c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age.
— Giacomo Leopardi
Death! Strange that there should be such a word, and such a thing, and we ever forget it; that one should be living, warm and beautiful, full of hopes, desires and wants, one day, and the next be gone, utterly gone, and forever!
— Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
Never send to know for whom the bells tolls
—  it tolls for thee.
I wonder if everyone who faces death hurts like this. It's as though for the first time I realize how much just being alive makes my body ache. But I don't want that ache to stop.
— Shannon Hale, Book of a Thousand Days
Every blade in the field - Every leaf in the forest - lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up.
— Henry David Thoreau
Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.
— Lawrence Clark Powell
There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
But my point, you see is that death is misunderstood. The loss of one's life is not the greatest loss. It is no loss at all. To others, perhaps, but not to oneself.
— Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists
There is just as much beauty in birth as there is in death, and it changes our lives just the same. They both add things to us and take things away." Pg. 155 Undone
— Brooke Taylor, Undone
We rehearse for the big death through the little death of orgasm, through erotic living. Death as transfiguration
— Peter Redgrove
Wait.” Stefan’s voice was hard suddenly. Bonnie and Elena turned back and froze, embracing each other, trembling. “What is your—your father—going to do to you when he finds out that you allowed this?” as I do, and we will be sharing a belly laugh tomorrow.
— L.J. Smith, Midnight
Selling eternal life is an unbeatable business, with no customers ever asking for their money back after the goods are not delivered.
— Victor J. Stenger
I cannot tell you what it is that guides us in this life; but for me, I fell toward the Chairman just as a stone must fall toward the earth. When I cut my lip and met Mr. Tanaka, when my mother died and I was cruelly sold, it was all like a stream that falls over rocky cliffs before it can reach the ocean. Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories.
— Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
Fairytales by nature only talk about the victors. The survivors. Nobody speaks about what happens to those who failed, except in the abstract: as cautionary tales to guide others onto the path to success. How many brave knights fell to the dragon before he was slayed by the noble prince? How many children burned to a crisp and eaten before the wicked witch received her due? These stories are lost, but the lesson behind them is not: it is not enough to be merely pure and good.
— Nenia Campbell, Evergloom
When someone dies they can be any age you remember can't they ' she asked. As I tried to think of a reply she continued 'You probably think about the grown-up Tess because you were still close to her. But when I woke up I thought of her when she was three wearing a fairy skirt I'd got her in the Woolworth's and a policeman's helmet. Her wand was a wooden spoon. On the bus yesterday I imagined holding her when she was two days old. I felt the warmth of her. I remembered all her fingers clasped around my finger so tiny they didn't even meet. I remembered the shape of her head and stroking the nape of her neck till she slept. I remembered her smell. She smelled of innocence. Other times she's thirteen and so pretty that I worry for her everytime I see a man look at her. All of those Tesses is my daughter.
— Rosamund Lupton, Sister
His absence is so big it's like he's there.
— Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go
After sixty-one years together, she simply clutched my hand and exhaled.
— Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants
Death is not the end.
— Patrick Ness, Release
I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
When I think of Simone now, I think of butterfly wings. Beautiful and excruciatingly delicate. Touch them once and they might disintegrate.
— Nick Sagan, Idlewild
It is a strange thing how quickly our bodies die. How fragile a force our presence is. In an instant the soul is gone - leaving an empty, insignificant vessel in its stead. I have read of those sent to the gallows and guillotines of Europe. I have read of the great war of ages past and men slaughtered by the tens of thousands. And we give but fleeting consideration to such deaths, for it is our nature to banish such thoughts. But in doing so, we forget that they were each as alive as we, and the one length of rope - or bullet - or blade, took the whole of their lives in that one, fragile instant. Took their earliest days as swaddled infants, and their grayest unfulfilled futures. When one think of how many souls have suffered this fate in all of history - of the untold murders of untold men, women and children.. it is too much to bear.
— Seth Grahame-Smith, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.
— Anna Quindlen, Every Last One
The only reason people die, is because EVERYONE does it. You all just go along with it.It's RUBBISH, death. It's STUPID. I don't want nothing to do with it.
— Neil Gaiman, The Doll's House
REQUIEMUnder the wide and starry skyDig the grave and let me lie:Glad did I live and gladly die,And I laid me down with a will.This be the verse you grave for me:Here he lies where he long'd to be;Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Selected Poems
I didn’t want any flowers, I only wantedTo lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.How free it is, you have no idea how free——The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.
— Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems
I mentally bless and exonerate anyone who has kicked a chair out from beneath her or swallowed opium in large chunks. My mind has met their environment, here in the void. I understand perfectly.
— Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce
The bombs were coming-and so was I.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
I feel the terror of idleness,like a red thirst.Death isn't just an idea.
— Mary Oliver
She died that night. Her last breath took her soul, I saw it in my dream. I saw her soul leave her body as she exhaled, and then she had no more needs, no more reason; she was released from her body, and being released, she continued her journey elsewhere, high in the firmament where soul material gathers and plays out all the dreams and joys of which we temporal beings can barely conceive, all the things that are beyond our comprehension, but even so, are not beyond our attainment if we choose to attain them, and believe that we truly can.
— Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain
Everybody has an angel hiding inside. When you die, your angel comes out. You can die, but not your angel. Your angel never dies.
— Jerry Spinelli
And the thing about trying to cheat death is that, in the end, you still lose.
— Robyn Schneider, Extraordinary Means
It felt as though the whole globe was dressed in snow. Like it has pulled it on, the way you pull on a sweater. Next to the train line, footprints were sunken to their shins. Trees wore blankets of ice. As you may expect, someone has died.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
I can't die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwords I'll have a whole lifetime in which to die.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game
as long as there arehuman beings aboutthere is never going to beany peacefor any individualupon this earth (oranywhere elsethey mightescape to).all you can dois maybe grabten lucky minuteshereor maybe an hourthere.somethingis working toward youright now, andI mean youand nobody butyou.
— Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
IT'S A SWORD, said the Hogfather. THEY'RE NOT /MEANT/ TO BE SAFE.
— Terry Pratchett
Life is too fleet for onomatopoeia.
— Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan
And starward drifts the stricken world,Lone in unalterable gloomDead, with a universe for tomb,Dark, and to vaster darkness whirled.(“The Testimony of the Suns”)
— George Sterling, The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror
The bustle in a houseThe morning after deathIs solemnest of industriesEnacted upon earth,--The sweeping up the heart,And putting love awayWe shall not want to use againUntil eternity
— Emily Dickinson
I want to look at you as you kill me.
— Curtis Jobling, Rise of the Wolf
In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence. A kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the great catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plants die and how many are killed; but, from the moment you enter the animal kingdom, this law is suddenly in the most dreadful evidence. A Power, a violence, at once hidden and palpable. . . has in each species appointed a certain number of animals to devour the others. . . And who [in this general carnage] exterminates him who will exterminate all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man. . . The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.
— Joseph de Maistre
Fear of death is form of stasis horrors. The dead weight of time.
— William S. Burroughs, Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of disappointed shells that dropped behind. GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And floundering like a man in fire or lime.-- Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
— Wilfred Owen, The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
Death was an inverse Big Bang; an impossible magic trick where everything had become nothing in the very same instant, where one state had been replaced so completely by another that no evidence of the first could be detected, and where the catalyst had been vaporized by the sheer shock of the new.
— Belinda Bauer, Rubbernecker
Do not wait until the near end of your life to realize that you have not fully lived to love.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
She made the decision that her existence had lost its meaning. And you cannot judge that.
— Jack Kevorkian
I was discovering that the most precious gift someone can give us is time, because what gives time its value is death.
— Ingrid Betancourt, Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle
The most important thing I learnt on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When any Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
Committing suicide so as not to be murdered is the worst reason I've ever heard of to die. 
— Tiffanie DeBartolo, God-Shaped Hole
When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.
— Ray Bradbury, The Halloween Tree
I basked in you;I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love.And death doesn't prevent me from loving you.Besides, in my opinion you aren't dead.(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)
— Franz Wright, Walking to Martha's Vineyard
If while alive you hurt or disappoint people you love, there's no use continuing such behavior when you're dead.
— Anthony Swofford, Jarhead
Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!
— Thomas Mann
DisciplineI am old and I have hadmore than my share of good and bad.I've had love and sorrow, seen sudden deathand been left alone and of love bereft.I thought I would never love againand I thought my life was grief and pain.The edge between life and death was thin, but then I discovered discipline.I learned to smile when I felt sad, I learned to take the good and the bad, I learned to care a great deal morefor the world about me than before.I began to forget the "Me" and "I"and joined in life as it rolled by: this may not mean sheer ecstasybut is better by far than "I" and "Me.
