if you were needed by someone else. You couldn’t be a Surplus if you were loved.
— Gemma Malley, The Declaration
Remember where you came from, where you’re going, and why you created the mess you got yourself into in the first place. You're going to die a horrible death, remember. It's all good training, and you'll enjoy it more if you keep the facts in mind. Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to your execution is not generally understood by less-advanced life-forms, and they'll call you crazy.
— Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
Death is harder on those who are left behind.
— Robert La Fosse, Nothing To Hide
I don't eat friggin' lobster or anything like that. Because they're alive when you kill it.
— Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi
So," he asked. "How's death?""Hard," she said. "It just keeps going.
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Death is the most sophisticated form of beauty, and the most difficult to accept.
— Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After
THE WEATHER OF LOVELoveHas a way of wiltingOr blossomingAt the strangest,Most unpredictable hour.This is how love is,An uncontrollable beastIn the form of a flower.The sun does not always shine on it.Nor does the rain always pour on itNor should it always get beaten by a storm.Love does not always emit the sweetest scents,And sometimes it can sting with its thorns.Water it.Give it plenty of sunlight.Nurture it,And the flower of love willOutlive you.Neglect it or keep dissecting it,And its petals will quickly curl up and die.This is how love is,Perfection is a delusional vision.So love the person who loves youUnconditionally,And abandon the oneWho only loves youUnder favorableConditions.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Maybe they did what they had to do to live, and tried to get a little love and have a little fun before the darkness took them.
— Poppy Z. Brite, Lost Souls
Girls are always saying things like, “I’m so unhappy that I’m going to overdose on aspirin,” but they’d be awfully surprised if they succeeded. They have no intention of dying. At the first sight of blood, they panic.
— Rachel Klein, The Moth Diaries
Yes, alive,” said Fudge. “That is — I don’t know — is a man alive if he can’t be killed? I don’t really understand it, and Dumbledore won’t explain properly — but anyway, he’s certainly got a body and is walking and talking and killing, so I suppose, for the purposes of our discussion, yes, he’s alive.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
I know the truth, and I will tell you now: He was admired, loved, cheered, honored, respected. In life as well as in death. A great man, he is. A great man, he was. A great man he will be. He died that day because his body had served its purpose. His soul had done what it came to do, learned what it came to learn, and then was free to leave. And I knew, as Denny sped me toward the doctor who would fix me, that if I had already accomplished what I set out to accomplish here on earth, if I had already learned what I was meant to learn, I would have left the curb one second later than I had, and I would have been killed instantly by that car. But I was not killed. Because I was not finished. I still had work to do.
— Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain
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
My best day ever. Got up. Had breakfast. Came to school. Bored, as usual. Wishing I wasn't there, like usual. Kids ignoring me, suits me fine. Sitting with the other retards—we’re so special. Wasting my time. Yesterday was the same, and it's gone, anyway. Tomorrow may never come. There is only today. This is the best day and the worst day. Actually it's crap.
— Rachel Ward, Numbers
Warmblood now a bloodborne death,Will rob your body of it's breathMark your skin and seal your fate The Underland becomes a plate
— Suzanne Collins, Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods
Mithorden said it well," she said finally. "It's worshipping death. They say they follow light. But, in the end, they're really following desolation, division, the end of things. You should hear their prophecies -- war, destruction, only special chosen people are spared." She felt sad and angry. Worse, she wondered to what ends people who believed these things would go to assert their views.
— Robert Fanney
He made me feel unhinged . . . like he could take me apart and put me back together again and again.
— Chelsie Shakespeare
The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.
— Guy de Maupassant, The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One
I've changed my ways a little, I cannot nowRun with you in the evenings along the shore,Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment,You see me there.
— Robinson Jeffers
Did she say anything before she died?" he asked."Yes," the surgeon said. "She said, 'Forgive him'""Forgive him?" my father asked."I think she was referring to the drunk driver who killed her."Wow.My grandmother's last act on earth was a call for forgiveness, love and tolerance.She wanted us to forgive Gerald, the dumb-ass Spokane Indian alcoholic who ran her over and killed her.I think My Dad wanted to go find Gerald and beat him to death.I think my mother would have helped him.I think I would have helped him, too.But my grandmother wanted us to forgive her murderer.Even dead, she was a better person than us.
— Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
I love you," he said, his voice catching. "When I thought you were going to die, I wanted to die.
— Eloisa James, When Beauty Tamed the Beast
War is not just the business of death, it is the antitheses of life.
— Joss Whedon
She had no time for sleep, with the weight of the world upon her shoulders. And she feared to dream. Sleep is a little death, dreams the whisperings of the Other, who would drag us all into his eternal night.
— George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
It's okay if you want to go. Everyone wants you to stay. I want you to stay more than I've ever wanted anything in my life. But that's what I want and I could see why it might not be what you want. So I just wanted to tell you that I understand if you go. It's okay if you have to leave us. It's okay if you want to stop fighting.
— Gayle Forman
When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.
— David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it.
— Gail Caldwell, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship
...what happens when you returnand find nothingbut a hollowed shell,shingles and floor,walls and echoesand the light that lead you herehas now burned outand the ones who built ithave traveled afarand you cant go to them,no matter what shoes you wear.
— Kellie Elmore, Magic in the Backyard
Pentru mine, moartea este doar hotarul unde încetează să mai existe "mâine". Numai până acolo poți să iubești, să visezi, să regreți. Brusc, tot ce n-ai făcut va rămâne pentru totdeauna nefăcut.
— Octavian Paler, Deșertul pentru totdeauna
We're all dead the moment we're born. Just, some of us get there faster than others.
— Alex Scarrow, The Eternal War
But all that is warm will go cold. My ears will fall off and my eyes will melt. My mouth will be clamped shut. My lips will turn to glue....No taste or smell or touch or sound.Nothing to look at. Total emptiness for ever.
— Jenny Downham, Before I Die
If you are a Buddhist, inspire yourself by thinking of the bodhisattva. If you are a Christian, think of the Christ, who came not to be served by others but to serve them in joy, in peace, and in generosity. For these things, these are not mere words, but acts, which go all the way, right up to their last breath. Even their death is a gift, and resurrection is born from this kind of death. (157)
— Jean-Yves Leloup, Compassion and Meditation: The Spiritual Dynamic between Buddhism and Christianity
As for my own part I care not for death, for all men are mortal; and though I be a woman yet I have as good a courage answerable to my place as ever my father had. I am your anointed Queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything. I thank God I am indeed endowed with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat I were able to live in any place in Christendom.
— Elizabeth I, Collected Works
I will guard you from Death, for I have no fear of him.
— Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
Because the plan God has for each of our lives isn't always the same plan we have for ourselves, Grace. Sometimes, our deaths have more of an impact than our births. It can inspire people to do great things, even greater than they would have had the deaths not happened at all.
— S.L. Naeole, Falling From Grace
He loved me and I loved him, but the number in my head was telling me that he was going to die today. And the numbers had never been wrong.
— Rachel Ward, Numbers
Life will be wonderful when men no longer fear dying. When the last superstitions are thrown out and we meet death with the same equanimity as life. No longer will children's minds be twisted by evil gods whose fantastic origin is in those barbaric tribes who feared death and lightning, who feared life. That's it: life is the villain to to those who preach reward in death, through grace and eternal bliss, or through dark revenge.
— Gore Vidal, Messiah
We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say so we represent that hour to ourselves as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time, it never occurs to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned, or may signify that death — or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again — may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon every hour of which has already been allotted to some occupation. You make a point of taking your drive every day so that in a month’s time you will have had the full benefit of the fresh air; you have hesitated over which cloak you will take, which cabman to call, you are in the cab, the whole day lies before you, short because you have to be at home early, as a friend is coming to see you; you hope that it will be as fine again to-morrow; and you have no suspicion that death, which has been making its way towards you along another plane, shrouded in an impenetrable darkness, has chosen precisely this day of all days to make its appearance, in a few minutes’ time, more or less, at the moment when the carriage has reached the Champs-Elysées.
— Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way
Look at the stupid, poor people. Look at the stupid, poor, burned-out people. Look at the stupid, poor, burned-out people, look at their dead baby. It's death porn for the masses. 
— Laurie Halse Anderson, Catalyst
This feather stirs; she lives! if it be so, it is a chance which does redeem all sorrows that ever I have felt.
— William Shakespeare, King Lear
But thoughts the slave of life, and life, Time’s fool,And Time, that takes survey of all the world,Must have a stop.
— William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1
Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.
— Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men
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
Do I fear death? No, I am not afraid of being dead because there's nothing to be afraid of, I won't know it. I fear dying, of dying I feel a sense of waste about it and I fear a sordid death, where I am incapacitated or imbecilic at the end which isn't something to be afraid of, it's something to be terrified of.
— Christopher Hitchens
She died in my arms, saying, "I don't want to die." That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Even her name seemed empty, as though it had detached itself from her and was floating untethered in his mind. How am I supposed to live without you? It was not a matter of the body; his body would carry on as usual. The problem was located in the word how: he would live, but without Elspeth the flavour, the manner, the method of living were lost to him. He would have to relearn solitude.
— Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry
...all of our laments could not add a single second to her life, not one additional beat of the heart, nor a breath. 
— Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
We cry coming into the world, as everyone around us laughs with joy. And we laugh with joy leaving this world, when everyone around us cries.
— Wendy Corsi Staub, Awakening