c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The mental pictures I have of my parents and grandparents and my childhood are beginning to break up into small fragments and get blown away from me into empty space, and the same wind is sucking me toward it ever so gently, so gently as not even to raise a hair on my head (though the truth is that there are very few of them to be raised). I'm starting to take the idea of death as the end of life somewhat harder than before. I used to wonder why people seemed to think that life is tragic or sad. Isn't it also comic and funny? And beyond all that, isn't it amazing and marvelous? Yes, but only if you have it. And I am starting not to have it. The pictures are disintegrating, as if their molecules were saying, "I've had enough," ready to go somewhere else and form a new configuration. They betray us, those molecules, we who have loved them. They treat us like dirt.
— Ron Padget
The trouble with dying...is that you don't get to see how everything turns out. You won't know the ending.
— Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread
Dying is not dead.
— George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
To Tiffany's surprise, Nanny Ogg was weeping gently. Nanny took another swig from her flagon and wiped her eyes. 'Cryin' helps sometimes,' she said. 'No shame in tears for them as you've loved. Sometimes I remember one of my husbands and shed a tear or two. The memories're there to be treasured, and it's no good to get morbid-like about it.
— Terry Pratchett
All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Moths and flames, mankind and death--there is little difference.
— Sherwin B. Nuland
Don't worry, I plan on living a long time.""Why are you making a bucket list, then?""Because if you wait until you're really dying, it's too late.
— Gayle Forman, Just One Day
Every day we're one day closer to death. But there's no reason to rush into it.
— Susan Beth Pfeffer, Life As We Knew It
A silence followed, while the two men contemplated dying for love.
— Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer
Certain aspects of dying are still a mystery to me now, but as I grow and study life more, the end of my life becomes more of a certain truth.
— Innocent Mwatsikesimbe, Mirror
The motionless person was once full of life in one moment in time. What a misery?
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
A heart? Peppone knows where one is to be met with. There is always someone in the black market in need of dying early.
— Michelle Franklin
Here's the thing," he said. "People see me as a bridge. I'm not as alive as I used to be, but I'm not yet dead. I'm sort of...in-between
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
If we knew a person was going to die, we’d hold harder to the memories.
— Kristin Cashore
What could be more intimate than dying with someone?
— Sarah Lotz, Day Four
No matter what the bards may say, there’s no romance in dying for a man.
— Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea
While I thought that I was learning how to live, I’ve been learning how to die.
— Kami Garcia, Beautiful Chaos
At the last moment she thought, I'm not ready.But she already knew the answer to that.Nobody was ever ready.
— L.J. Smith, Secret Vampire
Life is death we're lengthy at
— Emily Dickinson
He nodded toward the window with the sunshine streaming in. "You see that? You can go out there, outside, anytime. You can run up and down the block and go crazy. I can't do that. I can't go out. I can't run. I can't be out there without fear of getting sick. But you know what? I appreciate that window more than you do.
— Mitch Albom from "Tuesdays with Morrie"
I'm on the last great journey here--and people ant me to tell them what to pack.
— Mitch Albom from "Tuesdays with Morrie"
Ted," he said, "when all this started, I asked myself, 'Am I going to withdraw from the world, like most people do, or am I going to live?" I decided I'm going to live-or at least try to live-the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humor, with composure.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
What is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.
— Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
Here's a secret," I said. "There's a difference between being dead and dying. We're all dying. Some of us die for ninety years, and some of us die for nineteen. But each morning everyone on this planet wakes up one day closer to their death. Everyone. So living and dying are actually different words for the same thing, if you think about it.
— Robyn Schneider, Extraordinary Means
At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change of position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death.
— Gabriel García Márquez
If God shall choose I shall love thee but better after death
— Elizabeth Browning
Death is known only through dying and truth is known only through diving deep within oneself.
— Maitreya Rudrabhayananda, Drop It! Practical Guide to Self Enlightenment
But everyone knows someone who has died, I said. Why is it so hard to think about dying?'Because,' Morrie continued, 'most of us walk around as if we're sleepwalking. We really don't experience the world fully, because we're half asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.'And facing death changes all that?'Oh, yes. You strip away all that stuff and you focus on the essentials. When you realize you are going to die, you see everything much differently.'He sighed. 'Learn how to die, and you learn how to live.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Like a firework, a person’s life flashed brightest right before expiration.
