c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I need not describe the feelings of those whose dearest ties are rent by that most irreparable evil, the void that presents itself to the soul, and the despair that is exhibited on the countenance. It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she whom we saw every day and whose very existence appeared a part of our own can have departed forever—that the brightness of a beloved eye can have been extinguished and the sound of a voice so familiar and dear to the ear can be hushed, never more to be heard. These are the reflections of the first days; but when the lapse of time proves the reality of the evil, then the actual bitterness of grief commences. Yet from whom has not that rude hand rent away some dear connection? And why should I describe a sorrow which all have felt, and must feel? The time at length arrives when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity; and the smile that plays upon the lips, although it may be deemed a sacrilege, is not banished. My mother was dead, but we had still duties which we ought to perform; we must continue our course with the rest and learn to think ourselves fortunate whilst one remains whom the spoiler has not seized.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
A flower bloomed already wilting. Beginning its life with an early ending.
— R.J. Gonzales, Mundahlia
Why is it we have so little choice? We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated - defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Sill, to cease living is unacceptable.
— Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen
There is only one true wealth in all the universe--living time.
— Frank Herbert
A penny for my thoughts, oh no, I'll sell them for a dollarThey're worth so much more after I'm a gonerAnd maybe then you'll hear the words I been singin'Funny when you're dead how people start listenin
— Kimberly Perry, If I Die Young: Piano/Vocal/Chords, Sheet
Shinji slowly fell forward onto his face. Debris bounced up on impact. It took less than thirty seconds for the rest of his body to die. The memento of his beloved uncle--the earring worn by the woman he loved--was now stained with the blood running down Shinji's left ear, reflecting the glow from the red flames of the farm building.And so the boy known as the Third Man, Shinji Mimura, was dead.
— Koushun Takami, Battle Royale
I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.
— John Fowles, The Magus
I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.
— Mark Twain
Charitably... I think... sometimes, perhaps, one must change or die. And, in the end, there were, perhaps, limits to how much he could let himself change.
— Neil Gaiman, The Wake
For Death is the meaning of night;The eternal shadowInto which all lives must fall, All hopes expire.
— Michael Cox, The Meaning of Night
It's okay to talk about it. Death is so normal, I don't know why everyone gets so hung up about it. We all have to deal with it. Most people that you talk to have lost someone, but nobody talks about it.
— Rachel Ward, Numbers
Is anyone who's supposed to be dead actually dead?
— Karen Marie Moning, Shadowfever
How soon will we accept this opportunity to be fully alive before we die? (88)
— Stephen Levine, A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last
It was all very strange, Mr. Gray thought, as he wiped the coffee canister clean with a sponge. Very, very mysterious. You were born; you lived a whole life; and at the end, you wound up in a coffee canister."Ah, well," he said out loud quietly. "That's just the way things are. Life's a funny business." Death, he supposed, was the punch line.
— Lauren Oliver, Liesl & Po
It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, but it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: music, laughter, the physics of falling leaves, automobiles, holding hands, the scent of rain, the concept of subway trains... if only one could leave this life slowly!
— Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy
America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe just about anything could happen in America.
— Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
Of all the miracles Po had seen in the time and space of its death, Po thought this--the absorption of another, the carrying of it--was the most bewildering and remarkable of all. Whenever Bundle separated again, Po was left with an ache of sadness that reminded the ghost of the body it had left behind.
— Lauren Oliver, Liesl & Po
Death truly does have life, and walks with and lives through us everyday.
— Nicholas A. McGirr, Life of Death
I have seem even those who have long since abjured God die in grace. . . . Atheists don't use their drying to bargain for a better seat at the table
—  indeed they may not even believe supper is being served. They are not storing up 'merit.'
When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.
— Jennifer Egan
I am Death. I come quickly, I come slowly, but I am not cheated.
— Erika Johansen, The Queen of the Tearling
Nico didn’t like to be touched, but somehow this brief contact with his father felt reassuring – the same way the Chapel of Bones was reassuring. Like death, his father’s presence was cold and often callous, but it was real – brutally honest, inescapably dependable.
— Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
From the time we're born until we die, we're kept busy with artificial stuff that isn't important.
— Tom Ford
Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history.
— Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science
I just found this world a hard place to be good in,’ says Bunny, then he closes his eyes and, with an expiration of breath, goes still.
