c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
That's the secret. If you always make sure you're exactly the person you hoped to be, if you always make sure you know only the very best people, then you won't care if you die tomorrow.
— Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home
There is only one things in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Most people die at 25 and aren’t buried until they’re 75.
— Benjamin Franklin (attributed, not found in any major work, fake)
The old man smiled. 'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.
— Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
I’ll try to be around and about. But if I’m not, then you know that I’m behind your eyelids, and I’ll meet you there
— Terence McKenna
Nothing quite brings out the zest for life in a person like the thought of their impending death
— Jhonen Vásquez, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Director's Cut
It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.
— Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before
To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.
— Socrates
Sometimes, the Lord just takes blessed people because they've filled their purpose early. Everyone plays their own song. They sing their story to the world and leave behind a melody of memories. Sometimes... their song is cut short and ends too early. But that doesn't mean their music was any less sweet or that they left any less of an impression.
— Linda Kage, The Stillburrow Crush
Time," the Captain said, "is not what you think." He sat down next to Eddie. "Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning.
— Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
We are so afraid of the idea of having to die… that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn…
— José Saramago, Blindness
We must conquer life by living it to the full, and then we can go to meet death with a certain prestige.
— Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend
I don't give a shit, Dad!""Well I do! I absolutely give a shit! This will completely exhaust you.""It's my body. I can do what I like!""So you don't care about your body now?""No, I'm sick of it! I'm sick of doctors and needles and blood tests and transfusions. I'm sick of being stuck in a bed day after day while the rest of you get on with your lives. I hate it! I hate all of you! Adam's gone for a university interview, did you know that? He's going to be here for years doing whatever he likes and I'm going to be under the ground in a couple of weeks!
— Jenny Downham, Before I Die
This was how the world ended. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
— Andrea Speed, Bloodlines
Life is stressful,dear. That's why they say "rest in peace.
— David Mazzucchelli
If you can't imagine it, think clumsy silence. Think bits and pieces of floating despair. And drowning in a train.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
The reason dying is so easy is because death has no meaning... And the reason death has no meaning is because life has no meaning. All the same, have fun!
— Janne Teller, Nothing
I wonder about death, I who may never know it. It looks much like ecstacy, the way they open their mouths as they drown, the way their fingers dig into your skin. Their eyes are wide and startled and they trash in your hands as though with an excess of passion.
— Holly Black, Tithe
Dying has a funny way of making you see people, the living and the dead, a little differently. Maybe that's just part of the grieving, or maybe the dead stand there and open our eyes a bit wider.
— Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen
Are you afraid to die?'Cause it scares the hell outta me,And the end is all I can see,And it scares the hell outta me,That the end is all I can see.
— Matthew Bellamy
Ravens are the birds I'll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have to die at all. Instead, become ravens.
— Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Everybody dies. There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God. (Although there’s no question a belief in God would come in handy. It would be great to think there’s a plan, and that everything happens for a reason. I don’t happen to believe that. And every time one of my friends says to me, “Everything happens for a reason,” I would like to smack her.)
— Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections
The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop.
— Saul Bellow
Many African societies divide humans into three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalised ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered. Many … can be recalled by name. But they are not the living-dead. There is a difference.
— James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me
For everything in life there is always a beginning and an end. This is the tough part the most difficult thing when you see that it’s coming: The end.
— Seve Ballesteros
Death wasn't a movie where the pretty star faded away with a touch of pale makeup and every hair in place.
— Soheir Khashoggi, Nadia's Song
We could endlessly reminisce, live in the past to an unhealthy degree, then politely kill each other some winter night before bedtime, stirring poison into our cups of whiskey-spiked chamomile tea, wearing party hats. Then, nervous about our double homicide, we could lie in bed together, holding hands again, frightened and waiting, still wondering, after all these years, if we even believed in our own souls.
— Timothy Schaffert, The Coffins of Little Hope
Who set Rome on fire? The man we must admire. For killing his wife, and taking the life of mother and brother and so many others, while plucking his damnable lyre.
— Paul L. Maier, The Flames of Rome
See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory thatsomeone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of livingis a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one dayyou look down and see how much pain has eroded.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
She ran because she had no other choice. She feared what would happen if she dared to stop. There was no time to think. There was barely any time for her to breathe. On her broken ankle, she ran. With her bruised arms, she ran. With her bleeding sides, she ran because she knew today was the day she was meant to die.
— Judyann McCole, Adela Arthur and the Creator's Clock
We do not look for reason for logic in the passionate entreaties of those who are sick unto death; we are stung with the recollection of a thousand slighted opportunities of fulfilling the wishes of those who will soon pass away from among us: and do they ask us for the future happiness of our lives, we lay it at their feet, and will it away from us.
— Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
None of us are getting out of here alive".
— R. Alan Woods
[In my dream] they slide their lips over my skin, whispering whispering whispering. They tell me their names, they tell me their lives, they tell me their pain...I can't struggle, I can't stop laughing, I can't resist these people who once were.
— Carrie Ryan, The Dead-Tossed Waves
I was finally beginning to perceive that no matter how many dead people I might see, or people at the instant of their death, I would never manage to grasp death, that very moment, precisely in itself. It was one thing or the other: either you are dead, and then in any case there's nothing else to understand, or else you are not yet dead, and in that case, even with the rifle at the back of your head or the rope around your neck, death remains incomprehensible, a pure abstraction, this absurd idea that I, the only living person in the world, could disappear. Dying, we may already be dead, but we never die, that moment never comes, or rather it never stops coming, there it is, it's coming, and then it's still coming, and then it's already over, without ever having come.
— Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones
I've been ready to die since before you was Born!
— Marvel Comics
Demons never die quietly, and a week ago the storm was a proper demon, sweeping through the Caribbean after her long ocean crossing from Africa, a category five when she finally came ashore at San Juan before moving on to Santo Domingo and then Cuba and Florida. But now she's grown very old, as her kind measures age, and these are her death throes. So she holds tightly to this night, hanging on with the desperate fury of any dying thing, any dying thing that might once have thought itself invincible.
— Caitlín R. Kiernan
Strange, how death had a way of turning a table upside down in an instant. It swept away all the dust that covered treasures, blew the fog from one’s view, knockedaway facades.
— Julianne MacLean, Love According to Lily
I deserve it all. Let the cold world do its worst; one thing I know--there's a grave somewhere for me. The world may go on just as its always done, and take everything from me--loved ones, property, everything--but it can't take that. Some day I'll lie down in it and forget it all, and my poor broken heart will be at rest.
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Dying was misery. Death was that period at the end of the sentence.
— Holly Hood, Perfectly Hopeless
When death comes you do not stay for one minute in the place it has visited. Many things arrive after death-sadness, questions, and policemen- and none of these can be answered when your papers are not in order.
— Chris Cleave
One had heard and read a great deal about death, and even seen a little of it, and knew by heart the thousand commonplaces of religion and poetry which seemed to deaden one's senses and veil the horror. Society being immortal, could put on immortality at will. Adams being mortal, felt only the mortality. Death took features altogether new to him, in these rich and sensuous surroundings. Nature enjoyed it, played with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture, and smothered her victim with caresses. Never had one seen her so winning. The hot Italian summer brooded outside, over the market-place and the picturesque peasants, and, in the singular color of the Tuscan atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting with mid-summer blood. The sick-room itself glowed with the Italian joy of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the soft shadows; even the dying women shared the sense of the Italian summer, the soft, velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual fulness of Nature and man. She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even gaily, racked slowly to unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence, as a soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the same air of sensual pleasure.
— Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
Your father calls you to his court. You need not pack. You go garbed in glorious raiment. He waits eagerly by his palace doors to welcome you, and has prepared a place at the high table, by his side, in the company of the great-souled, honored, and best-beloved.
— Lois McMaster Bujold, Paladin of Souls
There is a thin line that separates life from death, but once it's crossed, it becomes as large as an ocean, and so treacherous that it’s impossible to cross back.
— Federico Chini, The Sea Of Forgotten Memories
Sensei says funerals are not really for the dead. They are for those left behind. "The dead are long gone by the time a funeral is held," he told us. "Who would wait when the doors of Heaven are open? Only the living would be foolish enough to still hang around on earth.
— Sandy Fussell, Shaolin Tiger
She wasted and grew so thin that she no longer was a little girl, but the shadow of a little girl. The flame of her life flickered so faintly that it appeared sufficient to blow at it to extinguish it. Stas understood that death did not have to wait for a third attack to take her and he expected it any day or any hour.
— Henryk Sienkiewicz, In Desert and Wilderness
Posthumous: It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that’s what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage.
— Roberto Bolaño
the only way to get over a death is by seeing it as a life completed, instead of a life interrupted.
— Anonymous
I discovered the bleeding when he licked my hand and left a swath of blood behind, death's autograph.
— Augusten Burroughs, A Wolf at the Table
If (or rather when) you move to death, you’ll learn its language through the educational process known as total immersion. (7)
— Sandra M. Gilbert, Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve
You’ll live for as long as you live, and once you stop living, you don’t have to worry about staying alive any more because you’ll be dead.