— Meryl Gordon
We walk into the rest of our lives together, not knowing it'll end before it's truly started.
— Tess Sharpe, Far From You
The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started. I shook off the sweat and the sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.
— Albert Camus, L'Étranger
Sin, death, and hell have set their marks on him,And all their ministers attend on him.
— William Shakespeare, Richard III
The Only Way Out Is To DIE!!!!
— Bullet for My Valentine
I would rather live than die. I would rather die than survive as a monster.
— Robert Fanney, The War of Mists
Old age is not as honorable as death, but most people seek it.
— David Gemmell, Fall of Kings
Death is as unexpected in his caprice as a courtesan in her disdain
—  but death is truer – Death has never forsaken any man
They say that in the second before our death, each of us understands the real reason for our existence, and out of that moment, heaven or hell is born.
— Paulo Coelho, Aleph
I got out on the street and started crying the kind of hysterical tears made justifiable only by turning off one’s cell phone, putting it to the ear, and pretending to be told of a death in the family.
— Sloane Crosley
And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,So do our minutes hasten to their end;Each changing place with that which goes before,In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
— William Shakespeare, The Sonnets and Narrative Poems
Every morning is my birthday and every night is my death-day.
— Santosh Kalwar
There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.
— Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
I am not a coward, but I am so strong. So hard to die.
— Meriwether Lewis
I'd like to die listening to a piece of music. I imagine this as so easy, so natural, but naturally it's quite impossible. Notes stab too softly. The wounds they leave behind may smart, but they don't fester. Melancholy and pain trickle out instead of blood. When the notes cease, all is peaceful within me again.
— Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories
Obedient to no man, dependent only on weather and season, without a goal before them or a roof above them, owning nothing, open to every whim of fate, the homeless wanderers lead their childlike, brave, shabby existence. They are the sons of Adam, who was driven out of Paradise; the brothers of the animals, of innocence. Out of heaven's hand they accept what is given them from moment to moment: sun, rain, fog, snow, warmth, cold, comfort, and hardship; time does not exist for them and neither does history, or ambition, or that bizarre idol called progress and evolution, in which houseowners believe so desperately. A wayfarer may be delicate or crude, artful or awkward, brave or cowardly—he is always a child at heart, living in the first day of creation, before the beginning of the history of the world, his life always guided by a few simple instincts and needs. He may be intelligent or stupid; he may be deeply aware of the fleeting fragility of all living things, of how pettily and fearfully each living creature carries its bit of warm blood through the glaciers of cosmic space, or he may merely follow the commands of his poor stomach with childlike greed—he is always the opponent, the deadly enemy of the established proprietor, who hates him, despises him, or fears him, because he does not wish to be reminded that all existence is transitory, that life is constantly wilting, that merciless icy death fills the cosmos all around.
— Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund
Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow lazy and indifferent; the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one's own.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Death is the true inspiring genius, or the muse of philosophy, wherefore Socrates has defined the latter as θανάτου μελέτη. Indeed without death men would scarcely philosophise.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol 1
If men only felt about death as they do about sleep, all terrors would cease. . . Men sleep contentedly, assured that they will wake the following morning. They should feel the same about their lives.
— Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come
Do not mourn the dead. They know what they are doing.
— Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
A man falling off a cliff to certain death will stretch out a hand even to his worst enemy.
— Robert Jordan, Lord of Chaos
I want you here. I don't care if it's a hundred degrees and every blade of grass dies. Without you, none of that matters to me.
— Kami Garcia
Colder by the hour, more dead with every breath.
— John Green
How do you tell if something's alive? You check for breathing.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
A man begins dying at the moment of his birth. Most People live in denial of Death's patient courtship until, late in life and deep in sickness, they become aware of him sitting bedside.
— Dean Koontz, The Husband
How do you get all those coins?" asked Mort.IN PAIRS.
— Terry Pratchett, Mort
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
— Sigmund Freud
He was Death, and he'd ridden in on a pale horse...
— Sherrilyn Kenyon, Invincible
How easy to be a bird or an animal, living from day to day, unaware you're alive, unaware that one day you will die.
— Rachel Ward, Numbers
In the end, we all lose it. Remember that. In the end, we own nothing.