— Katherine McIntyre, Soul Solution
A line that reads, 'Died gallantly' would tell a truer story, often, if it read, 'Died screaming'; and instead of the total number of troops who 'sacrificed' their lives, we might simply chisel onto a block of marble the number of limbs left on the battlefield or in hospitals, the number of body parts unaccounted for, missing in action. Such a memorial would be unthinkable, of course, and I must confess that even I would find it tasteless. But if you want the truth about war, you have to start and end with the screaming.
— Craig Juresevic
But while the thought of being dead seemed appealing, the actual act of dying did not.
— Leslye Walton, The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender
Everything had life to me,’ he heard Enkidu murmur, ‘the sky, the storm, the earth, water, wandering, the moon and its three children, salt, even my hand had life. It’s gone. It’s gone.
— Herbert Mason, The Epic of Gilgamesh
...the existential paradox we all experience; we feel that we are immortal, yet we know that we will die.
— Calvin Trillin
So cold your tears freeze against your cheeks.'It's not my fault,' I told Bear. 'I don't make the weather. You got a beef, take it up with God.' That's what I've been doing a lot lately: taking it up with
— Rick Yancey
One of the difficult things about growing older is that you start losing so many friends. On the other hand, the older you get, the less time you have to wait until you see them again.
— Ron Brackin
I hope I leave this world gracefully, like a pilgrim slips from the back of his donkey at the end of a long ride, like a traveler disembarks from an airplane that has carried him across a great ocean.
— Kim   Wright
I love you," I whisper over and over again. "Don't go," I close my eyes. My tears fall on his cheeks.
— Marie Lu, Champion
How can the boy who stirred an entire nation be dying?
— Marie Lu, Champion
In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one’s final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or “It’s O.K.” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.”People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives.
— Atul Gawande
I don't want--to go--I don't want--to leave you--Eden--
— Marie Lu, Champion
A study led by the Harvard researcher Nicholas Christakis asked the doctors of almost five hundred terminally ill patients to estimate how long they thought their patient would survive, and then followed the patients. Sixty-three per cent of doctors overestimated survival time. Just seventeen per cent underestimated it. The average estimate was five hundred and thirty per cent too high. And, the better the doctors knew their patients, the more likely they were to err.
— Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
If she was going to die she wanted to go out with chocolate in one hand and a shopping bag in the other.
— Caroline Hanson, Love is Darkness
There are no stars, no moon, only knots, only the promise of death. Drums cry out in the abyss and then fade with everything else. Even the shadows fade and all that is left is death. We are all dead, we just haven't figured it out yet.
— Courtney M. Privett, The Shattered Veil
You're right," Early said. "Those are two different things.""What are?", I asked, surprised that he thought I was right about ANYTHING."Dying and sleeping. A person should be able to do one without the other sneaking up on him.
— Clare Vanderpool
But the sons of Men die indeed, and leave the world; wherefore they are called the Guests or the Strangers. Death is their fate, the gift of Illúvatar, which as time wears even the Powers shall envy.
— J.R.R. Tolkien
We are all dead, we just haven't figured it out yet.
— Courtney M. Privett, The Shattered Veil
The Line welcomed rain and sun. Seeds germinated in mass graves, between skulls and femurs and broken pick handles, tendrils rose up alongside dog spikes and clavicles, thrust around teak sleepers and tibias, scapulas, vertebrae, fibulas and femurs.
— Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
All of these people, it was as if they were all turning to gold, all marked with an invisible X on their foreheads, as of course we are, too, the place and time yet to be determined. Yes, we are burning down; time is disintegrating.
— Michael Paterniti
Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he was going out with a rifle in his hand.
— Kelly Moran, Return to Me
Death smiles at us all
—  all we can do is smile back.
What's the advantage of fear or the benefit of regret or the bonus of granting misery a foothold even if death is embracing you? My old abbot used to say, "Life is only precious if you wish it to be." I look at it like the last bite of a wonderful meal. Do you enjoy it, or does the knowledge that there is no more to follow make it so bitter that you would ruin the experience? - Myron on facing death
— Michael J. Sullivan, Heir of Novron
We must be willing to accept the bitter truth that, in the end, we may have to become a burden to those who love us. But it is necessary that we face this also. The full acceptance of our abjection and uselessness is the virtue that can make us and others rich in the grace of God. It takes heroic charity and humility to let others sustain us when we are absolutely incapable of sustaining ourselves. We cannot suffer well unless we see Christ everywhere, both in suffering and in the charity of those who come to the aid of our affliction.
— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
Or perhaps it is because it is so NECESSARY for you to win. It is like a drowning man catching at a straw. You yourself will agree that, unless he were drowning he would not mistake a straw for the trunk of a tree.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gambler
I told my mother he looked like a deflated balloon. Greta said he looked like a small gray moth wrapped in a spider's web. That's because everything about Greta is more beautiful, even the way she says things.
— Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home
The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death.The rest are actors who want me to stay and further the plot.
— Adrienne Rich, Leaflets
No doubt my books too, like my mortal being, would eventually die, one day. But one has to resign oneself to dying. One accepts the thought that in ten years oneself, in a hundred years one's books, will not exist. Eternal duration is no more promised to books than it is to men.
— Marcel Proust, Time Regained
To do more, is not necessarily to do better.
— Katy Butler, Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death
I appreciate the beauty and balm of flowers but I have never enjoyed receiving them because then I have to watch them die, and worse...throw them away.
— Donna Lynn Hope
Things change after you die, though- I guess because dying is about the lonliest thing you can do.
— Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall
Rings and magazines; keychains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random... and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel.
— Stephen King, Insomnia
Eventually our whole world, every culture, will explode and we'll all just be fucking cosmic dust. We'll all dissipate. We'll all be nothing and everything. What's more spiritual than that?
— Dash Shaw
Spring had been the season for dying in the old days. Invalids who had struggled through the dark comfort of winter took fright as the night receded.
— Mavis Gallant
The merciful Providence - or whatever power there is in the universe - has so ordained things that our little world will go on without us. Indeed, it will not miss us for long. It is a comfort to know that the waters close over us quickly. Only a few remember the splash and struggle, and fancy it important, really....I daresay we are making all this fuss for nothing.
— Anne Sullivan Macy
So many die without our caring, decline to silence in rooms beyond hearing. We honor the dead and abhor the dying.- from the story "De Composition
— David Benioff
It means, Day, that you're dying.
— Marie Lu, Prodigy
Why was he laughing? Did he know that he would survive? No. That's impossible. He realized that he would end his life here. He admitted the truth that he would die and laughed. Have you ever seen a pirate laughing on the execution stand?
— Captain Smoker
I'd like to take a long walk, to the edge of something.
— Arthur K. Flam
​"If I was afraid of dying, I couldn't do half the shit I do." I told him.
— Rachel Bach, Heaven's Queen
The thing with dying, well, with death really, is that there's a difference between being someone who knows they can really die at any time and someone who doesn't.
— Jo Walton, Among Others
One day, while life is being incredible and interesting, I’m going to die.
— Agnostic Zetetic
I know I'm not supposed to argue with you when you talk about dying. And yes, you could die, Neil. But I could get hit by a bus and die tomorrow. Either we need to live every single day together like it's our last, or we need to be comfortable with the fact that some times are just sucky times.
— Abigail Barnette, The Girlfriend
It must have been fifty seconds before Doc died.Long time.
— William Goldman, Marathon Man
If you were dying...If you were sixteen and dying...If your blood was spilling out of you, calling to them, the creatures of the night, and you knew you were dying...If you saw their pale faces and the gleam of sharp teeth in the moonlight, and you felt your blood spilling warmly over your hands, and you knew beyond any doubt that you were dying...Wouldn’t you say yes?Yes, turn me.Yes, I want to live.Yes... make me one of you.
— Tamara Summers, Never Bite a Boy on the First Date
I wanted to kill someone and I wanted to die and I wanted to run as far and as fast as I could because she was never coming back. She had fallen off the face of the earth and she was never coming back.
— Melissa Kantor, Maybe One Day
I am not worried about dying, what I am worried about is not living
— Saji Ijiyemi, Don't Die Sitting
In this world, you have to die to find peace.