— Nick Cave, The Death of Bunny Munro
I asked him if it were a mirage, and he said yes. I said it was a dream, and he agreed, But said it was the desert's dream not his. And he told me that in a year or so, when he had aged enough for any man, then he would walk into the wind, until he saw the tents. This time, he said, he would go on with them.
— Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
Now death is uncool, old-fashioned. 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
Anyway, lots of warrior tribes think that when they die, they go to a heavenly land somewhere," said the toad. "You know, where they can drink and fight and feast forever? So maybe this is theirs.""But this is a real place!""So? That's what they believe. Besides, they're only small. Maybe the universe is a bit crowded and they have to put heavens anywhere there's room? I'm a toad, so you'll appreciate that I'm having to guess a lot here.
— Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
We think of mortality so little these days...I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones.Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by,As you are now so once was I:As I am so will you be...
— Tana French, In the Woods
That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we're old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner or later we'll lose everyone we love. We're never the same. But somehow we're all right. We go on.
— Dean Koontz, Winter Moon
The day after Paul Newman was dead, he was twice as dead.
— Maurice Sendak
I'm Allen Walker!"My life....is over...I'm going to die....
— Katsura Hoshino, D.Gray-man, Volume 11
In a world where everyone struggles to survive whatever the cost, how could one judge those who decide to die?
— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
If you can overcome love, you can overcome fear. If you can overcome fear, you can overcome death.
— Santosh Kalwar
We're all drowning, but don't say it out loud.
— Marty Rubin
How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike.
— Ray Bradbury, The October Country
It's a tragic fact to die in an accident
— Gabrielle Zevin
The other mammoths were as protective of the dying as they were of newborns, and they gathered around tying to make the fallen one get up. When all was over, they buried the dead ancestor under piles of dirt, grass, leaves, or snow. Mammoths were even known to bury other dead animals, including humans.
— Jean M. Auel, The Plains of Passage
We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men
He comes down next to me, and when I hold out my hand, he takes it. Our fingers lace together. And in that feeling, that perfect feeling of our hands and fingers pressed together, I want to tell him everything. I want to tell him about Josh, and his sister, Emily. I want to tell him about tall, crazy Gert. I want to tell him about bridges and funerals, and most of all, maps. More than anything else, I want to tell him about myself. I want to tell him that I know what things look like from above now. There's so much I want to tell him, because I know he'll understand.
— Shawn Klomparens, Jessica Z.
It was a mistake to think of houses, old houses, as being empty. They were filled with memories, with the faded echoes of voices. Drops of tears, drops of blood, the ring of laughter, the edge of tempers that had ebbed and flowed between the walls, into the walls, over the years.Wasn't it, after all, a kind of life?And there were houses, he knew it, that breathed. They carried in their wood and stone, their brick and mortar a kind of ego that was nearly, very nearly, human.
— Nora Roberts, Key of Knowledge
Մահ ոչ իմացեալ՝ մահ է, մահ իմացեալ՝ անմահութիւն է:Death, unanticipated, is death; death, anticipated, is immortality.
— Saint Vardapet Eghishē
One time, two years ago, I took a draught of morphia, meaning to end my life. My mother found me before the life was ended, the doctor drew the poison from my stomach with a syringe, and when I woke, it was to the sound of my own weeping. For I had hoped to open my eyes on Heaven, where my father was; and they had only pulled me back to Hell.
— Sarah Waters, Affinity
He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides
— Gustave Flaubert
You people have a religion of death that fills you with the joy and courage to confront it...I do not. I believe the only essential thing is to be alive.- Abrenucio
— Gabriel García Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons
The dead has only one place to go… up. Wherever you bury them, they will go the same way, up
— Abdul Sattar Edhi
They suffered with his death and she - she suffered with their reaction to it.
— Haidji, SG - Suicide Game
My faceless neighbor spoke up:“Don’t be deluded. Hitler has made it clear that he will annihilate all Jews before the clock strikes twelve.”I exploded:“What do you care what he said? Would you want us to consider him a prophet?His cold eyes stared at me. At last he said, wearily:“I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.
— Elie Wiesel, Night
Death is a state of mind---many people on Earth spend their entire lives dead.
— Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere
When the star dies, Its eye closes; tired of watching, It flies back to its first bright dream.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
I’ve never once thought about how I was going to die,” she said. “I can’t think about it. I don’t even know how I’m going to live.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
What I have learned lately is that people deal with death in all sorts of ways. Some of us fight against it, doing everything we can to make it not true. Some of us lose our selves to grief. Some of us lose ourselves to anger.
— Carrie Jones, Entice
That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.
— Lev Grossman, The Magician King
You and I have a connection that nothing, not on heaven or earth, or even hell, could ever break. If you want to talk to me, talk to me. I’ll hear you…
— Cynthia Hand
Think about that for a moment. They died for you. Now take a good look at the life you're living and tell me: Did they do the right thing?
— Mira Grant, Feed
Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe.
— Clifford D. Simak, Way Station
The person whom you really, really love may not be here anymore. And you might be feeling lonely, but, there are people in this world who really, really love you, so shouldn't that equal it all out? So, please don't ever think that you're alone. I'll be watching over you. I'll always be watching over you. I promise to always watch over you. You're not alone.
— Yuuki Obata, We Were There, Vol. 1
poor boy! I never knew you, Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you
— Walt Whitman, Drum Taps
It doth not hurt", whispered a faint voice, "She will take you life and all you are and all you care'st for, and she will leave you with nothing but mist and fog. She'll take your joy. And one day you'll wake and your heart and soul will have gone. A husk you'll be, a wisp you'll be, and a thing no more than a dream on waking, or a memory of something forgotten.
— Neil Gaiman, Coraline
I wonder if it will rain after we die. When you kill yourself, you don't know what happens next, afterward.
— Albert Borris, Crash Into Me
There is not a day or night but a doe offers her life for her kittens, or some honest captain of Owsla his life for his Chief Rabbit's. Sometimes it is taken, sometimes it is not. But there is no bargain, for here, what is, is what must be.
— Richard Adams, Watership Down
I think...I think its always been you who was dying,"- Delaney
— Megan Miranda, Fracture
There's still a thousand places I haven't gone to die.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Y allá en el fondo está la muerte si no corremos y llegamos antes y comprendemos que ya no importa.
— Julio Cortázar, Historias de cronopios y de famas
What is life? It departs covertly. Like a thief Death took him.
— John Gunther, Death Be Not Proud
She cannot possibly be dead, people do not just die
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
His life spells living. Your life or my life, apart from Him, spells death.
— Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Other Gods: The Absolute Claims of the Christian Message
I'm going to get 'I'M NOT FUCKING DEAD' tattooed on my chest.""That will become inaccurate at some point, " Omar pointed out.
— Domashita Romero, Complicated Creation
Dreams link us to those who have already left this life.
— Doug Dillon
It was one thing to live in a world where death stood a distant figure, quite another to hold it in your hands.
— David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
Death is a lot like prom - loud, overdone, and although the guy you came with was cool, you never know who'll end up taking you home.
— Cecily White, Prophecy Girl
Everything but a life can be replaced.
— Marty Rubin
Then Deborah stood at the wicket gate, the boundary, and there was a woman with outstretched hand, demanding tickets."Pass through," she said when Deborah reached her. "We saw you coming." The wicket gate became a turnstile. Deborah pushed against it and there was no resistance, she was through. "What is it?" she asked. "Am I really here at last? Is this the bottom of the pool?""It could be," smiled the woman. "There are so many ways. You just happened to choose this one."Other people were pressing to come through. They had no faces, they were only shadows. Deborah stood aside to let them by, and in a moment they had gone, all phantoms."Why only now, tonight?" asked Deborah. "Why not in the afternoon, when I came to the pool?""It's a trick," said the woman. "You seize on the moment in time. We were here this afternoon. We're always here. Our life goes on around you, but nobody knows it. The trick's easier by night, that's all.""Am I dreaming, then?" asked Deborah."No," said the woman, "this isn't a dream. And it isn't death, either. It's the secret world."The secret world... It was something Deborah had always known, and now the pattern was complete. The memory of it, and the relief, were so tremendous that something seemed to burst inside her heart."Of course..." she said, "of course..." and everything that had ever been fell into place. There was no disharmony. The joy was indescribable, and the surge of feeling, like wings about her in the air, lifted her away from the turnstile and the woman, and she had all knowledge. That was it - the invasion of knowledge. ("The Pool")
— Daphne du Maurier, Echoes from the Macabre: Selected Stories
Death is never swift... No matter how those left behind would like to comfort themselves with the thought. -Before Ever After
— Samantha Sotto
He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Fight on, brave knights! Man dies, but glory lives! Fight on; death is better than defeat! Fight on brave knights! for bright eyes behold your deeds!