— Richard Paul Evans, Miles to Go
You have to remember one life, one death–this one! To enter fully the day, the hour, the moment whether it appears as life or death, whether we catch it on the inbreath or outbreath, requires only a moment, this moment. And along with it all the mindfulness we can muster, and each stage of our ongoing birth, and the confident joy of our inherent luminosity. (24)
— Stephen Levine, A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last
But really, anybody could die any day, whether you were ready or not. It could be your pet fish or your sister or you. Nothing is the same forever. Maybe all the people on Earth are God's little pet fish. God lives such a long time that people's lives probably seem really short to him. He watches them swim for a little while, and then they stop swimming. 
— Suzanne LaFleur, Love, Aubrey
...Opal is dead, and I don't see how a healer can change that! It's not something to joke about."Joke?" Then Owen hit his forehead and cried, "That's right, you haven't heard!"Heard what?" asked Adrien, who felt an insane glimmer of hope return to his heart.Death is on strike! She hasn't done that for two centuries, and it's very annoying. Your friend is alive."Very annoying?" repeated Amber. "I don't see what's so annoying about a miracle! What is Death on strike for?"Everyone knows that Death lives in Fairytale-in an inaccessible area, obviously. And just a few hours ago, she decided to stop working. So, for now, no one can die.
— Flavia Bujor
It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
— Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
Ros was dead.He had loved heroin more than it loved him. I was shocked beyond imagining
—  he was the first of my friends to fall.
Never underestimate the will of a creature who begins to die at birth.
— Lyn Benedict, Sins & Shadows
The worst that can possibly have happened to him is death and that we are all in for---if not this morning, then in days, or weeks, or years at most.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.
— Marina Warner, The Leto Bundle
It's normal to shy away from illness and death. It's natural to gravitate toward laughter and life.
— Ellyn Bache, The Art of Saying Goodbye
When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.
— Richard Dawkins
In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
The problems of today's youth were no longer a Sunday supplement, or a news broadcast, or anything so remote and intangible. They were suddenly become a dirty, shivering boy, who told us that in this world we had built for him with our sweat and our blood, he was not only tired of living, but so unscared of dying that he did it daily, sometimes for recreation.
— Spider Robinson, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon
I can't do anything to death, doctor's orders.
— Woody Allen
Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.
— John Fowles, The Magus
Death comes to me again, a girlin a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.It’s not so terrible she tells me,not like you think, all darknessand silence. There are windchimesand the smell of lemons, some daysit rains, but more often the air is dryand sweet. I sit beneath the staircasebuilt from hair and bone and listento the voices of the living. I like it,she says, shaking the dust from her hair,especially when they fight, and when they sing.
— Dorianne Laux
Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone's about to die.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
For how imperiously, how coolly, in disregard of all one’s feelings, does the hard, cold, uninteresting course of daily realities move on! Still we must eat, and drink, and sleep, and wake again, - still bargain, buy, sell, ask and answer questions, - pursue, in short, a thousand shadows, though all interest in them be over; the cold, mechanical habit of living remaining, after all vital interest in it has fled.
— Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
What I love about the sculpture is that it makes the bones that we are always walking and playing on manifest, like in a world that so often denies the reality of death and the reality that we are surrounded by and outnumbered by the dead. Here, is a very playful way of acknowledging that and acknowledging that and that always, whenever we play, whenever we live, we are living in both literal and metaphorical ways on the memory and bones of the dead.
— John Green
Give me liberty or give me death.".]
— Patrick Henry
Only.. I want to do die as myself
— Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of starsLetting in the light, peephole after peephole--- A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
— Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems
I mean, I really do think that love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops. But I also have to say, for the umpty-umpth time, that life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.
— William Goldman, The Princess Bride
No popularity exists when tragedy strikes. All that's left are human hearts and love and ache. We all love each other, deep down, and when we see another soul in pain we can't help but hurt too.
— Maya Van Wagenen, Popular: Vintage Wisdom for a Modern Geek
Not easy to state the change you made.If I'm alive now, I was dead,Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.
— Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems
It bothered me that he was right. Without Sir Stuart's intervention, I'd have been dead again already.That's right--you heard me: dead again already.I mean, come on. How screwed up is your life (after- or otherwise) when you find yourself needing phrases like that?
— Jim Butcher, Ghost Story
But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.
— Richard Feynman
How sad, ye Gods, how sad the world is at evening, how mysterious the mists over the swamps! You will know it when you have wandered astray in those mists, when you have suffered greatly before dying, when you have walked through the world carrying an unbearable burden. You know it too when you are weary and ready to leave this earth without regret; its mists; its swamps and its rivers; ready to give yourself into the arms of death with a light heart, knowing that death alone can comfort you.
— Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Cyrano: The leaves---Roxane: What color---Perfect Venetian red! Look at them fall.Cyrano: Yes---they know how to die. A little wayFrom the branch to the earth, a little fearOf mingling with the common dust---and yetThey go down gracefully---a fall that seemsLike flying!
— Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac
Do you want to know something about tyrants? When faced with death, they weep and they beg just like the rest of us.
— Melina Marchetta, Quintana of Charyn
Once a flower is picked it immediately begins to die.
— Nenia Campbell, Terrorscape
Destiny, if I could sit across the porch from God, I'd thank Him for Lending me you.....
— Flavia Weedn, Across The Porch From God: Reflections Of Gratitude
But that's the thing with death. The whisper of it descent travels fast and wide, and people must've know I'd become a corpse because nobody even came to view the body.
— Gayle Forman, Where She Went
Bones are patient. Bones never tire nor do they run away. When you come upon a man who has been dead many years, his bones will still be lying there, in place, content, patiently waiting, but his flesh will have gotten up and left him. Water is like flesh. Water will not stand still. It is always off to somewhere else; restless, talkative, and curious. Even water in a covered jar will disappear in time. Flesh is water. Stones are like bones. Satisfied. Patient. Dependable. Tell me, then, Alobar, in order to achieve immortality, should you emulate water or stone? Should you trust your flesh or your bones?
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated... As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all... No man is an island, entire of itself... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
— John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and Death's Duel: With the Life of Dr. John Donne by Izaak Walton
Copulation is no more foul to me than death is.
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition
Shakespeare’s enduring tragedy did its part to further the goals of the Mercenaries—glamorizing death, making dying for love seem the most noble act of all, though nothing could be further from the truth. Taking an innocent life—in a misguided attempt to prove love or for any other reason—is a useless waste.
— Stacey Jay, Juliet Immortal
But hey, if there’s one bright side to your dying, it’s that you aren’t around to tell me things I don’t like hearing. I’m sorry. That was a dickhead thing to say. I need a condom for my mouth.
— Adam Silvera, History Is All You Left Me
Every cataclysm is welcomed by somebody
—  there is always someone to rejoice at disaster and see in it the prospect of a new beginning and a better world.
Why won't they let me be? I just need to rest, that's all, to rest and sleep some, and maybe die a little.
— George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords
The world is too brutal for me—I am glad there is such a thing as the grave—I am sure I shall never have any rest till I get there.
— John Keats, Letters of John Keats
To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?" he said.I placed my hands flat on the table and leaned across it. "Stay the hell away from him.""Who? Oh, you mean the guy who's gonna bite it soon?" "He's not. He's going to be fine."He reached a hand out and placed it over my own. I snatched my hand back. He shook his head at me and whispered, "You can't stop it.""Watch me.
— Megan Miranda, Fracture
It's gonna hurt, now," said Amy. "anything dead coming back to life hurts.
— Toni Morrison
You ask 'Are you a man or a demon?' Neither, I say. I have woken up, and the rest of you are sleeping, and that is the only difference between us.
— Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps, And here you are the mothers' laps. This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, Darker than the colorless beards of old men, Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing. ...What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas'd the moment life appear'd. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling...
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
— John Fowles, The Collector
Sometimes the only answer to death is lunch.
— Jim Harrison, Warlock
Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists...but it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.
— Lafcadio Hearn, Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn
I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.
— E.M. Forster
We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.
— Stephen King, The Green Mile, Part 6: Coffey on the Mile
Survival is the celebration of choosing life over death. We know we're going to die. We all die. But survival is saying: perhaps not today. In that sense, survivors don't defeat death, they come to terms with it.
— Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival - Who Lives, Who Dies and Why
Decline is also a form of voluptuousness, just like growth. Autumn is just as sensual as springtime. There is as much greatness in dying as in procreation.
— Iwan Goll
There is no such thing as originality. It has all been said before, suffered before. If a person knows that, is it any wonder love becomes mechanical and death just a scene to be shunned? There is no absolute knowledge to be gained from either. Just another ride on the merry-go-round, another blurred scene of faces smiling and faces grieved.
— Clive Barker
Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness, of fear; then she wished that it were already the next day. Immediately afterwards she realized that that wish was futile because the death of her father was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening endlessly.
— Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories
Having made the decision to love, had I chosen life instead of death?
— Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
I'll have that someday, thought Peter. Someone who'll kiss me good-bye at the door. Or maybe just someone to put a blindfold over my head before they shoot me. Depending on how things turn out.
— Orson Scott Card, Shadow of the Hegemon
Killing is easy," said Mo, "Dying is harder...
— Cornelia Funke
Grandfather : Death is nothing to be afraid of.Renee : It's not death I'm afraid of.Grandfather: What is it, then?
— Yvonne Wood, Dead Beautiful
Death is the reward for living
— Sylvia Browne, Life on the Other Side: A Psychic's Tour of the Afterlife
the sensation of trying to escape... but never being able to... i'm sure i felt that... that's... death
— Allen Walker
No mother should lose her child.
— Ann Hood, The Knitting Circle
Sometimes the dying live more fiercely and wisely than the rest of us. (146)
— Julia Cameron, God is No Laughing Matter
Yes, Max, you are going to die. Just like everybody else.Thank you, Confucious.
— James Patterson
This sadness is one of the great trials of the human experiment. As far as we know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift - or curse, perhaps - of awareness about our own mortality. Everything here eventually dies; we're just the lucky ones who get to think about this fact every day.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,' the mage said...'And life is also a terrible thing,' Ged said, 'and must be feared and praised.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
That which has died falls not out of the universe. If it stays here, it also changes here, and is dissolved into its proper parts, which are elements of the universe and of thyself. And these too change, and they murmur not".
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
She couldn't tell where his pupils ended and the irises began
—  looking into those eyes was like looking into a well where children had drowned.
Though there had been moments of beauty in it Mariam knew that life for most part had been unkind to her.But as she walked the final twenty paces,she could not help but wish for more of it.She wished she could see Laila again , wished to hear the clangor of her laugh , to sit with her once more for a pot of chai and leftover halwa under a starlit sky. She mourned that she would never see Aziza grow up , would not see the beautiful young woman that she would oneday become ,would not get to paint her hands with henna and toss noqul candy at her wedding . She would never play with Aziza's children. She would have liked that very much , to be old and play with Aziza's children.Mariam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes , it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that wshed over her. She thought of her entry into this world , the harami child of a lowly villager , an unintended thing , a pitiable , regrettable accident. A weed , And yet she was leaving the wolrd as a woman who had loved and been loved back.She was leaving it as a friend , a companion , a guardian.A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was no so bad , Mariam thought , that she should die this way. Not so bad.This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings. pg. 360
— Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
Ignorance is not bliss. It is the kiss of death.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
For some folks death is release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them.
— Neil Gaiman, Dream Country
Smiling at death seems like a pretty bold act. And so I smile like a damned fool.
— Emm Cole, Keeping Merminia
I must confess, I have always wondered what lay beyond life, my dear.Yeah, everybody wonders. And sooner or later everybody gets to find out.
— Neil Gaiman, Fables and Reflections
So if there is something on the planet that is worth living for, I'd better not miss it, because once you're dead, it's too late for regrets, and if you die by mistake, that is really, really dumb.
— Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Tirelessly they flew on and on, and tirelessly she kept pace. She felt a fierce joy possessing her, that she could command these immortal presences. And she rejoiced in her blood and flesh, in the rough pine bark she felt next to her skin, in the beat of her heart and the life of all her senses, and in the hunger she was feeling now, and in the presence of her sweet-voiced bluethroat dæmon, and in the earth below her and the lives of every creature, plant and animal both; and she delighted in being of the same substance as them, and in knowing that when she died her flesh would nourish other lives as they had nourished her.
— Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife
Music links us humans, heart to heart...Across time and space, and life and death.
— Nancy Werlin, Impossible
But words are things, and a small drop of ink,      Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;      ’T is strange, the shortest letter which man uses Instead of speech, may form a lasting link      Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces Frail man, when paper — even a rag like this, Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.
— George Gordon Byron, Don Juan
Two weeks until your cure" she says finally. "Sixteen days" I say, but in my head I'm counting: Seven days. Seven days until I'm free and away from all these people and their sliding superficial lives brushing past one another gliding, gliding, gliding from life to death. For them there's hardly a change between the two.
— Lauren Oliver, Delirium
I lost my father this past year, and the word feels right because I keep looking for him. As if he were misplaced. As if he could just turn up, like a sock or a set of keys.