— Sebastyne Young
It was good that she remembered him, though it was exhausting to do so.No rest for the weary. Or the dying. Or the dead.
— Ryan Graudin, Invictus
...we spoke about dying. [Prim] told me how she'd nearly died of malaria. She said that she didn't mind the thought of death. That realizing you're going to die actually makes life better as it's only then that you decide to live the life you really want to live.
— Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir
As Ossie Jones crept out of his body and into the mist, his heart murmured till it was silent.
— Biyi Bandele-Thomas, The Street
Do you believe that you will die? Yes man is mortal I am a man ergo... no that isn't what I mean. I know that you know that. What I am asking is, have you ever actually believed it? Believed it completely? Believed not with your mind but with your body? Actually felt that one the fingers now holding this very piece of paper will be icy and yellow? No, of course you don't believe it. Which is the reason why up until now you haven't jumped from the tenth floor to the pavement.
— Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
...I wondered at times whether I would wake up and this would be just a bad dream, a nightmare that I could wish away, I had the same fantasy when you were sick, Doc, that I would one day wake up and you all would be healthy and alive.
— Rabih Alameddine, The Angel of History
They drove farther north like that. In perfect loving antagonism. It occurred to Ted that maybe Marty was like all the red and gold leaves he saw burning on the trees. In nature, it seems, things reached their most vibrant and beautiful right at the point of death, flaming out with all they had—why not natural man? His father was red, green, yellow, and gold, like a beautiful bird falling from the sky. Parodoxical undressing again.
— David Duchovny, Bucky F*cking Dent
That’s when it happens. The moment of death is full of heat and sound and pain bigger than anything, a funnel of burning heat splitting me in two, something searing and scorching and tearing, and if screaming were a feeling it would be this.Then nothing.
— Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall
Jest when we stopped wanting to kill ourselves, we started to die.
— David Levithan
What about you?" he asked, his words not much more than a mumble. "Regrets?""Many," Skuduggery said.Tesseract's breath rattled in his chest. "That's the goo thing about living. You get to make up for past mistakes.""Or make brand-new ones.
— Derek Landy, Mortal Coil
A principled life begins by accepting the evident truth that we must die. Death becomes us. Knowledge of the impermanence of our existence reassures us that how we live does make a difference. Because our allotted time for living is finite, we must make the most of each day.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Death does not mark the end of a chapter in a man’s life, but the end of a book of man, the beautiful conclusion to his yearnings.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
I can't tell whether a revived man would appreciate his second chance or yearn for the stolen serenity.
— Ahmed Mostafa
He had visited his family the evening before, eaten dinner with Renee and Chris, his grandson, in the pretence that everything was ordinary, but in fact to service his end-game ruse. He was going over the mountains, he'd said, to hunt for quail in willow canyons, he had no particular canyons in mind, he intended to return on Thursday evening, though possibly, if the hunting was good, he would return on Friday or Saturday. The lie was open-ended so that his family wouldn't start worrying until he'd been dead for as long as a week - so none would miss or seek him where he rotted silently in the sage. Ben imagined how it might be otherwise, his cancer a pestilent force in their lives, or a pall descending over them like ice, just as they'd begun to emerge from the pall of Rachel's death. The last thing they needed was for Ben to tell hem of his terminal colon cancer.
— David Guterson, East of the Mountains
Death could be waiting for him, but he wasn’t afraid. Whether it be sooner or later, he welcomed the inevitability with open arms.
— Craig R. Key, Iniquitous
Fran had from an unsuitably early age been attracted by the heroic death, the famous last words, the tragic farewell. Her parents had on their shelves a copy of Brewer's 'Dictionary of Phase and fable', a book which, as a teenager, she would morbidly browse for hours. One of her favourite sections was 'Dying Sayings', with its fine mix of the pious, the complacent, the apocryphal, the bathetic and the defiant. Artists had fared well: Beethoven was alleged to have said 'I shall hear in heaven'; the erotic painter Etty had declared 'Wonderful! Wonderful this death!'; and Keats had died bravely, generously comforting his poor friend Severn.Those about to be executed had clearly had time to prepare a fine last thought, and of these she favoured the romantic Walter Raleigh's, 'It matters little how the head lies, so the heart be right'. Harriet Martineau, who had suffered so much as a child from religion, as Fran had later discovered, had stoically remarked, 'I see no reason why the existence of Harriet Martineau should be perpetuated', an admirably composed sentiment which had caught the child Fran's attention long before she knew who Harriet Martineau was. But most of all she had liked the parting of Siward the Dane who had commended his men: 'Lift me up that I may die standing, not lying down like a cow'.
— Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises
The little queen’s mother and father had said that she would live on, for a long time, and that her tears would magnify the life around her forever more, but they had not explained how she should go about going on.
— Meia Geddes, The Little Queen
But you'll see, you can feel time on the wind it whips up as it passes. We don't worry about time or the wind. Nothing can touch us any more. As long as people remember us, we are here. Anyway, it's the wind that tells us, lets us know about the thigs we've left behind.
— Tahar ben Jelloun
The palliative care nurses welcome him: he's a spot of brightness, they claim he keeps the patients interested in life. "We don't think of the clients here as dying," one of them said to him on his first visit. "After all everyone's dying, just some of us more slowly.
— Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last
People die. This is the fact the world desperately hides from us from birth. Long after you find out the truth about sex and Santa Claus, this other myth endures, this one about how you’ll always get rescued at the last second and if not, your death will at least mean something and there’ll be somebody there to hold your hand and cry over you. All of society is built to prop up that lie, the whole world a big, noisy puppet show meant to distract us from the fact that at the end, you’ll die, and you’ll probably be alone.
— David Wong, John Dies at the End
Just when we stopped wanting to kill ourselves, we started to die.
— David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing
All the same I fear what happens when we expand the terrain of medical practice to include actively assisting people with speeding their death. I am less worried about the abuse of these powers than I am about dependence on them.
— Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
To confront death, in any guise, is to identify with the victim and face what is unsettling and sobering
— E.B. White
In the room full of individuals for whom I hold feelings of resentment about, Who might be the first I would converse with, when I am about to bite the dust?
— Nishikant, The Papery Onions
When I reflect on the stories of death supported by hospice care and contrast it with our story depicting an absence of support, I find myself dealing with envy and anger. I have channeled those emotions into this book with the hope that hearing our story might give someone else a chance to create a better ending to the life of a loved one.
— Lisa J. Shultz, A Chance to Say Goodbye: Reflections on Losing a Parent
I couldn't imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric.
— Zadie Smith, Swing Time
A paradigm shift of viewing palliative care or hospice as a gift instead of seeing it as giving up has the potential to change the way we experience advanced age.
— Lisa J. Shultz, A Chance to Say Goodbye: Reflections on Losing a Parent
What would I have wanted to say if I had had the opportunity to see him one more time? I would like to think that I would have kept it simple and said, “I love you,” then just held his hand in silence, letting that thought linger in the space of the time we had left together.
— Lisa J. Shultz, A Chance to Say Goodbye: Reflections on Losing a Parent
The world didn't end with a whimper or a bang. Your life finished in complete silence. Gone in a blink. And then there was nothing.
— F.K. Preston
Even as we live with the knowledge that each day might be our last, we don’t want to believe it.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
I felt guilty that I hadn't thought of Kizuki right away, as if I had somehow abandoned him. Back in my room, though, I came to think of it this way: two and a half years have gone by since it happened, and Kizuki is still seventeen years old. Not that this means my memory of him has faded. The things that his death gave rise to are still there, bright and clear, inside me, some of them even clearer than when they were new. What I want to say is this: I'm going to turn twenty soon. Part of what Kizuki and I shared when we were sixteen and seventeen has already vanished, and no amount of crying is going to bring that back. I can't explain it any better than this, but I think that you can probably understand what I felt and what I am trying to say.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
When I'd woken the next morning, I'd done so in a dislocated world of dimmed daylight and diluted colors, a sodden world, feeling like I was a castaway on an alien planet.
— Keith Houghton
If the push towards life sustaining technology were balanced with options for comfort care in both medical school training and the healthcare culture, more people would have the chance to transition to death with dignity and grace.
— Lisa J. Shultz, A Chance to Say Goodbye: Reflections on Losing a Parent
I believe it’s imperative to bring the light of support and knowledge to patients and families when death is approaching.
— Lisa J. Shultz, A Chance to Say Goodbye: Reflections on Losing a Parent
Fancifully, I had thought I would feel the exact moment if anything ever happened to Scarlett, even if she wasn't nearby. Some kind of immense magnetic disturbance as our two hemispheres divided and went their separate ways.
— Keith Houghton
Without guidance and support for patients and families approaching death, there may be unnecessary conflict, confusion, and trauma that linger long after the passing of a loved one.
— Lisa J. Shultz, A Chance to Say Goodbye: Reflections on Losing a Parent
It comes down to this. When we die, not only will our bodies be gone, but so will the people we remember. We live in the world, and we recall the world, and one day we won't do either anymore. The church bells will ring and the drunks will drink.
— Peter Orner, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live
It behooves me to remember as I advance in age that death is an inevitable part of the life cycle rather than a medical failure.