— D.J. Molles, Aftermath
Stop sleeping, Get to work! You will have much time to sleep when you die.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
We've always done it this way" is invalid when that way hasn't led to more life, greater growth, or maximum efficiency. Take that how you will...business, personally, church, or family. Complacency is too easy to breed, and already has one foot in the grave.
— Aaron W. Matthews
The last good time always comes
— Stephen King, Joyland
You can walk into your room after walking out through the door, but you cannot come out of your grave after being buried into the soil.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Jakie, is it my birthday or am I dying?" (Seeing all her children assembled at her bedside in her last illness.)
— Nancy Astor the Viscountess Astor
You can die from kitsch. And we're close to it.
— John Lamb Lash
I hate my left hand. I hate to look at it. I hate it when it stutters and trembles and reminds me that my identity is gone. But I look at it anyway; because it also reminds me that I'm going to find the boy who took everything away from me. I'm going to kill the boy who killed me, and when I kill him, I'm going to do it with my left hand.
— Katja Millay, The Sea of Tranquility
Though I had no respect for Jack Lewis, I respected the hole in his chest. He was dying, and you owe the dying your attention.
— Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned
But dying is for the sweetest ones. And he remembers sweetness, when life was sweet, and sweetly he was given that other lifetime.
— Raymond Carver, Short Cuts: Selected Stories
the word dyting is not synonymous with the word useless
— Mitch Albom
How fun it would be to bounce on the back of Lidewij Vliegenthart’s bike down the brick streets, her curly red hair blowing into my face, the smell of the canals and cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafés drinking beer, saying their r’s and g’s in a way I’d never learn.	I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I’d never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can’t make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn’t see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
They ought to bury people in hospitals and let sick people get well in the cemeteries.
— Paul Zindel, The Pigman
For a dying man it is not a difficult decision [to agree to become the world's first heart transplant] ... because he knows he is at the end. If a lion chases you to the bank of a river filled with crocodiles, you will leap into the water convinced you have a chance to swim to the other side. But you would not accept such odds if there were no lion.
— Christiaan Barnard
My father was a doctor,' she says, 'a very kind man. He died in the early '70s, relatively young.' She taps the cigarette packet on the table. 'Of lung cancer.''Oh.''But the thing about that is,' she says as she exhales, 'it doesn't take very long at all.
— Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
...nothing more excruciating when you are fighting for your life than to have healthy people round you, squabbling over futilities. Who do you love best, and who most do you want with you? Blithering idiots: it's life itself, can't you see? It's life I love best, and life I want with me. Go hang yourselves, all of you, you're only sapping my strength when most I need it. Leave me in peace and let me grapple.
— A.P., Sabine
A week passed, and Jean Valjean had not taken a step in his room. He still remained in bed. The portress said to her husband:–"The good man upstairs yonder does not get up, he no longer eats, he will not last long. That man has his sorrows, that he has. You won't get it out of my head that his daughter has made a bad marriage."The porter replied, with the tone of marital sovereignty:"If he's rich, let him have a doctor. If he is not rich, let him go without. If he has no doctor he will die.""And if he has one?""He will die," said the porter.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
I learned that dying is just a part of our journey of life. We are all on this journey and dying is a part of it for each of us. That does not mean that hope is hone. Hope just changes to a very realistic, practical hope... Sometimes hope becomes more beautiful than ever in our lives because it is about hope for the present moment and hope that is natural, such as, 'I hope the sun shines today'.
— Joyce Hutchinson
When we died, no one would know, and that fraction of a moment that was so important to who we were would be gone.
— Kiera Cass, The Elite
Death is only dreadful for those who live in dread and fear of it. Death is not wild and terrible, if only we can be still and hold fast to God’s Word. Death is not bitter, if we have not become bitter ourselves. Death is grace, the greatest gift of grace that God gives to people who believe in him. Death is mild, death is sweet and gentle; it beckons to us with heavenly power, if only we realize that it is the gateway to our homeland, the tabernacle of joy, the everlasting kingdom of peace. How do we know that dying is so dreadful? Who knows whether, in our human fear and anguish we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heavenly, blessed event in the world? Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.
— Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
This was how I would die. Strangled by an attractive, seminaked woman inside a fridge with a giant tarantula in the middle of a sea of carnivorous jam. As I blacked out, all I could think of was a fortune teller I'd spoken to a few years ago, and how full of shit she'd turned out to be.
— Yahtzee Croshaw, Jam
DEATH COMES SLOWLY LIKE ANTS TO A FALLEN FIG
— Charles Bukowski
From across the woods, as if by common accord, birds left their trees and darted upward. I joined them, flew amount them, they did not recognize me as something apart from them, and I was happy, so happy, because for the first time in years, and forevermore, I had not killed, and never would.
— George Saunders, Tenth of December
When I asked her what was the matter? answered, she didn't know; but she felt so afraid of dying!
— Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
...[we] has left nothing durable to signalize his stay upon this planet.[we]eventually dies to the honest regret of [our] associates.
— James Branch Cabell, Beyond Life
It is a dreadful thing to wait and watch for the approach of death; to know that hope is gone, and recovery impossible; and to sit and count the dreary hours through long, long, nights - such nights as only watchers by the bed of sickness know. It chills the blood to hear the dearest secrets of the heart, the pent-up, hidden secrets of many years, poured forth by the unconscious helpless being before you; and to think how little the reserve, and cunning of a whole life will avail, when fever and delirium tear off the mask at last. Strange tales have been told in the wanderings of dying men; tales so full of guilt and crime, that those who stood by the sick person's couch have fled in horror and affright, lest they should be scared to madness by what they heard and saw; and many a wretch has died alone, raving of deeds, the very name of which, has driven the boldest man away.("The Drunkard's Death")
— Charles Dickens
To take, for example, my own death: what I consider most likely to be true is that death will be the complete and utter end of my existence, with no successor existence of any kind that can be related to me as I now am. And if that is not the case, the next most likely scenario, it seems to me, is something along the lines indicated by Schopenhauer. But neither of these is what I most want. What I want to be true is that I have an individual, innermost self, a soul, which is the real me and which survives my death. That too could be true. But alas, I do not believe it.
— Bryan Magee
Are you afraid of dying?"  "I was at first, maybe I still am a little bit. But it's not death that scares me so much as not being alive anymore. It's missing all the things that I would have seen if I hadn't gotten AIDS. Things like my daughter's graduation, her wedding, my grandchildren. I'll never see those things, and that makes me sad.
— Deanna Lynn Sletten, Widow, Virgin, Whore
When we're alive, life consumes us. But when we die, all of the color and the motion is gone so quickly, it's as though it can no longer stand to be wasted on us.
— Lauren DeStefano, Sever
Wars are indeed fought by children, by young people who have little to say in where they are sent to die.
— Jeff Shaara
Rolling flat onto his back, Drake shuddered. Then he inhaled deeply. He stared up at the night sky. "We're going to win," he said, his voice calmer, less strained. "This is nothing. Keep going. They can't stop us. Jason, give Rachel the necklace. Tell her . . . tell her I'm sorry. Tell her . . . I wanted . . . to show her . . . my little valley. Tell her I tried."His voice was growing weak. Farfalee smoothed a hand over his brow. "Shhh," she whispered. "Be still, Drake. You can rest now. You did it. Rest. We'll take it from here.""Failie," he whispered, his hand twitching toward the back of his neck with little jerks. "Where's my seed?" His head tipped sideways. The breath went out of him.
— Brandon Mull, Chasing the Prophecy
You can call me Grandpa, if that does it for you.
— R.K. Lilley, In Flight
And as if he had read her thoughts, the old man murmured, 'What a blessing it is to die in your own bed, under your own roof, with your family surrounding you, full of the knowledge that you have lived as thoroughly as you wanted to.
— Anita Rau Badami, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?
The Society wants us to be afraid of dying. But I'm not. I'm only afraid of dying wrong.
— Ally Condie, Crossed
Rather than you smoking a cigarette, the cigarette is really smoking you.
— Anthony Liccione
A good death is a death in solidarity with others. To prepare ourselves for a good death, we must develop or deepen this sense of solidarity.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen
You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead.
— Zadie Smith, The Autograph Man
Because through the heavy water, I heard the sound of an angel calling my name, calling me to the only heaven I wanted.
— Stephenie Meyer, Twilight
GPs are almost the only doctors these days who understand all problems, can see the whole person…spend time with the dying…see things through to the end.
— Jane Wilson-Howarth, A Glimpse of Eternal Snows: A Journey of Love and Loss in the Himalayas
Dying is the last thing I will ever do.
— John Barrymore
Worry is yet another side effect of dying.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Dying in the line of duty is heroic, but dying while unemployed is just stupid.
— Tsugumi Ohba, Death Note, Vol. 5: Whiteout
But you're dead," said Harry."Oh yes," said Dumbledore matter-of-factly."Then...I'm dead too?""Ah," said Dumbledore, smiling still more broadly. "That is the question, isn't it? On the whole, dear boy, I think not.”They looked at each other, the old man still beaming."Not?" repeated Harry."Not," said Dumbledore."But…" Harry raised his hand instinctively toward the lightning scar. It did not seem to be there. "But I should have died—I didn't defend myself! I meant to let him kill me!""And that," said Dumbledore, "will, I think, have made all the difference.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Who worries for dying? If I close my eyes tonight, I will either dream, or not, or my eyes will open and I will be here again. And if none of those happen, and I do not wake? Who worries for dying?
— Roman Payne
How mighty you are as death comes upon you and your color fades. Yet from life and lush to bold array, screaming into the night.
— Kellie Elmore, Magic in the Backyard
There is absolutely no way someone cannot be affected, or cannnot learn vital lessons by being forced to dwell in the margins of a hindering repose as the one loved by so very few."Dying and Loving It
— Milkweed L. Augustine
The guard looked down at the scarlet bloodstains blooming on his chest. He appeared to think of something that he needed to say, but as his lips began to form the words, his knees gave up the strain of supporting his ruined bulk. He collapsed to the floor, his throat issuing a final sound like a bubbling casserole.
— R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room
Death loves death, not life. Dying people love to know that others die with them; it is a comfort to learn you are not alone in the kiln, in the grave.
— Ray Bradbury, A Pleasure to Burn: Fahrenheit 451 Stories
Just as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire, and my lamp is burning low, the horrible contraction will begin in my chest. I shall only have time to reach the bell, and pull it violently, before the sense of suffocation will come. No one will answer my bell. I know why. My two servants are lovers, and will have quarrelled. My housekeeper will have rushed out of the house in a fury, two hours before, hoping that Perry will believe she has gone to drown herself. Perry is alarmed at last, and is gone out after her. The little scullery-maid is asleep on a bench: she never answers the bell; it does not wake her. The sense of suffocation increases: my lamp goes out with a horrible stench: I make a great effort, and snatch at the bell again. I long for life, and there is no help. I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. 0 God, let me stay with the known, and be weary of it. I am content. Agony of pain and suffocation - and all the while the earth, the fields, the pebbly brook at the bottom of the rookery, the fresh scent after the rain, the light of the morning through my chamber window, the warmth of the hearth after the frosty air - will darkness close over them for ever?Darkness-darkness-no pain-nothing but darkness: but I am passing on and on through the darkness: my thought stays in the darkness, but always with a sense of moving onward ... ("The Lifted Veil")
— George Eliot, The Lifted Veil
We Let the Boat DriftI set out for the pond, crossing the ravine where seedling pines start up like sparks between the disused rails of the Boston and Maine.The grass in the field would make a second crop if early autumn rains hadn't washed the goodness out. After the night's hard frost it makes a brittle rustling as I walk.The water is utterly still. Here and therea black twig sticks up. It's five years today, and even now I can't accept what cancer did to him -- not death so much as the annihilation of the whole man, sense by sense, thought by thought, hope by hope.Once we talked about the life to come. I took the Bible from the nightstand and offered John 14: "I go to prepare a place for you.""Fine. Good," he said. "But what about Matthew? 'You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.'" And he wept.My neighbor honks and waves driving by. She counsels troubled students; keeps bees; her goats follow her to the mailbox.Last Sunday afternoon we went canoeing on the pond. Something terrible at school had shaken her. We talked quietly far from shore. The paddlesrested across our laps; glittering dropsfell randomly from their tips. The lightaround us seemed alive. A loon-itinerant-let us get quite close before it dove, coming upafter a long time, and well away from humankind
— Jane Kenyon, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems
You were right to come to see a dying man. It is right that these moments should have witnesses. Everyone has his dream; I would like to live till dawn, but I know I have less than three hours left. It will be night, but no matter. Dying is simple. It does not take daylight. So be it: I will die by starlight
— Victor Hugo
Lew had never seen a dead man before. He just stood there, and looked and looked. Then he went a step closer, and looked some more. 'So that's what it's like!' he murmured inaudibly. Finally Lew reached out slowly and touched him on the face, and cringed as he met the clammy feel of it, pulled his hand back and whipped it down, as though to get something off it.The flesh was still warm and Lew knew suddenly he had no time alibi.He threw something over that face and that got rid of the awful feeling of being watched by something from the other world. After that Lew wasn't afraid to go near him; he just looked like a bundle of old clothes. The dead man was on his side, and Lew fiddled with the knife-hilt, trying to get it out. It was caught fast, so he let it alone after grabbing it with his fingers from a couple of different directions.Next he went through his pockets, thinking he'd be helping to identify him.The man was Luther Kemp, forty-two, and he lived on 79th Street. But none of that was really true any more, Lew thought, mystified; he'd left it all behind. His clothes and his home and his name and his body and the show he'd paid to see were here. But where the hell had he gone to, anyway? Again that weird feeling came over Lew momentarily, but he brushed it aside. It was just that one of the commonest things in life - death - was still strange to him. But after strangeness comes familiarity, after familiarity, contempt. ("Dusk To Dawn")
— Cornell Woolrich
I have a habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am now leading a posthumous existence.
— John Keats, Selected Letters
It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.
— Robert Silverberg, Dying Inside
This is your war now.' I despised myself for the cheesy sentiment, but what else did I have?'Some war,' he said dismissively. 'What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Graze, with a predetermined winner.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Which do you hate more: breaking your word or dying?""I don't know. I've never done either.
— Gerald Morris, The Squire, His Knight, and His Lady
Peter Van Houten was the only person I’d ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it’slike to be dying, and (b) not have died.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
This is how it feels to die: It starts from outside and works its way in.
— Sarah Wylie, All These Lives
It’s what happens when you shoot someone,” Wayne pointed out. “At least, usually someone has the good sense to get dead when you go to all the trouble to shoot them.
— Brandon Sanderson, The Alloy of Law
Where have you been?" I asked weakly. A few minutes ago I would have rather died than questioned him. Let him know I care. But I'm too sick to be strong, kick ass Rayne at the moment."Vegas" he says.I raise an eyebrows. "Uh, okay. Win anything?" I can't believe he was off gambling as I lay dying. I mean, I know poker is hot and all, but couldn't he have waited a couple of days for that straight flush?"I got what I went for, if that's what you mean.""What, a lap dance?"He chuckes. "Even sick, you're still funny, Rayne.
— Mari Mancusi, Stake That
When you live with a potentially life-threatening condition you get used to the thought of dying. You accept it, you push on. The thing that scared me was the picture of dying slowly and painfully, the loss of independence and identity to illness.
— Josh Lanyon, Fatal Shadows / A Dangerous Thing
I know there's no heaven. I know it all turns to nothingness. But I fear there will be some remnant of me left within that void. Left conscious by some random fluke. Something that will scream out for this. That one speck of my soul will still exist and be left trapped and wanting. For you. For the light. For anything.
— Drew Magary, The Postmortal
I would not be dying if it were not for her. I would have stayed home, as I have always stayed home, and I would have been safe, and I would have done the one thing I have always wanted to do, which is to grow up.
— John Green, Paper Towns
Dying is beautiful- even the first time around, at the ripe old age of 20. It’s not easy most of the time, but there is real beauty to be found in knowing that your end is going to catch up with you faster than you had expected, and that you have to get all your loving and laughing and crying done as soon as you can.
— Norma Klein, Sunshine
Every atom in me feels composed of lead. This is what dying is: a pull to the ground.
— Sonya Hartnett, Surrender
Being dead does have its advantages.”-Alastor
— Dana Michelle Burnett, Spiritus
Waking up in a room with no natural light does something to a man. no windows. I’m almost afraid to die. I fear my soul won’t make it out.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
Mortal, what hast thou of such grave concernThat thou indulgest in too sickly plaints?Why this bemoaning and beweeping death?For if thy life aforetime and behindTo thee was grateful, and not all thy goodWas heaped as in sieve to flow awayAnd perish unavailingly, why not,Even like a banqueter, depart the hall,Laden with life?