— Mark Slouka
She started thinking about all the euphemisms for death, all the anxious taboos that had always fascinated her. It was too bad you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject. People were either too young or too old, or else they didn't have time.
— Tove Jansson, The Summer Book
There is shadow under this red rock // (Come in under the shadow of this red rock) // And I will show you something different from either // Your shadow at morning striding behind you // Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you // I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
— T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Death is inevitable passion is eternal
— Allison van Diepen, Raven
You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
It wasn't his, it wasn't my fault,we both had nothing except patience,but Death has none. I saw him come (how meanly!)and I watched him as he took and took:none of it I could claim as mine. 
— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images
Life is a long agonized illness only curable by death.
— Spike Milligan
I'm not scared of death, I just don't want to seek it out.
— Thomas James Higgins
If death, said my father, reasoning with himself, is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body;--and if it is true that people can walk about and do their business without brains,--then certes the soul does not inhabit there.
— Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Don't interfere!" The Doctor silenced her angrily. "I cannot will my own destruction.
— Peter Grimwade, Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead
It is always consoling to think of suicide
— it's what gets one through many a bad night.
I killed four flies while waiting. Damn, death was everywhere. Man, bird, beast, reptile, rodent, insect, fish didn't have a chance. The fix was in. I didn't know what to do about it. I got depressed. You know, I see a boy at the supermarket, he's packing my groceries, then I see him sticking himself into his own grave along with the toilet paper, the beer and the chicken breasts.
— Charles Bukowski, Pulp
She surveyed the carnage behind him. "Did you have fun?"He showed her his teeth. "Yes.
— Ilona Andrews, Bayou Moon
This is how it is in life and love. In life and love we are with people for a while, and then we join other people, people we have not met, and we walk with them, and we leave behind all the things we used to be. Sometimes we leave people behind too... This happens everyday. Everyday this happens and scarcely anybody cares.
— Daniel Handler, Adverbs
It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.
— Marcel Proust, The Captive & The Fugitive
There is uncertainty in hope, but even with its tenuous nature, it summons our strength and pulls us through fear and grief— and even death.
— Priscille Sibley, The Promise of Stardust
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded and loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
— Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems
I always say, if you must mount the gallows, give a jest to the crowd, a coin to the hangman, and make the drop with a smile on your lips.
— Robert Jordan, The Fires of Heaven
Every time you take a step, even when you don't want to. . . . When it hurts, when it means you rub chins with death, or even if it means dying, that's good. Anything that moves ahead, wins. No chess game was ever won by the player who sat for a lifetime thinking over his next move.
— Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer
What do you want to do with your life, then?” is often the question I'm asked.To be honest, I don't know. I really don't.Mainly because I don't see myself living long enough for that to make much of a difference.
— Nenia Campbell, Tantalized
Oh, we do not understand death, we never understand it; creatures are only truly dead when everyone else has died who knew them.
— Arthur Schnitzler, Selected Short Fiction
What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief.
— Meghan O'Rourke
After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts – like a Chinese nest of boxes – oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front – in our ancestors, back and back until...
— Walter de la Mare, The Return
And thus we all are nighingThe truth we fear to know:Death will end our cryingFor friends that come and go.
— Edwin Arlington Robinson
Everyone was eating, talking softly, glancing at me, hugging me, eating. It was as if someone had turned the volume down. Everything looked normal, but the sound was muted. Death did this, set all this weirdness in motion, made people appear out of nowhere carrying casseroles, saying 'I'm sorry' over and over, death muffled their voices.
— Joan Abelove, Saying it Out Loud
Perhaps because it seems so appropriate, I don't notice the rain. It falls in sheets, a blanket of silvery thread rushing to the hard almost-winter ground. Still, I stand without moving at the side of the coffin.
— Michelle Zink, Prophecy of the Sisters
But after I got them to leave and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Sweet as the tender fragrance that survives,When martyred flowers breathe out their little lives,Sweet as a song that once consoled our pain,But never will be sung to us again,Is they remembrance. Now the hour of restHath come to thee. Sleep, darling: it is best.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
She collapsed at the bottom of the trail, at the edge of the ghost town. Dekka sat on Edilio and pressed down on the wound. The force of the blood was weaker now. She could almost hold the blood back now, not a good thing, no, because it meant he was almost finished, his brave heart almost done beating.Dekka looked up straight into the glittering eyes of a coyote. She could sense the others around her, closing in. Wary but sensing that a fresh meal was close at hand.
— Michael  Grant, Hunger