— Lisa J. Shultz, A Chance to Say Goodbye: Reflections on Losing a Parent
I sat down in a chair by the bed. The house got altogether still again, and I thought he was asleep. Just ever so quietly I reached over and laid my hand on his shoulder.He said, 'I love you too, Hannah."He didn't last long after that. Death had become his friend. They say that people, if they want to, can let themselves slip away when the time comes. I think that is what Nathan did. He was not false or greedy. When the time came to go, he went.
— Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter
What is death if not these words that I say
— Sanchit Gupta, The Tree with a Thousand Apples
Part of us did die. Literally - that tissue on your face, the part they removed. It died. And you can't recover from any kind of death without mourning it.
— Alyssa B. Sheinmel, Faceless
I have walked in Death to the very precipice of the Ninth Gate," Abhorsen said quietly. "I know the secrets and horrors of the Nine Precincts. I do not know what lies beyond, but everything that lives must go there, in the proper time. That is the rule that governs our work as the Abhorsen, but it also governs us. You are the fifty-third Abhorsen, Sabriel. I have not taught you as well as I should—let this be my final lesson. Everyone and everything has a time to die.
— Garth Nix, Sabriel
Dying is something else. Dying is different to good and bad.
— Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart
Death is the only certainty in life. The moment we are born, our journey towards our final destination begins. It’s the beauty or the ugliness of that journey that defines our life; the distances covered varying in each case. Every flower that has bloomed in the free breeze of spring has to wither in the cruel icy autumn draught.
— Anurag Shourie, Half A Shadow
We should live lives of intentionality, for every life ends in death, but not every death ends in peace. The type of death one wishes to experience determines the type of life one ought to live. We should begin with the end in view, and in our journey we should never lose sight of the destination. The meaning of death holds the key to the meaning of life.
— James Castleton, MD, Mending of a Broken Heart
There are no more surprises and shocks in life, so that I watch the flame without agitation. For me the greatest reality is this and nothing else... Nothing else will worry or interest me in life hereafter.
— R.K. Narayan, The English Teacher
For the next two weeks, the world and all other issues would be omitted. We were two people alone in a hospital room. We allowed no visitors. We had two weeks of near-silence with each other and my increasing helplessness. I tended to tangle the IV and misplace the oxygen tube. As I started to say earlier, I could feel no sensible interest in the future. The moments became extraordinarily dimensionless - not without value but flat and a great deal emptier. When you learn you're fatally ill, time becomes very confusing, perhaps uninteresting, pedestrian. But my not caring if I lived or died hurt Ellen. And I was grateful that I could indulge my cowardice toward death in terms of living for her.
— Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death
When people pass on we must choose how to remember them. While our loved ones sleep for eternity we must carry on with our daily toil. We can elect to harbor adoration and love in our precious memories or cling to animosity and detestation. We can kindly remember our ancestors or continue to feel embedded enmity towards people who no longer walk this earth. Regardless the human frailties of the recently departed, it seems that we should aspire to clutch the best part of our ancestors being fast to our hearts. A book encapsulating a departed person’s life has many pages; we must choose which chapters to treasure and what chapters to disregard or downplay.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
[G]ive him this much: death didn't just walk up and inhale him. He wasn't exactly whisked away. He left claw marks on his life.
— Denis Johnson, Already Dead
In the lassitude after love Odysseus asks Circe, "What is the way to the land of the dead?"Circe answers, "You are muffled in folds of heavy fabric. You close your eyes against the rough cloth and though you struggle to free yourself you can barely move. With much thrashing and writhing, you manage to throw off another layer, but find that not only is there another one beyond it, but that the weight bearing you down has scarcely decreased. With dauntless spirit you continue to struggle. By infinitesimal degrees, the load becomes lighter and your confinement less. At last, you push away a piece of coarse, heavy cloth and, relieved, feel that it was the last one. As it falls away, you realize you have been fighting through years. You open your eyes.
— Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of The Odyssey
How easy it would be just to let go, to go willingly into all that wonderful energy.
— Adrienne Wilder, He Speaks Dead
I understood him. He wanted to die at home. He didn't want to be going someplace all the time for the sake of a hopeless hope. He wanted to die as himself out of his life. He didn't want his death to be the end of a technological process.
— Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter
I kept a picture of me kissing my dad’s corpse on the forehead in my wallet for years. I’d break it out any time someone showed me a baby picture, just so they would know how it ends.
— Doug Stanhope, Digging Up Mother: A Love Story
Every living thing dies, Art. That’s why we cherish it while we have it. That’s why we respect the decisions our loved ones make for themselves. That’s why we love, and why we care, and why we hurt. Because everything dies.
— Reilyn J. Hardy, The Last Chronomancer
I don't want to die. I want to live. I want to live long enough so I can really live.
— Patrick Ness, The Rest of Us Just Live Here
But dying people don't need to be reminded that they're dying
—  I feel they need to be reminded that they're still very much alive.
There are televisions and radios and the sounds of life, but too there is the sound of death, crying and oxygen tanks, and the squeaky wheels on wheelchairs. Like life and death are in a very close proximity to one another.
— Jon Chopan, Pulled from the River
Why is such a bad thing to die?
— Han Kang, The Vegetarian
But here I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all—but the certain knowledge that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now—this very instant—your soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man—and that this is certain, certain!
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
On my strand, lovely flowers their blossoms unfold,My mother shall grace thee with garments of gold.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
My father, my father, and dost thou not hearThe words that the Erl-King now breathes in mine ear?'Be calm, dearest child, 'tis thy fancy deceives;Tis the sad wind that sighs through the withering leaves.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We know everyone we love is going to die, but we don't know it, can't possibly believe it, she thought, or long ago I would have gone and started digging until I had a hole big enough to lie down in.
— Rae Meadows, I Will Send Rain
If we are to welcome the elderly into our communities and support them to stay there for as long as possible, if we are to attend to the social needs of our elderly citizens both inside and out of institutions, then we need both government intervention and funding, along with the community's engagement and help.
— Karen Hitchcock, Dear Life: On Caring for the Elderly
So, what is the right way to look at death? Do we see death as life's expiration date and the point of no return? Or is it simply a threshold to be crossed, on the way to another dimension, or another life? Do you want to know what the right answer is?Whatever makes you feel more comfortable about dying.
— Merlyn Gabriel Miller, Sex, Death, Drugs & Madness
When I spoke to a colleague about Joe's report, her face registered surprise. She said, "Is it possible for a death in a nursing home to be premature?" Joe told me, "If it were happening in any other kind of institution, to any other part of the population - workers, say, or children - there'd be an outcry, media, inquiries, swift intervention. The truth is we do not value the last months or years of a person's life. The remaining life of someone old. Particularly if they are in residential care." If we are all just economic units who lift or lean, then very little is "lost" when a nursing home resident or anyone getting on in their years dies prematurely. In fact money might be saved - one less nursing-home bed to fund, and the kids can finally get their hands on the house.
— Karen Hitchcock, Dear Life: On Caring for the Elderly
No one wants to go into a nursing home. My patients fear it; families often feel terrible guilt when the time comes: it is thought of as an abandonment. Nursing homes are where we place our bad outcomes, our frail, our no-longer-independents. They are places people go to wait safely to die. The old doubly incontinents. You might have stood up to Stalin, you might still read Tolstoy, but if you're losing it from both the front and back and you're not a two-year-old, you're going to be hidden away. "Don't know the nursing homes, they do a pretty good job," a geriatrician said to me. And most of the time they perform their function: as a holding bay for old people. Most of the time.
— Karen Hitchcock, Dear Life: On Caring for the Elderly
Your body's dying...pay no attention
— Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
Medicine and society have entered into a folie a deaux regarding medicine's importance in gigantic population ills. We believe that genetics and pills and enzymes bring us health. We wait for the dementia cure (the obesity cure, the diabetes cure) rather than changing our society to decrease incidence and severity. We slash social welfare programs and access to GPs and ignore the downstream effect this will have on future generations. To reduce non-communicable disease, the actions we need to take are societal: make it easier for people to move and eat well, strengthen education, promote community participation and meaningful work. Our collective delusion is that we can have all the benefits such a society would bring without the structural supports necessary to bring it into being, that we can attain health by inventing and buying drugs. It is hard to know which is the more utopian vision: magic pills or a society serious about prevention.
— Karen Hitchcock, Dear Life: On Caring for the Elderly
Having parked up at the entrance to the football ground I’d like my coffin to be taken from the hearse and carried around the mile and a half perimeter of the pitch in a fitting lap of honour. Then, after the lap of honour, I would like the undertakers to lift me out of my coffin, dress me in the home strip and sit with me in the Evans Halshaw Home Stand for a match against any team in the Essex and Suffolk Border League Division One. (From Undertaker's Question Time, 2016)
— Nick John Whittle
Death: When next we meet, the hour will strike for you and your friends.Antonius Block: And will you reveal your secrets?Death: I have no secrets.Antonius Block: So do you know nothing?Death: I am unknowing.
— Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal
DEATH IS A PROFOUND LESSON IN TRUTH: We grow to understand more about it from childhood until the day we must cross the mystic chasm and abandon the land of the living.
— Loren Mayshark, Death: An Exploration: Learning To Embrace Life's Most Feared Mystery
Time is quixotic because it can torment us. When we have insufficient stimulus to fill our lives, we resent the relentless quality of time, and we engage in activities designed to “kill time.” Time that passes slowly creates insufferable boredom; time that passes to quickly makes us aware of our accelerated death march. A person’s perspective on time depends mostly on what they are most afraid of, boredom or death.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Perhaps we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life.
— John Updike
The world slides, the world goes, and death makes equal the rich and the poor
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity
Be assured that any hurt to your spirit will pass in time. It is the nature of Death to take, but the nature of Life to give.
— Garth Nix, Lirael
Though we are terrorized by death, it's not different from birth, it just happens
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity
Death is permanent. There’s no coming back if you get off the ferryman’s boat.
— Martha Sweeney, Killmore
He wanted to argue like this forever. This was better than nothing. There was no exhausting his anger at his father, and every word, however well intentioned or intentionally barbed, was a pull at a scab on his bloody heart. It was too late for any of this. There could ultimately be no healing. Marty had terminal cancer, and so did the two men have a cancer between them. They were terminal together, as father and son. They remained, momentarily exhausted, but it was really only that quiet between lightning and thunder as sound lags behind speed. The lightning had cracked the ground already, you just hadn't heard it yet.
— David Duchovny, Bucky F*cking Dent
We would like to think of death as a release from the pressures of existence, but this is a fatally mistaken thought: it is the ultimate culmination of those pressures.
— Anthony Marais
I was scared. Not of being dead, that I could not comprehend, to be nothing was impossible to grasp and therefore nothing really to be scared of, but the dying itself I could comprehend, the very instant when you know that now comes what you have always feared, and you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember.
— Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time
Veins of ivy scale stones,find footholds butthe caretaker cuts earth short, peels creepers from Cotswold rock and props the deadhead to head so they won’ttopple like drunkson their moss-soft shadows.
— Jalina Mhyana, The Trauma Scope: Poems of Heartache & Optical Illusion
It's... no, nothing." She grunted, turning from the screen with her vodka. "I'm starting to think Morris is right. We're just f---ed. Us, Colby, the whole human race.""Maybe," Teagan said noncommittally. "Some days I believe that. I look at this f---ed up bloody world and see we don't be needing the likes of monster-gods with unpronounceable names to come and do the job for us. We do just fine screwing ourselves, don't we?
— Mary SanGiovanni, Chills
How are we supposed to live every day if we know we're going to die?' He looked at me, clearly pained by the dawning of my genetically predestined morbidity. He had been the same way as a kid. A day never went by where he didn't think about this eventual demise. He sighed, leaned back in his chair, unable to conjure a comforting answer. 'You just do'.
— Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
Birth is not a beginning; it’s a continuation. That lends tremendous comfort because we then understand that, equally true, death is not an end; it’s merely a continuation.
— Laurie Buchanan, PhD
My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long.
— Marie Antoinette
The tragedy of life is not death, but fearing to live, allowing parts of us to wilt and die instead of flower and rejoice.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
You never know when you're going to die, but maybe something in you does, some cellular consciousness that's aware of the cosmic countdown and starts making plans.
— Jonathan Trooper
A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.
— Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present
Too evident sorrow does not inspire pity but repugnance, it is the sign of mental instability or of bad manners: it is morbid.
— Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present
An acceptable death is a death which can be accepted or tolerated by the survivors. It has its antithesis: ‘the embarrassingly graceless dying,’ which embarrasses the survivors because it causes too strong an emotion to burst forth; and emotions must be avoided both in the hospital and everywhere in society. One does not have the right to become emotional other than in private, that is to say, secretly.
— Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present
We all emerge into this material soup, mix about with the meat and potatoes of life, and then slip away, back to the primordial germination whence we came. Nascence is a strange business: we forget what we were doing only to come forth and continually forget what we were doing perpetually over the course of a lifetime, until it is time to quit this plane through some unseen and ethereal vomitorium, and presumably forget that we had forgotten all over again.
— Michelle Franklin
Indeed, in the majority of cases the dying person has already lost consciousness. Death had been dissected, cut to bits by a series of little steps, which finally makes it impossible to know which step was the real death, the one in which consciousness was lost, or the one in which breathing stopped. All these little silent deaths have replaced and erased the great dramatic act of death, and no one any longer has the strength or patience to wait over a period of weeks for a moment which has lost a part of its meaning.
— Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present
She was infamous once upon a time. She's legendary now. The girl is a definite force to be reckoned with, though perhaps she doesn't know it yet.
— Rebecca Harris, The Dead of Winter
The sky looks comfortingly mundane compared to the garish kaleidoscope of the stained glass. It makes Rose yearn to be reliving any one of a thousand ordinary days spent with her ordinary older sister, who has now done this extraordinary thing and died.
— Liane Moriarty, The Last Anniversary
There is not a single person I have met in my lifetime who is comfortable talking about death. It’s the biggest downside to our youth-centric culture. Death is a bummer, so let’s not talk about it. Let’s hide it away and hope it never strikes close to home.
— Gudjon Bergmann, The Meditating Psychiatrist Who Tried to Kill Himself
I realize how utterly amazing it is that we're all able as humans to go about our daily lives without constantly obsessing over the fact that each of us will almost certainly be in a sterile bed someday, medicated and slowly dying. This officially marks the most depressing thing that has ever crossed my mind.
— Matthew Norman
There will be no beautiful widow with Persian eyes sitting at your grave. And teary-eyed kids won't be asking: "Papa, papa, can you hear us?
— Ilya Ilf
You still are? There go my plans! And the suit I had bought to attend your funeral. Well, well. Anyway, do call me up when you an't.
— Fakeer Ishavardas
Death is what happens when you die.
— kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Forge
No one dies pre-maturely. As is meant, happens naturally
— Fakeer Ishavardas
Death is the vehicle God uses to get us from here to where we are going. Before you take that ride, make sure you know in what direction you are heading.
— Danny L Deaubé
It made leaving bearable, knowing I'd had that kind of love in my life. Knowing I'd had the best thing.
— Saul Black, The Killing Lessons
An old Celtic proverb boldly places death right at the center of life. ‘Death is the middle of a long life,’ they used to say. Ancient people did things like that; they put death at the center instead of casting it out of sight and leaving such an important subject until the last possible moment. Of course, they lived close to nature and couldn’t help but see how the forest grew from fallen trees and how death seemed to replenish life from fallen members. Only the unwise and the overly fearful think that death is the blind enemy of life.
— Michael Meade
I really like people. But I don't know how it will end.
— Tom Drury
It's difficult the first time you have to get close to kill another. You see their eyes, see the light in it go out. Even a troll's eyes have that light. I'd be worried if you didn't feel something after that. I don't like hunting with a man who's a killer without that feeling.
— Raymond E. Feist, Honored Enemy
It was something he had never quite understood about himself. He had seen thousands of men die in nearly ten years of war and could look on it at times with a near-total detachment, but an animal suffering - be it a horse or needra injured in battle, or the stag now dying - moved him deeply.
— Raymond E. Feist, Honored Enemy
From our birth we are all dying, but some of us finish sooner than others.
— Raymond E. Feist, Honored Enemy
It has been seven years since you died. Of course what I'll say next is that time has flown by. I got old. All of a sudden, de repente. I walk with difficulty. I even drool. I leave the door unlocked in case I die in my sleep, but it's more likely I'll go endlessly on until I get put away someplace. I am already dotty.... It's not so strange that I talk to my cat but I feel silly because he is totally deaf.
— Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories
Those what yielded the extra lolly were gevyn a clothe to put over themselves when they dost cash in their chips, and were told to staye where they lay until they be picked up. - From "Three Interesting Facts about Undertakers
— Nick John Whittle
Last Comforts” was born when one nagging question kept arising early in my journey as a hospice volunteer. Why were people coming into hospice care so late in the course of their illness? That question led to many others that rippled out beyond hospice care. Are there better alternatives to conventional skilled nursing home operations? How are physicians and nurses educated about advanced illness and end-of-life care? What are more effective ways of providing dementia care? What are the unique challenges of minority and LGBT people? What is the role of popular media in our death-denying culture? What has been the impact of public policy decisions about palliative and hospice care? 	The book is part memoir of lessons learned throughout my experiences with patients and families as a hospice volunteer; part spotlight on the remarkable pathfinders and innovative programs in palliative and late-life care; and part call to action. I encourage readers – particularly my fellow baby boomers -- not only to make their wishes and goals clear to friends and family, but also to become advocates for better care in the broader community.
— Ellen Rand, Last Comforts: Notes from the Forefront of Late Life Care
Probably everybody be nice to you if they knew you were dying," he said."Everybody knows everybody is dying," I said. "That is why people are nice. You all die soon enough, so why not be nice to each other?
— Mark Harris, Bang the Drum Slowly
But who thinks of death in the middle of life?"-Mike RogersEndless Night by Agatha Christie
— Agatha Christie, Endless Night