— Titus Lucretius Carus
Convinced that we're living the whole time that we're dying.We decide to go out walking the whole time that you're talking.Convinced that you're living whole time that I'm dying.
— Tegan Quin
And all the while one spirit uttered this,The other one did weep so, that, for pity,I swooned away as if I had been dying,And fell, even as a dead body falls.
— Dante Alighieri
It is meaningless to rise while leaving others behind! It is also unethical and selfish! If you know the paths to rise, rise altogether with others!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
If a road ends, that creates a great opportunity to develop new abilities to continue! Welcome every challenge in your life!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.
— Marcel Proust, Time Regained
I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling.
— Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time
When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.
— Marguerite Duras, The Lover
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.
— Martin Amis
Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.
— Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway on Writing
Don’t try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough.
— Arthur Freed
If you're a writer, you'll know it by the distinct feeling of only being able to breathe properly when alone with your characters. All other times, I'm panting--just pining for the next time I can be with them.
— Karen Luellen, Winter's Awakening: The Metahumans Emerge
There's a difference between writing for a living and writing forlife. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises....If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest,not what pays
— Toni Morrison
Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. ...this book...is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:"Fool!" said my muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write.
— Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella
Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.
— William Carlos Williams, Spring and All
Because here’s the thing: No matter how much one tells stories of magical beasts or impossible worlds, in the end, it is always the world of here and now one is writing about. The better one understands that world, the more powerful the stories will be.
— Steven Brust
Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.
— Virginia Woolf
A writer's life is never boring when you have imaginary friends to play with!
— Christie Silvers
There is no literature and art without paranoia. Probably there would be even civilization. Paranoia is the world. It is the attempt to make sense of what has not.
— Thomas Pynchon
Capture your reader, let him not depart, from dull beginnings that refuse to start
— Horace
...but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.
— Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees
If one can, anyone can.If two can, you can, too!
— Nancy I. Sanders, Yes! You Can Learn How to Write Children's Books, Get Them Published, and Build a Successful Writing Career
A writer’s brain is like a magician’s hat. If you’re going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first
— Louis L'Amour
Before cruelly vilifying them from a great height, the mudslingers at newspapers and journals should bear in mind that all artistic endeavors were by and large a mixture of effort and imagination, the embodiment of a solitary endeavor, of a sometimes long-nurtured dream, when they were not a desperate bid to give life meaning.
— Félix J. Palma, The Map of Time
A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
— Cyril Connolly
Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.
— Julia Cameron
Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.
— John Banville
Great writers create
—  writers of smaller gifts copy
Writers have come to master nearly every trade. They are inventors and entrepreneurs of character, plot, and dialogue. They are the eager scientists that can’t wait to try out their new experiment. They are the maestros of the symphony that plays in their head, conducting what happens, where, and at what precise moment. They are engineers and architects that design the structure of their piece so it stands the test of time and continues to fire on all cylinders. They play mechanics and doctors in their revisions, hoping they prescribe the correct diagnosis to fix the piece’s 'boo boos'. They are salesmen who pitch not an idea or a product, but themselves, to editors, publishers, and more importantly, their readers. They are teachers who through their craft, preach to pupils about what works and what doesn’t work and why. Writers can make you feel, can make you think, can make you wonder, but they can also grab your hand and guide you through their maze. Similar to what Emerson stated in 'The Poet,' writers possess a unique view on life, and with their revolving eye, they attempt to encompass all. I am a writer.
— Garrett   Dennert
Why do I love writing YA? Because I get a chance to re-live my youth knowing all I know now...
— Belle Whittington
The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner - the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a sprint, and less heroic.
— Graham Greene, A Sort Of Life
A rain forest springs from the droppings of animals and grows greater than any cultivated garden; likewise, a great mass of literary skill springs from the droppings of writers that cross our minds through the reading we do.
— Agona Apell
I have never known anything to be as exquisite or as excruciating as the Love-Hate relationship I have with writing.
— Tonny K. Brown
The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.
— E B White
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
A writer or an author must always be the no.1 fan of his/her book.
— Aditi Dufare