— Walter Scott
Kill you all!" The clown was laughing and screaming. "Try to stop me and I'll kill you all! Drive you crazy and then kill you all! You can't stop me!
— Stephen King, It
If life is a punishment, one should wish for an end; if life is a test, one should wish it to be short.
— Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul and Virginia by Bernardin de St. Pierre, Fiction, Literary
Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.
— C.S. Lewis, Letters to Children
Had I truly thought I would not die when he kissed me? But I did. For a moment the breath and life went out of me and there was no time and no tomorrow but only my lips against his.
— Martine Leavitt, Keturah and Lord Death
Death and destruction are necessary to the health of the world, and therefore as natural, and lovable, as birth and life. Only priests and born cowards moan and weep over dying. Brave men face it with approving nonchalance.
— Ragnar Redbeard
It's time, Old Captain, lift anchor, sink!The land rots; we shall sail into the night;if now the sky and sea are black as inkour hearts, as you must know, are filled with light.Only when we drink poison are we well —we want, this fire so burns our brain tissue,to drown in the abyss — heaven or hell,who cares? Through the unknown, we'll find the new. ("Le Voyage")
— Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil and Other Works/Les Fleurs du Mal et Oeuvres Choisies : A Dual-Language Book (Dover Foreign Language Study Guides)
At the end, one didn't remember life as a whole but as just a string of moments.
— David Levien, City of the Sun
There is a child - a baby - who long since kicked off her blankets. Her skin is ashen and her mouth open in a perpetual yet silent scream. She isn't old enough to roll over, to sit up, to climb. So she lies there kicking her fat legs against the footboard of the crib, eternally calling for her mother. For food. For flesh.
— Carrie Ryan, The Forest of Hands and Teeth
With mind distracted, never thinking, "Death is coming,"To slave away on the pointless business of mundane life,And then to come out empty--it is a tragic error. (116)trans by Robert Thurman
— Huston Smith, Tibetan Book of the Dead
And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
— Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death
Life dies but forever will there be music. Always.
— Nicholas A. McGirr, The Growing Dim Project
You haven't lost Iraki, you know. I don't know if it helps to say that. I lost a friend once myself, and I know how it goes.'He'll find his way inside you, and you'll carry him onward. Behind your heartbeat, you'll hear another one, faint and out of step. People will say you are speaking his opinions, or your hair has turned like his.'There are no more facts about him, that part is over. Now is the time for essential things. You'll see visions of him wherever you go. You'll see his eyes so moist, his intentions so blinding, you'll think he is more alive than you. You will look around and wonder if it was you who died.'Gradually you'll grow older than him, and love him as your son. 'In the future, you'll live astride the line separating life from death. You'll become experienced in the wisdom of grief. You won't wait until people die to grieve for them. You'll give them their grief while they are still alive, for then judgement falls away, and there remains only the miracle of being.' 
— Rana Dasgupta, Solo
How did your mother die?” asked Delk.“Car accident,” Katie replied, gazing out over the water. “She’d been to mass. A tire blew on the way home, and she was gone. I was nineteen, Pather’s age, when it happened. My brother was only eleven.” She paused. “I do know what you’re going through.” Katie looked at her.“Pather told you?” Katie nodded. Delk was glad Pather had told his sister; she was relieved not to have to tell the story again. “Does it ever . . . you know . . . get any better?”Katie shrugged her narrow shoulders and smiled. “In some ways it does, but it’s a bit like running a long race with a rock in your shoe. You get used to it, but it always hurts a little.
— Suzanne Supplee, When Irish Guys Are Smiling
The field of the soul must be watered by the rain with tears of love
—  otherwise it will become a desert.
In so many senseless deaths, beauty is to blame.
— Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce
Not since North Korean media declared Kim Jong-il to be the reincarnation of Kim Il Sung has there been such a blatant attempt to create a necrocracy, or perhaps mausolocracy, in which a living claimant assumes the fleshly mantle of the departed.
— Christopher Hitchens
The landscape is best described as 'pedestrian hostile.' It's pointless to try to take a walk, so I generally just stay in the room and think about shooting myself in the head.
— David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames
At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. I hope this isn't too melodramatic or self-centred a way of saying that I attempt to write as if I did not care what reviewers said, what peers thought, or what prevailing opinions may be.
— Christopher Hitchens, A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq
How many boys like him were out there in the ether, holding on to their big brothers and sisters who were still alive? How many husbands were floating between life and death, clinging to their wives in this world? And how may millions and millions of people were there in the world like Charlie who wouldn't let go of their loved ones when they're gone?
— Ben Sherwood
Having second thoughts?” Puck’s voice was soft and dangerous, a far cry from his normal flippancy. “I thought we put this behind us for now.”“Never,” I said, matching his stare. “I can’t ever take it back, Goodfellow. I’m still going to kill you. I swore to her I would.” Lighting flickered overhead, and thunder rumbled in the distance as we faced each other with narrowed eyes. “One day,” I said softly. “One day you’ll look up, and I’ll be there. That’s the only ending for us. Don’t ever forget.
— Julie Kagawa
Just being alive should make you late for everything. In case you've never noticed, the dead are always on time.
— Arlene Ang
- had a million things to do today; death would have to wait, -(The Tin Star)
— J.L. Langley
Please not yet. Those are the three eternal words. Please not yet.
— John D. MacDonald, A Deadly Shade of Gold
I have never lived a life so much larger than death. (93)
— Stephen Levine, A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last
And no child deserved to die for defending her father, no matter who she was
— Janice Hardy, Blue Fire
Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are callingFrom glen to glen, and down the mountain sideThe summer's gone, and all the flowers are dying'Tis you, 'tis you must go and I must bide.But come ye back when summer's in the meadowOr when the valley's hushed and white with snow'Tis I'll be here in sunshine or in shadowOh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so.And if you come, when all the flowers are dyingAnd I am dead, as dead I well may beYou'll come and find the place where I am lyingAnd kneel and say an "Ave" there for me.And I shall hear, tho' soft you tread above meAnd all my dreams will warm and sweeter beIf you'll not fail to tell me that you love meI'll simply sleep in peace until you come to me.I'll simply sleep in peace until you come to me.
— Fred E. Weatherly
Voi rakkaanisydän on kylmäja sammalta käteni kasvaaMinun reiteni mullassa hajoovat maaksiJa haudalla risti jo lahona on.Olen maa.Olen maa johon tahdot.
— Timo K. Mukka
You are afraid to die?'Yes, everyone is.'But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together. Girls are caterpillars when they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structures.
— J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla
Some of these guys will go on walking long after the laws of biochemistry and handicapping have gone by the boards. There was a guy last year that crawled for two miles at four miles an hour after both of his feet cramped up at the same time, you remember reading about that? Look at Olson, he's worn out but he keeps going. That goddam Barkovitch is running on high-octane hate and he just keeps going and he's as fresh as a daisy. I don't think I can do that. I'm not tired -not really tired- yet. But I will be." The scar stood out on the side of his haggard face as he looked ahead into the darkness "And I think... when I get tired enough... I think I'll just sit down
— Stephen King, The Long Walk
This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road
And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.
— Mark Doty
You know Sven? The man who takes care of the gym?' he asked. He waited till he got a nod from Nicholson. 'Well, if Sven dreamed tonight that his dog died, he'd have a very, very bad night's sleep, because he's very fond of that dog. But when he woke up in the morning, everything would be all right. He'd know it was only a dream.'Nicholson nodded. 'What's the point exactly?'The point is if his dog really died, it would be exactly the same thing. Only he wouldn't know it. I mean he wouldn't wake up till he died himself.
— J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
We suddenly feel fearful and apprehensive, naked in our perishable flesh, and for just a moment we wish we could go back to being stone—crumbling in death rather than rotting, trapped inside an immobile prison of stone rather than reduced to immaterial souls like those that now rattled within our skulls. The moment passes. There is no point in regretting irreversible decisions—one has to live with them, and we try.
— Ekaterina Sedia, The Alchemy of Stone
The Chorus Line:A Rope-Jumping Rhymewe are the maidsthe ones you killedthe ones you failedwe danced in airour bare feet twitchedit was not fairwith every goddess, queen, and bitchfrom there to hereyou scratched your itchwe did much lessthan what you didyou judged us badyou had the spearyou had the wordat your commandwe scrubbed the bloodof our deadparamours from floors, from chairsfrom stairs, from doors,we knelt in waterwhile you staredat our bare feetit was not fairyou licked our fearit gave you pleasureyou raised your handyou watched us fallwe danced on airthe ones you failedthe ones you killed
— Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
Dance, my darling dance! If you dance then death can't catch you! Nothing bad can touch you! Dance!
— Jackie French, Lady Dance
Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why they write symphonies..
— Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
Everything science has taught me strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. I believe in an immortal soul. Science has proved that nothing disintegrates into nothingness. Life and soul, therefore, cannot disintegrate into nothingness, and so are immortal.
— Werner Von Braun
Now when I die, I shall only be dead.
— Richard Matheson, I Am Legend and Other Stories
Supermarkets this large and clean and modern are a revelation to me. I spent my life in small steamy delicatessens with slanted display cabinets full of trays that hold soft wet lumpy matter in pale colours. High enough cabinets so you had to stand on tiptoes to give your order. Shouts, accents. In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere. Men shout as they die to be noticed, remembered for a second or two. To die in an apartment instead of a house can depress the soul, I would imagine, for several lives to come. In a town there are houses, plants in bay windows. People notice dying better. The dead have faces, automobiles. If you don't know a name you know a street name, a dog's name. 'He drove an orange Mazda.' You know a couple of useless things about a person that become major facts of identification and cosmic placement when he dies suddenly, after a short illness, in his own bed, with a comforter and matching pillows, on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, feverish, a little congested in the sinuses and chest, thinking about his dry cleaning.
— Don DeLillo, White Noise
Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.
— Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
Achieving the state of SABLE is not, as many people who live with these knitters believe, a reason to stop buying yarn, but for the knitter it is an indication to write a will, bequeathing the stash to an appropriate heir.
— Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, At Knit's End: Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much
The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn't want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.
— Margaret Atwood, Surfacing
Only the previous day, Arch had found him in a spirit-dance corral, blistering the creatures to the point of death, such was his need to touch and destroy.
— Frank Beddor, Seeing Redd
And now -- now it only remains for me to light a cigarette and go home. Dear God, only now am I remembering that people die. Does that include me?Don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.
— Clarice Lispector
It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule. You are puzzled because you cannot get over the idea that pleasures are only of the sense; but, child, a man who dies for his country dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage because he likes it.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
the meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture - it begins in the dignity with which we treat the dead
— Frank Herbert
Kate lost a mother," I said, "but I lost a nothing."Kate doesn't feel that way," Jack assured me.But what about everybody else besides Kate? How can I ever explain to anyone what she was when she and I had no name? People need names for everything. I wasn't a relative or a friend, I was just an object of her kindness.". I buried my face in his shoulder.True kindness is stabilizing," I went on. "When you feel it and when you express it, it becomes the whole meaning of things. Like all there is to achieve. It's life, demystified. A place out of self, a network of simple pleasures, not a waltz, but like whirls within a waltz."You're the one now," Jack said definitively. "That's why you met her. She had something she had to pass on." (p. 95)
— Hilary Thayer Hamann, Anthropology of an American Girl
But, who is Death? A figure that harrows and wastes wherever and however it pleases. This is also a possible description of the Countess Bathory. Never did anyone wish so hard not to grow old; I mean, to die. That is why, perhaps, she acted and played the role of Death. Because, how can Death possibly die?
— Alejandra Pizarnik
Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.
— J.G. Ballard, The Complete Short Stories
The question of how to spend my life, of what my life is for, is a question posed only to me, and I can no more delegate the responsibility for answering it than I can delegate the task of dying.
— Anthony T. Kronman, Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life
That cake tasted good. But the cake in the garbage tasted better. It was the best cake I ever ate.
— Loretta Ellsworth, In a Heartbeat
From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?
— Ray Bradbury
I will miss it so,” she said beside him. “This hell of a place, I will miss it so much. This fat body, walking mud puddle, deceived by everything, this impossible, ruinous accident of a world, these people who would truly rather hurt one another than eat—oh, there is nothing, nothing, nothing I would not do to stay here ten minutes longer. Oh, I will leave claw marks, I will drag mountains and forests away under my fingernails when I am dragged off. Such a stupid way to feel. I will be all dirty from clutching at this stupid planet, and the gods will laugh at me.
— Peter S. Beagle, The Folk of the Air
I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellry?
— Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
It’s quite simple. Death isn’t what we think it is. It isn’t life which ends but time which stops.
— Henri Rivière
I'm going to die. And as if that weren't bad enough, I'm going to die inside a cake.
— Peter H. Fogtdal, The Tsar's Dwarf
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
— James     Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
I just took [my cancer diagnosis] as bad luck, basically. It did strike me almost immediately, my atheist sort of thing kicked in and I thought "ha, if I was a God-botherer, I'd be thinking, why me God? What have I done to deserve this?" and I thought at least I'm free of that, at least I can simply treat it as bad luck and get on with it.
— Iain M. Banks
Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
— Erik H. Erikson
All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories—if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.
— Neil Gaiman, Preludes & Nocturnes
Death, mademoiselle, unfortunately creates a prejudice. A prejudice in favour of the deceased. I heard what you said just now to my friend Hastings. ‘A nice bright girl with no men friends.’ You said that in mockery of the newspapers. And it is very true—when a young girl is dead, that is the kind of thing that is said. She was bright. She was happy. She was sweet-tempered. She had not a care in the world. She had no undesirable acquaintances. There is a great charity always to the dead. Do you know what I should like this minute? I should like to find someone who knew Elizabeth Barnard and who does not know she is dead! Then, perhaps, I should hear what is useful to me—the truth.
— Agatha Christie, The A.B.C. Murders
The grave's a fine and private place,But none, I think, do there embrace.
— Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress
When a husband loses his wife, they call him a widower. When a wife loses her husband, they call her a widow. And when somebody’s parents die, they call them an orphan. But there is no name for a parent, a grieving mother, or a devastated father who have lost their child. Because the pain behind the loss is so immeasurable and unbearable, that it cannot be described in a single word. It just cannot be described.
— Bhavya Kaushik, The Other Side of the Bed
এ ভুবনে ডুবল যে চাঁদ সে ভুবনে উঠল কি তা?হেথায় সাঁঝে ঝরল যে ফুল হোথায় প্রাতে ফুটল কি তা?এ জীবনের কান্না যত― হয় কি হাসি সে ভুবনে?হায়! জীবন এত ছোট কেনে?এ ভুবনে?
— Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, কবি
Heroes and scholars represent the opposite extremes... The scholar struggles for the benefit of all humanity, sometimes to reduce physical effort, sometimes to reduce pain, and sometimes to postpone death, or at least render it more bearable. In contrast, the patriot sacrifices a rather substantial part of humanity for the sake of his own prestige. His statue is always erected on a pedestal of ruins and corpses... In contrast, all humanity crowns a scholar, love forms the pedestal of his statues, and his triumphs defy the desecration of time and the judgment of history.
— Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Advice for a Young Investigator
The Angel of Death is always a young person, or a group of young people, you'll begin seeing them left and right soon.
— Benjamin R.  Smith
Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;Thus unlamented let me die;Steal from the world, and not a stoneTell where I lie.
— Alexander Pope, Poems Collected
But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust; The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace.
— Andrew Marvell, The Complete Poems
Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand was open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a man's. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal.
— Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Around, around the sun we go:The moon goes round the earth.We do not die of death:We die of vertigo.
— Archibald MacLeish, Collected Poems, 1917-1982
In actuality, it was like the homes of all people who are not really rich but who want to look rich, and therefore end up looking like one another: it had damasks, ebony, plants, carpets, and bronzes, everything dark and gleaming—all the effects a certain class of people produce so as to look like people of a certain class. And his place looked so much like the others that it would never have been noticed, though it all seemed quite exceptional to him.
— Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych And Other Stories
Oh, but once my memories had pulsed with the blood-heat of life. In desperation, I forced myself to recall that once, I had walked with kings and conversed in languages never heard in this land. Once I had stood at the prow of a Sea Wolf ship and sailed oceans unknown to seamen here. I had ridden horses through desert lands, and dined on exotic foods in Arab tents. I had roamed Constantinople’s fabled streets, and bowed before the Holy Roman Emperor’s throne. I had been a slave, a spy, a sailor. Advisor and confidant of lords, I had served Arabs, Byzantines, and barbarians. I had worn captive’s rags, and the silken robes of a Sarazen prince. Once I had held a jeweled knife and taken a life with my own hand. Yes, and once I had held a loving woman in my arms and kissed her warm and willing lips...Death would have been far, far better than the gnawing, aching emptiness that was now my life.
— Stephen R. Lawhead, Byzantium
Sadness and boredom were more bearable than the effort of living a normal life. Perhaps the idea of death began to hover over her during that period, as a kind of higher order of lassitude in which she would not have to move the blood in her veins or the air in her lungs; her repose would be absolute- not to think, not to feel, not to be.
— Isabel Allende, Eva Luna
O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching Earth;Lie close around her; leave no room for mirthWith its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.She hath no questions, she hath no replies.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
Who wanted to be smiled at by the girl that trailed shadows like pets, conjured snakes and waited for Death, her bridegroom, to steal her from these walls?
— Roshani Chokshi, The Star-Touched Queen
For, truly, the man who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.
— John Ruskin, Unto This Last
The stillness and stasis of bed are the perfect opposite of travel: inertia is what I've come to consider the default mode, existentially and electronically speaking. Bed, its utter inactivity, offers a glimpse of eternity, without the drawback of being dead.
— Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Not Now, Voyager: A Memoir
It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that’s that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness, persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop?
— Mary Roach, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
One night he sits up. In cots around him are a few dozen sick or wounded. A warm September wind pours across the countryside and sets the walls of the tent rippling.Werner’s head swivels lightly on his neck. The wind is strong and gusting stronger, and the corners of the tent strain against their guy ropes, and where the flaps at the two ends come up, he can see trees buck and sway. Everything rustles. Werner zips his old notebook and the little house into his duffel and the man beside him murmurs questions to himself and the rest of the ruined company sleeps. Even Werner’s thirst has faded. He feels only the raw, impassive surge of the moonlight as it strikes the tent above him and scatters. Out there, through the open flaps of the tent, clouds hurtle above treetops. Toward Germany, toward home.Silver and blue, blue and silver.Sheets of paper tumble down the rows of cots, and in Werner’s chest comes a quickening. He sees Frau Elena kneel beside the coal stove and bank up the fire. Children in their beds. Baby Jutta sleeps in her cradle. His father lights a lamp, steps into an elevator, and disappears.The voice of Volkheimer: What you could be.Werner’s body seems to have gone weightless under his blanket, and beyond the flapping tent doors, the trees dance and the clouds keep up their huge billowing march, and he swings first one leg and then the other off the edge of the bed.“Ernst,” says the man beside him. “Ernst.” But there is no Ernst; the men in the cots do not reply; the American soldier at the door of the tent sleeps. Werner walks past him into the grass.The wind moves through his undershirt. He is a kite, a balloon.Once, he and Jutta built a little sailboat from scraps of wood and carried it to the river. Jutta painted the vessel in ecstatic purples and greens, and she set it on the water with great formality. But the boat sagged as soon as the current got hold of it. It floated downstream, out of reach, and the flat black water swallowed it. Jutta blinked at Werner with wet eyes, pulling at the battered loops of yarn in her sweater.“It’s all right,” he told her. “Things hardly ever work on the first try. We’ll make another, a better one.”Did they? He hopes they did. He seems to remember a little boat—a more seaworthy one—gliding down a river. It sailed around a bend and left them behind. Didn’t it?The moonlight shines and billows; the broken clouds scud above the trees. Leaves fly everywhere. But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in what seems to Werner like impossibly slow, imperturbable rays. They hang across the buckling grass.Why doesn’t the wind move the light?Across the field, an American watches a boy leave the sick tent and move against the background of the trees. He sits up. He raises his hand.“Stop,” he calls.“Halt,” he calls.But Werner has crossed the edge of the field, where he steps on a trigger land mine set there by his own army three months before, and disappears in a fountain of earth.
— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
I wished that my own bones were unbound, I wished they were mingling, picked clean by fish, with the bones of another body, a body my bones and heart and soul had loved with unfathomable certainty for decades, and both of us down deep now, lost to everything but the fact of bare bones on a dark seabed.
— Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy
A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard. And the candle by which she had read the book that was filled with fears, with deceptions, with anguish, and with evil, flared up with greater brightness than she had ever known, revealing to her all that before was in darkness, then flickered, grew faint, and went out forever.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Cauldron save you.Mother hold you.Pass through the gates, and smell that immortal land of milk and honey.Fear no evil.Feel no pain.Go, and enter eternity.
— Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and melt into the sun?
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house.
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed