c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don't like at all and would like to avoid. It's not as if the whole thing has not happened before, it's not as if people have not been dying all along and each person left behind is the first person ever left behind in the world. What to make of it? Why can’t everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can’t go on and on, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it’s so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you could survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go.
— Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother
Of all the ways I had imagined my death, getting beaten by my zombified mentor while trapped by a cannibalistic window handle wasn’t one of them
— Anton Strout, Dead To Me
Camels can go many weeks without drinking anything at all. The notion that they cache water in their humps is pure myth—their humps are made of fat, and water is stored in their body tissues. While other mammals draw water from bloodstreams when faced with dehydration, leading to death by volume shock, camels tap the water in their tissues, keeping their blood volume stable. Though this reduces the camel’s bulk, they can lose up to a third of their body weight with no ill effects, which they can replace astonishingly quickly, as they are able to drink up to forty gallons in a single watering.” (pp.69-70)
— Michael Benanav, Men of Salt: Crossing the Sahara on the Caravan of White Gold
Susan's gotta poker, you know," it said, as if anxious to be helpful. WELL, WELL. INDEED. MY GOODNESS ME. week she picked up a bogey by its nose."Death tried to imagine this. He felt sure he'd heard the sentence wrong, but it didn't sound a whole lot better however he rearranged the words.
— Terry Pratchett
For the first time in my life I tasted death, and death tasted bitter, for death is birth, is fear and dread of some terrible renewal.
— Hermann Hesse, Demian. Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;Make dust our paper and with rainy eyesWrite sorrow on the bosom of the earth,Let's choose executors and talk of wills
— William Shakespeare, Richard II
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
Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.
— Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces
So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
— George Orwell, 1984
…but there they lay, sprawled across the field, craved far more by the vultures than by wives.
— Homer, The Iliad
The reaper does not listen to the harvest.
— Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
O, that this too too solid flesh would meltThaw and resolve itself into a dew!Or that the Everlasting had not fix'dHis canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,Seem to me all the uses of this world!Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,That grows to seed; things rank and gross in naturePossess it merely. That it should come to this!But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:So excellent a king; that was, to this,Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my motherThat he might not beteem the winds of heavenVisit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!Must I remember? why, she would hang on him,As if increase of appetite had grownBy what it fed on: and yet, within a month--Let me not think on't--Frailty, thy name is woman!--A little month, or ere those shoes were oldWith which she follow'd my poor father's body,Like Niobe, all tears:--why she, even she--O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,Would have mourn'd longer--married with my uncle,My father's brother, but no more like my fatherThan I to Hercules: within a month:Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tearsHad left the flushing in her galled eyes,She married. O, most wicked speed, to postWith such dexterity to incestuous sheets!It is not nor it cannot come to good:But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
The spirit who inhabits her animates us all. Destroy the host, you destroy the power. The young die first; the old wither slowly; the eldest perhaps would go last. But she is the Queen of the Damned, and the Damned can't live without her.
— Anne Rice, The Queen of the Damned
As I would soon learn myself, cleaning up what a parent leaves behind stirs up dust, both literal and metaphorical. It dredges up memories. You feel like you’re a kid again, poking around in your parents’ closet, only this time there’s no chance of getting in trouble, so you don’t have to be so sure that everything gets put back exactly where it was before you did your poking around. Still, you hope to find something, or maybe you fear finding something, that will completely change your conception of the parent you thought you knew.
— Roz Chast
The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.
— Gail Caldwell, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship
Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.
— E.L. Doctorow
Forget it. Never explain
—  never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can't.
WHAT FOR IS THIS BOX PADDED? IS IT TO BE SAT ON? CAN IT BE THAT IT IS CAT-FLAVOURED?
— Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
Our life is composed of events and states of mind. How ewe appraise our life from our deathbed will be predicated not only on what came to us in life but how we lived with it. It will not be simply illness or health, riches or poverty, good luck or bad, which ultimately define whether we believe we have had a good life or not, but the quality of our relationship to these situations: the attitudes of our states of mind. (34)
— Stephen Levine, A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last
Just know I amNot there to catch youBut I am there for you
— Caleb Warta, My Sanity: The Ramblings of a Mad Man
We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")
— Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Dragon: Fifteen Stories
And often the worst thing wasn't the victims--they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen. (Mystic River)
— Dennis Lehane
Death is not the end death can never be the end. Death is the road. Life is the traveller. The Soul is the Guide
— Sri Chinmoy
I lost Susy thirteen years ago; I lost her mother--her incomparable mother!--five and a half years ago; Clara has gone away to live in Europe and now I have lost Jean. How poor I am, who was once so rich! . . . Jean lies yonder, I sit here; we are strangers under our own roof; we kissed hands good-by at this door last night--and it was forever, we never suspecting it. She lies there, and I sit here--writing, busying myself, to keep my heart from breaking. How dazzling the sunshine is flooding the hills around! It is like a mockery. Seventy-four years ago twenty-four days. Seventy-four years old yesterday. Who can estimate my age today?
— Mark Twain
And here face down beneath the sunAnd here upon earth's noonward heightTo feel the always coming onThe always rising of the night
— Archibald MacLeish, Collected Poems, 1917-1982
Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on death's silent ship always scan the dock for faces of the long-departed?
— Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden
die daily.hourly, if you'vegot the energy.
— Sherwin Tjia, The World Is a Heartbreaker
Keisuke: "It's alright for you to kill someone?"Akira: "As long as they have tags. According to the rules, if there's three people present, it's an official battle. I'm not sure how you're supposed to start it, though."Keisuke: "So killing people is just a game, huh?"Akira: "It's the only way to survive.
— Suguro Chayamachi, Togainu No Chi Volume 1
Losing Chloe had been like reading a wonderfulook only to realize that all the pages past a certain point were blank.
— Jodi Picoult, Salem Falls
seeing a woman cough today made me sense a vague fear of death
— Brandon Scott Gorrell
You can't drown yourself that simply. All good suicides involve speed and irreversibility, because the body will always move to protect itself against the sicko mind trying to do it in.
— Josephine Humphreys, Dreams of Sleep
Attention, God the Judge, God the Father, who Art in Heaven, give me one miracle, please. If You exist as I know You do, even if no one else in the world believes in You, please give me a brain tumor. Please tear my limbs from their sockets and let the backseat and my older sister be totally covered with blood. Please make me dumb and blind and deaf, please make me a martyr, please, dear heavenly Father. Tear my heart right from my chest. Drive spikes into my eyes and let hot lava shoot out of my mouth. Make me silent and thoroughly dead, but please hurry. Before we get home, before we reach the next stoplight, let the only sound be no sound, the silence of my death burning in the empty sky. If You are a mighty and true God, if You are not just a dream I have made up, please, before another hour, another minute passes, let the wire in my bra poke through my heart. Dear Lord, please, please, give me this one miracle. I have begged You every day, every evening, so please, let Your will be done, let Your will be done. Give me a gruesome death as fast as You possibly can. Thank you, God. Amen.
— Joe Meno, The Great Perhaps
Feel completely unable to do anything. Try to picture your life in five years. It really seems like you will be dead.
— Megan Boyle
Well, as to that, all I'll say is, you can't take out a fellow's heart before he's ready to give it up.
— Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye
I have triumphed over both life and death because I no longer desire to live, nor do I any longer fear to die.
— Nawal El-Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
— Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome. your life?
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
Birth and death - what could be more monstrous than that? We like to deceive ourselves and call it wondrous and beautiful and majestic, but it's freakish, let's face it.
— Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance
but as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certain fatal cliffside fall—falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else's degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves.
— Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Maybe it's wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either.
— Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow
When I die, nieces, I want to be cremated, my ashes taken up in a bush plane and sprinkled onto the people in town below. Let them think my body is snowflakes, sticking in their hair and on their shoulders like dandruff.
— Joseph Boyden, Through Black Spruce
Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,when I come backwe will go out together,we will walk out together among,the ten thousand things,each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.
— Galway Kinnell
Time erodes us all.
— Meg Rosoff, What I Was
I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian
Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
— Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
In her mind's eye she saw it, saw it all at last: the rolling armies and the flames of battle; the graves and pits and dying cries of a hundred million souls; the spreading darkness, like a black wing stretching over the earth; the last, bitter hours of cruelty and sorrow, and the terrible, final flights; death's great dominion over all, and, at the last, empty cities, becalmed by the silence of a hundred years. Already these things were coming to pass.
— Justin Cronin, The Passage
In a world where the dead have returned to life, the word" trouble' loses much of its meaning.
— Dennis Hopper
Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a thousand feet high, open to the sky, life a woman undressing before an intruder and provoking him to rape her. We ring Russia's borders with missile-launching pads, and then scream that she's threatening us. In all history there's never been a more lurid mass example of the sadist-masochist expression of the thanatos instinct than the present conduct of the United States. The Nazis by comparison were Eagle Scouts.
— Herman Wouk, Don't Stop the Carnival
The world begins anew with every birth, my father used to say. He forgot to say, with every death it ends. Or did not think he needed to. Because for a goodly part of his life he worked in a graveyard.
— Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
There's a gentle sigh which descends like billowing silk upon the soul that accepts its coming death. It's a gentle pocket of air in the turbulence of everyday life... the silk settles around you as if it has been drifting towards the earth forever and has finally found it's target. The flag of defeat has been mercifully dropped and, in this action, the loss is not so bad. Defeat itself is defeated by the embrace of defeat, and death is swallowed up in victory.
— Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle
And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten—since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn't as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder!
— Albert Camus, The Stranger
My religious beliefs teach me to feel as safe in battle as in bed. God has fixed the time of my death. I do not concern myself with that, but to be always ready whenever it may overtake me. That is the way all men should live, and all men would be equally brave.
— Stonewall Jackson
Because there was only one thing worse than dying. And that was knowing you were going to die. And where. And how. (“Death Ship”)
— Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1
Can I just say that dying sucks? All that bullshit about seeing the light and having this inner peace, blah, blah, blah. It's crap.
— Julie Kenner, Tainted
The day she was born,her grandfather made her a ring of silver and a polished stone, because he loved her already.
— Aliki
In every person, there is a doer and a devil. With every passing days, the doer dies and a devil has to rise.
— Santosh Kalwar
We do not play on Graves—Because there isn't Room—Besides—it isn't even—it slantsAnd People come—And put a Flower on it—And hang their faces so—We're fearing that their Hearts will drop—And crush our pretty play—And so we move as farAs Enemies—away—Just looking round to see how farIt is—Occasionally— 
— Emily Dickinson
The dead do not harm us, only the alive.
— Rosie Thomas, Iris & Ruby
If you remembered somebody was as real as yourself, how could you kill anybody?
— Sena Jeter Naslund, Four Spirits
If I could make a dream real, I would not kill anything unless it could never be changed at heart.
— Robert Fanney, The War of Mists
It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness alike were really only appreciable with one's legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave.
— Walter de la Mare, The Return
Be sure that head and heart were laidIn wisdom down, content to die.Be sure he faced the Starless SkyUnduped, unmurmuring, unafraid.(“The Passing of Bierce”)
— George Sterling, The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror
When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can’t go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they’re covered with soil or stones?
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays cosily tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
— Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories
Poets are interested primarily in death and commas. 
— Carolyn Kizer
Life seemed to him to be a narrow cage, and her iron bars were many and dense, and there was only one way out.
— Leonid Andreyev
But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near
— Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress
Not only did I rediscover every experience of my life, I had to live each unfulfilled desire as well—as though they’d been fulfilled. I saw that what transpires in the mind is just as real as any flesh and blood occurrence. What had only been imagination in life, now became tangible, each fantasy a full reality. I lived them all—while, at the same time, standing to the side, a witness to their, often, intimate squalor. A witness cursed with total objectivity.
— Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come
Suicide is an attack on society--an attack on its omnipotence, on its denial of death, and on its own despair.
— Robert E. Neale, The Art of Dying
Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages
— Elias Canetti
A child's reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its vast sources of recuperation, he is bound to envisage, at once, the very worst; yet at the same time, because of his inability to imagine death, the worst remains totally unreal to him. Gerard went on repeating: "Paul's dying; Paul's going to die"' but he did not believe it. Paul's death would be part of the dream, a dream of snow, of journeying forever.
— Jean Cocteau, The Holy Terrors
Just for a while": Death's opening chat-up line in His great seduction, before he drugged you with soporific comforts, distracted you with minor luxuries and ensnared you with long-term payment plans.Join the Rat Race "just for a while."Concentrate on your career "just for a while."Move in with your girlfriend "just for a while."Find a bigger place, out in the burbs "just for a while."Lie down in that wooden box "just for a while.
— Christopher Brookmyre, A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away
People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
— P.D. James, Innocent Blood
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
The South-wind bringsLife, sunshine and desire,And on every mount and meadowBreathes aromatic fire;But over the dead he has no power,The lost, the lost, he cannot restore;And, looking over the hills, I mournThe darling who shall not return.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
If I should go before the rest of youBreak not a flower nor inscribe a stone, Nor when I'm gone speak in a Sunday voice But be the usual selves that I have known. Weep if you must, Parting is hell, But life goes on, So sing as well.
— Joyce Grenfell
She was made mostly of coffee and empty spaces.
— Adelise M. Cullens, Dead Bunnies Make All Eight Of Me Cry
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval
— George Santayana
I didn't cry when they buried my father - I wouldn't let myself. I didn't cry when they buried my sister. On Thursday night, with my family asleep upstairs, my eyes filled as Agassi and Marcos Baghdatis played out the fifth set of their moving second-round match.
— Greg Garber
While death and darkness girdle meI grope for immortality.
— Lionel Pigot Johnson
Again the ranch is on the market and they’ve shipped out the last of the horses, paid everybody off the day before, the owner saying, ‘Give them to the real estate shark, I’m out a here,” dropping the keys in Ennis’s hand. He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks up another job, yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream.
— Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain
I could picture how Caprice was before we lost her. Dark hair, beautiful smile, intelligent hazel eyes, quick wit.Now gone.Just gone.Like a chessboard where suddenly one of the knights disappeared. A blank spot on the board of life that could never truly be replaced because no two things were alike, no two beings alike.
— Cheyenne McCray, Demons Not Included
He was just a small church parson when the	war broke out, and heLooked and dressed and acted like all parsons	that we see.He wore the cleric's broadcloth and he hooked	his vest behind.But he had a man's religion and he had a stong	man's mind.And he heard the call to duty, and he quit his	church and went.And he bravely tramped right with 'em every-	where the boys were sent.He put aside his broadcloth and he put the	khaki on;Said he'd come to be a soldier and was going	to live like one.Then he'd refereed the prize fights that the boys	pulled off at night,And if no one else was handy he'd put on the	gloves and fight.He wasn't there a fortnight ere he saw the sol-	diers' needs,And he said: "I'm done with preaching; this	is now the time for deeds."He learned the sound of shrapnel, he could tell	the size of shellFrom the shriek it make above him, and he knew	just where it fell.In the front line trench he laboured, and he knew	the feel of mud,And he didn't run from danger and he wasn't	scared of blood.He wrote letters for the wounded, and he cheered	them with his jokes,And he never made a visit without passing round the smokes.Then one day a bullet got him, as he knelt be-	side a ladWho was "going west" right speedy, and they	both seemed mighty glad,'Cause he held the boy's hand tighter, and he 	smiled and whispered low,"Now you needn't fear the journey; over there	with you I'll go."And they both passed out together, arm in arm	I think they went.He had kept his vow to follow everywhere the	boys were sent.
— Edgar A. Guest
If one does die taking these drugs, the death is likely to be very peaceful. Morphia is, after all, the goddess of dreams.
— Philip Nitschke
Psychologists have clinically observed that overly prolonged grief in the bereaved usually signifies a poor relationship with the one who died.
— Robert E. Neale, The Art of Dying
I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room
— Gustave Flaubert
Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition that really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be their last, inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another. 
— Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh
To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.
— Tana French, In the Woods
With The Dread, first kiss was the beginning. Second kiss was the end.
— Luke  Taylor, The Knight Ascendant
A little smoke lost in the air, that was the life of a man.
— W. Somerset Maugham
Nothing in life was as ugly as death.
— Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
There are moments of despair that come sometimes, when night sets in and a white fog presses against the windows. Then our house changes its shape, rears up and becomes a place of despair. Then fear and rage run simply--and the thought of Death as a friend. This is the simplest of thoughts, that Death must come when we call, although he is a god.
— Stevie Smith
He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.
— Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
Man (and woman) has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. A human being may be clinically alive and yet, despite all appearances, spiritually dead.
— Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
YOU'RE ONLY PUTTING OFF THE INEVITABLE, he said.That's what being alive is all about.
— Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
In spite of my suffering, at the thought that I was sure to end up by killing myself, I cried aloud and burst into tears.
— Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun
I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am.
— J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
Madness doesn’t get off wearing gloves. It needs to feel skin on skin, smell the blood and shit as it brings itself off.
— Benjamin R.  Smith, Atlas
Once the game is over, the King and the pawn go back in the same box.
— Italian proverb
All his life the example of a syllogism he had studied in Kiesewetter's logic - "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal" - had seemed to him to be true only in relation to Caius the man, man in general, and it was quite justified , but he wasn't Caius and he wasn't man in general, and he had always been something quite, quite special apart from all other beings; he was Vanya, with Mama, with Papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with his toys and the coachman, with Nyanya, then with Katenka, with all the joys, sorrows, passions of childhood, boyhood, youth. Did Caius know the smell of the striped leather ball Vanya loved so much?: Did Caius kiss his mother's hand like that and did the silken folds of Caius's mother's dress rustle like that for him? Was Caius in love like that? Could Caius chair a session like that? And Caius is indeed mortal and it's right that he should die, but for me, Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my feelings and thoughts - for me it's quite different. And it cannot be that I should die. It would be too horrible.
— Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych
Death was for-the other people.
— Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None
They looked to each other for support, for strength, and at times, motivation, to remember why and for whom they lived.
— Sage Steadman, Upon Destiny's Song
The living used to wonder what happened after death. She said that whole religions were born and evolved around this one simple uncertainty.
— Carrie Ryan, The Forest of Hands and Teeth
The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.
— George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Five Volumes in One
Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.
— George Eliot
You smell so good,""No, I don't, I smell like death.""You're crazy, you're not dead. You do not smell like death.""I was dead a long time.""And now you're not. Hence the alive smell.
— Amy Tintera
Not that there's anything wrong with just lying around on your back. In it's way, rotting is interesting too, as we will see. It's just that there are other ways to spend your time as a cadaver.
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Ah earth you old extinguisher.
— Samuel Beckett, Happy Days
In the last moment of his life, he turned his fading "flame of life" into a huge fire that enveloped the world. I've never laughed more than on that day...!! I've never cried more than on that day... I've never drank more either..!! He was our captain... and he was a magnificent man...!!!
— Rayleigh
Death was not the scariest thing out there; no, the denial of it could be far worse.
— Nenia Campbell, Cease and Desist
One forgets the dead quite quickly; one doesn't wonder about the dead-what is he doing now, who is he with?
— Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter
Thank God,my name isn’t in the list of thosewho died or werekilled yesterday!
— Suman Pokhrel
A man who takes into consideration the feelings of others even when arranging the manner of his own death shows a nobility of character which compels the admiration of all classes.
— Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman
The perfect being, huh? There is no such thing as perfect in this world. That may sound cliché, but it’s the truth. The average person admires perfection and seeks to obtain it. But, what’s the point of achieving perfection? There is none. Nothing. Not a single thing. I loathe perfection! If something is perfect, then there is nothing left. There is no room for imagination. No place left for a person to gain additional knowledge or abilities. Do you know what that means? For scientists such as ourselves, perfection only brings despair. It is our job to create things more wonderful than anything before them, but never to obtain perfection. A scientist must be a person who finds ecstasy while suffering from that antimony. In short, the moment that foolishness left your mouth and reached my ears, you had already lost. Of course, that’s assuming you are a scientist
— Tite Kubo
There are two kinds of people in this world, son. Those who save lives, and those who take lives.""And what of those who protect and defend? Those who save lives by taking lives?""That's like trying to stop a storm by blowing harder. Ridiculous. You can't protect by killing.
— Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings
This is where the evening splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard, and make a wish.
— Richard Siken, Crush
Human stories are practically always about one thing, really, aren't they? Death. The inevitability of death. . .. . . (quoting an obituary) 'There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that ever happens to man is natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident, and even if he knows it he would sense to it an unjustifiable violation.' Well, you may agree with the words or not, but those are the key spring of The Lord Of The Rings
— J.R.R. Tolkien
There are a million things in this world that can end you, that can in one second obliterate the life you work so hard to keep alive. Our lives are structured around not dying. Eating, sleeping, looking both ways before you cross the street. It's all, all of it, to keep us safe from the thing that we know is going to get us anyway. It doesn't even make sense, if you think about it. It's the world's biggest joke. Our entire lives are set up around not dying, knowing all the while that it's the one thing we can't avoid.
— Rebecca Serle, When You Were Mine
In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground.
— Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife
Those who live in memories are never really dead.
— Kate Morton, The House at Riverton
For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel:Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him!This was the most unkindest cut of all
— William Shakespeare
The bed we loved in was a spinning world of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seaswhere we would dive for pearls. My lover’s wordswere shooting stars which fell to earth as kisseson these lips; my body now a softer rhymeto his, now echo, assonance; his toucha verb dancing in the centre of a noun.Some nights, I dreamed he’d written me, the beda page beneath his writer’s hands. Romanceand drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -I hold him in the casket of my widow’s headas he held me upon that next best bed.
— Carol Ann Duffy, The World's Wife
And now let us love and take that which is given us, and be happy; for in the grave there is no love and no warmth, nor any touching of the lips. Nothing perchance, or perchance but bitter memories of what might have been.
— H. Rider Haggard, She
Being alone can be good. It's easy to find peace alone. But sometimes, being alone is a king of death.
— Dean Koontz, Chase
She had storms all her life, but she died peacefully.
— Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939
Then the voice - which identified itself as the prince of this world, the only being who really knows what happens on Earth - began to show him the people around him on the beach. The wonderful father who was busy packing things up and helping his children put on some warm clothes and who would love to have an affair with his secretary, but was terrified on his wife's response. His wife who would like to work and have her independence, but who was terrified of her husband's response. The children who behave themselves because they were terrified of being punished. The girl who was reading a book all on her own beneath the sunshade, pretending she didn't care, but inside was terrified of spending the rest of her life alone. The boy running around with a tennis racuqet , terrified of having to live up to his parents' expectations. The waiter serving tropical drinks to the rich customers and terrified that he could be sacket at any moment. The young girl who wanted to be a dance, but who was studying law instead because she was terrified of what the neighbours might say. The old man who didn't smoke or drink and said he felt much better for it, when in truth it was the terror of death what whispered in his ears like the wind. The married couple who ran by, splashing through the surf, with a smile on their face but with a terror in their hearts telling them that they would soon be old, boring and useless. The man with the suntan who swept up in his launch in front of everybody and waved and smiled, but was terrified because he could lose all his money from one moment to the next. The hotel owner, watching the whole idyllic scene from his office, trying to keep everyone happy and cheerful, urging his accountants to ever greater vigilance, and terrified because he knew that however honest he was government officials would still find mistakes in his accounts if they wanted to. There was terror in each and every one of the people on that beautiful beach and on that breathtakingly beautiful evening. Terror of being alone, terror of the darkness filling their imaginations with devils, terror of doing anything not in the manuals of good behaviour, terror of God's punishing any mistake, terror of trying and failing, terror of succeeding and having to live with the envy of other people, terror of loving and being rejected, terror of asking for a rise in salary, of accepting an invitation, of going somewhere new, of not being able to speak a foreign language, of not making the right impression, of growing old, of dying, of being pointed out because of one's defects, of not being pointed out because of one's merits, of not being noticed either for one's defects of one's merits.
— Paulo Coelho, The Devil and Miss Prym
I find myself thinking about my ongoing existence as a human being and the path that lies ahead of me. Though of course these thoughts lead to but one place - death.
— Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes
I won't be sad too often,If they bury me in the libraryWith bookworms in my coffin.
— J. Patrick Lewis
Twas something else. I had come to hate her, you see. I had come to wish her dead, and that was what held me back.
— Stephen King, Full Dark, No Stars
…the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.
— W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz
He danced with the sky instead, and the sky dropped him like a rotten plum.
— Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone
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
Sometimes I hear the world discussed as the realm of men. This is not my experience. I have watched men fall to the ground like leaves. They were swept up as memories, and burned. History owns them. These men were petrified in both senses of the word: paralyzed and turned to stone. Their refusal to express feeling killed them. Anachronistic men. Those poor, poor boys.
— Antonella Gambotto-Burke, The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide
There was something about other people's grief that was so exposing, so personal, that she felt she shouldn't be looking.
— Jane Fallon, Getting Rid Of Matthew
If only certain things had been preventable, his life would have unfurled in front of him as intended, like a lush Oriental carpet. No surprises, no detours. Just a thick tapestry of days and nights that at the end of his time on earth, he could roll up and proudly claim as his own.
— Shilpa Agarwal, Haunting Bombay
If you truly live, you will never truly die!
— Melanie M. Grace
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
If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.
— Peter Heller, The Dog Stars
Who said, 'All Time's delightHath she for narrow bed;Life's troubled bubble broken'? ---That's what I said.
— Walter de la Mare, Peacock Pie
Dark circles under my eyes sink deeper and deeper into my skull, in contrast to my pale skin there is an undeniable resemblance to a fresh corpse.
— Dee Remy
Why did I not die? More miserable than man ever was before, why did I not sink into forgetfulness and rest? Death snatches away many blooming children, the only hopes of their doting parents: how many brides and youthful lovers have been one day in the bloom of health and hope, and the next a prey for worms and the decay of the tomb! Of what materials was I made, that I could thus resist so many shocks, which, like the turning of the wheel, continually renewed the torture?But I was doomed to live;
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
The best way to be appreciative for your life is to live it; don't die for any other reason but love. Dreams are what guide us, art is what defines us, math is makes it all possible, and love is what lights our way.
— Mike  Norton, White Mountain
His [Death] voice is cold at first, John. It seems unfeeling. But if you listen without fear, you find that when he speaks, the most ordinary words become poetry. When he stands close to you, your life becomes a song, a praise. When he touches you, your smallest talents become gold; the most ordinary loves break your heart with their beauty.
— Martine Leavitt, Keturah and Lord Death
Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back -- to be sucked back -- into it?
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,And therefore I forbid my tears.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
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
Losing a mate to death is devastating but it's not a personal attack like divorce. When somebody you love stops loving you and walks away, it's an insult beyond comparison.
— Sue Merrell, Great News Town
Human beings are the only ones in nature who are aware that they will die. For that reason and only for that reason, I have a profound respect for the human race, and I believe that its future is going to be much better than its present. Even knowing that their days are numbered and that everything will end when they least expect it, people make of their lives a battle that is worthy of a being with eternal life. What people regard as vanity-leaving great works, having children, acting in such a way as to prevent one's name from being forgotten- I regard as the highest expression of human dignity.
— Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage
Flowers, cold from the dew,And autumn's approaching breath,I pluck for the warm, luxuriant braids,Which haven't faded yet.In their nights, fragrantly resinous,Entwined with delightful mystery,They will breathe in her springlikeExtraordinary beauty.But in a whirlwind of sound and fire,From her shing head they will flutterAnd falland before herThey will die, faintly fragrant still.And, impelled by faithful longing,My obedient gaze will feast upon themWith a reverent hand,Love will gather their rotting remains.
— Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova
The more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life - that Death would come and end everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and that there was no help for it, Yes it was terrible but true
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Still, being fragile creatures, humans always try to hide from themselves the certainty that they will die. They do not see that it is death itself that motivates them to do the best things in their lives. They are afraid to step into the dark, afraid of the unknown, and their only way of conquering that fear is to ignore the fact that their days are numbered. They do not see that with an awareness of death, they would be able to be even more daring, to go much further in their daily conquests, because then they would have nothing to lose- for death itself is inevitable.
— Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage
Someday you will die, and until you know that, you're useless to me.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
This was their way of honoring the dead. The story over, the demands of their own hard, rough lives began to re-assert themselves in their hearts, in their nerves, their blood and appetites. Would that the dead were not dead! But there is grass that must be eaten, pellets that must be chewed, hraka that must be passed, holes that must be dug, sleep that must be slept. Odysseus brings not one man to shore with him. Yet he sleeps sound beside Calypso and when he wakes thinks only of Penelope.
— Richard Adams, Watership Down
If you heard your lover scream in the next roomand you ran in and saw his pinkie on the floor, in a small puddle of blood.You wouldn't rush to the pinkie and say, 'Darling, are you OK? 'No, you'd wrap your arms around his shoulders and worry about the pinkie later.The same holds true if you heard the scream, ran in and saw his hand or -god forbid- his whole arm.But suppose you hear your lover scream in the next room, and you run in and his head is on the floor next to his body.Which do you rush to and comfort first?
— Jeffrey McDaniel
Everything- even me, and one day even Charlotte- must come to end.
— Avery Williams, The Alchemy of Forever
Was there any meaning to life or to war, that two men should sit together and jump within seconds of each other and yet never meet on the ground below?
— David Kenyon Webster, Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich
The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable.
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
My father will find you and kill you for what you have done.” She said to him solemnly.Maligo towered over her, a leering smile twisting his dark face.“You would have to consider yourself lucky if you ever see your father again. Even if it is while he watches me take your life.” He snarled, allowing a haughty smirk creep across his face.
— B.C. Morin, Mark of the Princess
Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.
— Dan Chaon, Stay Awake
It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I know who you are and I am ready. Not that I want to go, of course, but I will come." Those souls are always light because more of them have been put out.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Life is the death of all of us.' - Tristan
— Rowan Speedwell, Kindred Hearts
People aren't often asked to make life or death decisions. There are no causes to die for. You can go through life never knowing which of your friends would really come through for you
— Bella Pollen, Midnight Cactus
I doubt love can do little else, if it cannot bring back people back from the dead.
— James Potter
But in battle you cannot tell another when it is his time to enter the World-to-Come, nor is it possible to keep any man in this world when he wishes to leave it behind.
— Alice Hoffman, The Dovekeepers
But unless we determine to take action,' said the old man querulously, as if struggling against something deeply insouciant in his nature, 'then we shall all be destroyed, we shall all die. Surely we care about that?' 'Not enough to want to get killed over it,' said Ford.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything