c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
And Harry remembered his first nightmarish trip into the forest, the first time he had ever encountered the thing that was then Voldemort, and how he had faced him, and how he and Dumbledore had discussed fighting a losing battle not long thereafter. It was important, Dumbledore said, to fight, and fight again, and keep fighting, for only then could evil be kept at bay, though never quite eradicated. . . .And Harry saw very clearly as he sat there under the hot sun how people who cared about him had stood in front of him one by one, his mother, his father, his godfather, and finally Dumbledore, all determined to protect him; but now that was over. He could not let anybody else stand between him and Voldemort; he must abandon forever the illusion he ought to have lost at the age of one, that theshelter of a parent’s arms meant that nothing could hurt him. There was no waking from his nightmare, no comforting whisper in the dark that he was safe really, that it was all in his imagination; the last and greatest of his protectors had died, and he was more alone than he had ever been before.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
... And the boy whose hair remained the color of lemons forever.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.
— James     Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
I'm bored with it all. - Last Words
— Winston S. Churchill
I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.
— Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle
Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It's like an amputation, I feel a limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function. And yet, once it is done... life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid and fuller than before. 
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
Time doesn’t heal all wounds. We both know that’s bullshit
—  it comes from people who have nothing comforting or original to say.
I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, The Wall
A tragedy need not have blood and death
—  it's enough that it all be filled with that majestic sadness that is the pleasure of tragedy.
Though you may hear me holler,And you may see me cry--I'll be dogged, sweet baby,If you gonna see me die.
— Langston Hughes
Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.
— Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
If you wear black, then kindly, irritating strangers will touch your arm consolingly and inform you that the world keeps on turning.They're right. It does.However much you beg it to stop.It turns and lets grenadine spill over the horizon, sends hard bars of gold through my window and I wake up and feel happy for three seconds and then I remember.It turns and tips people out of their beds and into their cars, their offices, an avalanche of tiny men and women tumbling through life...All trying not to think about what's waiting at the bottom.Sometimes it turns and sends us reeling into each other's arms. We cling tight, excited and laughing, strangers thrown together on a moving funhouse floor.Intoxicated by the motion we forget all the risks.And then the world turns...And somebody falls off...And oh God it's such a long way down.Numb with shock, we can only stand and watch as they fall away from us, gradually getting smaller...Receding in our memories until they're no longer visible.We gather in cemeteries, tense and silent as if for listening for the impact; the splash of a pebble dropped into a dark well, trying to measure its depth.Trying to measure how far we have to fall.No impact comes; no splash. The moment passes. The world turns and we turn away, getting on with our lives...Wrapping ourselves in comforting banalities to keep us warm against the cold."Time's a great healer.""At least it was quick.""The world keeps turning."Oh Alec—Alec's dead.
— Alan Moore, Swamp Thing, Vol. 5: Earth to Earth
It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.
— Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles
She died--this was the way she died;And when her breath was done,Took up her simple wardrobeAnd started for the sun.Her little figure at the gateThe angels must have spied,Since I could never find herUpon the mortal side.
— Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems
The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.
— Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake
But she's wrong about hell. You don't have to wait until you're dead to get there.
— Susan Beth Pfeffer, Life As We Knew It
Usually time alters and affects everything, but when someone you love dies time cannot change that, no amount of time will ever change that, so time stops having any meaning.
— Rosamund Lupton, Sister
What happens if a car comes? We die.
— Nicholas Sparks
My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
Stay with me to-night; you must see me die. I have long had the taste of death on my tongue, I smell death, and who will stand by my Constanze, if you do not stay?
— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
You have made flowers grow where I cultivated dust and stones. Remember this, on this journey you insist on making. If you die, I will not survive you long.
— Robert Jordan, Starscape Boxed Set B Mixed
Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change.
— Isabel Allende
Of course I want to kill you," said Skulduggery. "I want to kill most people. But then where would I be? In a field of dead people with no one to talk to.
— Derek Landy, Kingdom of the Wicked
Death has his favorites, like anyone. Those who are beloved of Death will not die.
— Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
One pain is lessened by another’s anguish. ... Take thou some new infection to thy eye, And the rank poison of the old will die.
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.
— Graham Greene
Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul,that soft summer morninground a turning in the path,the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones,its legs in the air like a woman in needburning its wedding poisonslike a fountain with its rhythmic sobs,I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound,but I touch my body in vain to find the wound.I am the vampire of my own heart,one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughterwho can no longer smile.Am I dead?I must be dead.
— Charles Baudelaire
If they killed him tonight, at least he would die alive.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
When I was a child, all problems had ended with a single word from my father. A smile from him was sunshine, his scowl a bolt of thunder. He was smart, and generous, and honorable without fail. He could exile a trespasser, check my math homework, and fix the leaky bathroom sink, all before dinner. For the longest time, I thought he was invincible. Above the petty problems that plagued normal people.And now he was gone.
— Rachel Vincent, Alpha
All good things pass away.
— Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass
Ethan was loyal and funny and protective. When we were little, he was the brother most likely to make me cry—and mostly likely to wipe away my tears.
— Rachel Vincent, Prey
As Luke knelt down beside his corpse, Clary couldn’t help but remember what he had said about having loved Valentine once, about having been his closest friend. Luke, she thought with a pang. Surely he couldn’t be sad — or even grieved?But then again, perhaps everyone should have someone to grieve for them, and there was no one else to grieve for Valentine.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Glass
ALL THINGS THAT ARE, ARE OURS. BUT WE MUST CARE. FOR IF WE DO NOT CARE, WE DO NOT EXIST. IF WE DO NOT EXIST, THEN THERE IS NOTHING BUT BLIND OBLIVION. AND EVEN OBLIVION MUST END SOMEDAY. LORD, WILL YOU GRANT ME JUST A LITTLE TIME? FOR THE PROPER BALANCE OF THINGS. TO RETURN WHAT WAS GIVEN. FOR THE SAKE OF PRISONERS AND THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS.Death took a step backwards.It was impossible to read expression in Azrael's features.Death glanced sideways at the servants. LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?
— Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
The rapt pupil will be forgiven for assuming the Tsar of Death to be wicked and the Tsar of Life to be virtuous. Let the truth be told: There is no virtue anywhere. Life is sly and unscrupulous, a blackguard, wolfish, severe. In service to itself, it will commit any offense. So, too, is Death possessed of infinite strategies and a gaunt nature- but also mercy, also grace and tenderness. In his own country, Death can be kind.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless
Every time I go to sleep, I know I may never wake up. How could anyone expect to? You drop your tiny, helpless mind into a bottomless well, crossing your fingers and hoping when you pull it out on its flimsy fishing wire it hasn't been gnawed to bones by nameless beasts below.
— Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
If no one knows when a person is going to die, how can we say he died prematurely?
— George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?
I wish to live to 150 years old, but the day I die, I wish it to be with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other.
— Ava Gardner
I pity you all... Most of you will die---scratch that---ALL of you.
— Gerard Way, The Umbrella Academy, Vol. 2: Dallas
Everyone has always said I look like Bailey, but I don't.I have grey eyes to her green,an oval face to her heart-shaped one,I'm shorter, scrawnier, paler, flatter, plainer, tamer.All we shared is a madhouse of curlsthat I imprison in a ponytailwhile she let hers ravelike madnessaround her head.I don't sing in my sleepor eat the petals off flowersor run into the rain instead of out of it.I'm the unplugged-in one,the side-kick sister,tucked into a corner of her shadow.Boys followed her everywhere;they filled the booths at the restaurant where she waitressed,herded around her at the river.One day, I saw a boy come up behind herand pull a strand of her long hairI understood this-I felt the same way.In photographs of us together,she is always looking at the camera,and I am always looking at her.
— Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
Today will die tomorrow.
— Algernon Charles Swinburne
It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood- you give it together, you take it together.
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awarness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. As awarness calls for types of heroic dedication that his culture no longer provides for him, society contrives to help him forget. In the mysterious way in which life is given to us in evolution on this planet, it pushes in the direction of its own expansion. We don’t understand it simply because we don’t know the purpose of creation; we only feel life straining in ourselves and see it thrashing others about as they devour each other. Life seeks to expand in an unknown direction for unknown reasons.What are we to make of creation in which routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types - biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one’s own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him. The mosquitoes bloating themselves on blood, the maggots, the killer-bees attacking with a fury and a demonism, sharks continuing to tear and swallow while their own innards are being torn out - not to mention the daily dismemberment and slaughter in “natural” accidents of all types: an earthquake buries alive 70 thousand bodies in Peru, a tidal wave washes over a quarter of a million in the Indian Ocean. Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism’s comfort and expansiveness.
— Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Is that what death would feel like? The nicest, warmest, heaviest never-ending nap? If that’s what it’s like, I wouldn’t mind.
— Gayle Forman, If I Stay
As Ginny and Hermione moved closer to the rest of the family, Harry had a clear view of the bodies lying next to Fred: Remus and Tonks, pale and still and peaceful-looking, apparently asleep beneath the dark, enchanted ceiling.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
They say, 'The coward dies many times'; so does the beloved. Didn't the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
Wherever you feel death, feel it. Don’t escape. Death is beautiful; death is the greatest mystery, more mysterious than life. Through life you can gain the world, the futile world- meaningless, worthless. Through death you can gain the eternal. Death is the door.
— Osho
Nothing is impossible to kill. It's just that sometimes after you kill something you have to keep shooting it until it stops moving
— Mira Grant, Feed
for some reason, dying men always ask the question they know the answer to. perhaps it's so they can die being right.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
But to mourn, that's different. To mourn is to be eaten alive with homesickness for the person.
— Olive Ann Burns, Cold Sassy Tree
I waited for dawn, but only because I had forgotten how hard mornings were. For a second I'd be normal. Then came the dim awareness of something off, out of place. Then the truth came crashing down and that was it for the rest of the day. Sunlight was reproof. Shouldn't I feel better than I had in the dead of night.
— Francine Prose, Goldengrove
When I heard your organization was recording testimonies, I knew I had to come. She died in my arms, saying 'I don't want to die.' That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
The rest of my days I'm going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I'm going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I will die--with my hand in the hand of some nice looking ship's doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch. "Poor lady," they'll say, "The quinine did her no good. That unwashed grape has transported her soul to heaven.
— Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
We have only a little time to please the living. But all eternity to love the dead.
— Sophocles, Antigone
Death, a necessary end, will come when it will come
— William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less.
— Neil Gaiman, Brief Lives
I'm not afraid of death. Death's afraid of me.
— Lee Child, 61 Hours
I guess I just couldn't see standing there -- alive, talking, thinking, breathing, being -- one second, and dead the next. It really bothered me. Death by violence isn't the same as dying any other way, accident or disease or old age. It just ain't the same.
— S.E. Hinton, That Was Then, This Is Now
The little things of life, sweet and excellent in their place, must not be the things lived for; the highest must be sought and followed; the life of heaven must be begun here on earth.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island
I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
We say that flowers return every spring, but that is a lie. It is true that the world is renewed. It is also true that that renewal comes at a price, for even if the flower grows from an ancient vine, the flowers of spring are themselves new to the world, untried and untested. The flower that wilted last year is gone. Petals once fallen are fallen forever. Flowers do not return in the spring, rather they are replaced. It is in this difference between returned and replaced that the price of renewal is paid. And as it is for spring flowers, so it is for us.
— Daniel Abraham, The Price of Spring
There is some delight in ale and wineAnd some in girls with ankles fineBut my delight, yes always mineIs to dance with Jak O’ the ShadowsWe will toss the dice however they fallAnd snuggle the girls be they short or tallThen follow Lord Mat whenever he callsTo dance with Jak O’ the Shadows.
— Robert Jordan, Knife of Dreams
What glitters may not be gold
—  and even wolves may smile
But on paper, things can live forever. On paper, a butterfly never dies.
— Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming
Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.
— Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
A tomb now suffices him for whom the world was not enough.]
— Alexander the Great
It was an indulgence, learning last words. Other people had chocolate; I had dying declarations.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
The scariest thing in the world is thinking someone you love is going to die.
— Jodi Picoult, Lone Wolf
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
— Roland Barthes
Here is a list of terrible things,The jaws of sharks, a vultures wingsThe rabid bite of the dogs of war,The voice of one who went before,But most of all the mirror's gaze,Which counts us out our numbered days.
— Clive Barker, Days of Magic, Nights of War
Not forever does the bulbul singIn balmy shades of bowers,Not forever lasts the springNor ever blossom the flowers.Not forever reigneth joy,Sets the sun on days of bliss,Friendships not forever last,They know not life, who know not this.
— Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan
Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.
— Tennessee Williams
If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?
— Joan Baez
How do you mourn something that never really belonged to you?
— Rebecca Serle, When You Were Mine
The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not...yet, I occurred.
— Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah
Any way I slice reality it comes out poorly, and I feel an urge to not exist, something I have never felt before; and now here it comes with conviction, almost panic. 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
When the dead do walk seek water's run,for this the Dead will always shun. Swift river's best or broadest laketo ward the dead and have and make.If water fails thee, fire's thy friend, if neither guards it will be thy end.
— Garth Nix, Lirael
Death and what came after death was no great mystery to Sabriel. She just wished it was.
— Garth Nix, Sabriel
My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.
— Tana French, Faithful Place
Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Nineteenth-century preacher Henry Ward Beecher's last words were "Now comes the mystery." The poet Dylan Thomas, who liked a good drink at least as much as Alaska, said, "I've had eighteen straight whiskeys. I do believe that's a record," before dying. Alaska's favorite was playwright Eugene O'Neill: "Born in a hotel room, and--God damn it--died in a hotel room." Even car-accident victims sometimes have time for last words. Princess Diana said, "Oh God. What's happened?" Movie star James Dean said, "They've got to see us," just before slamming his Porsche into another car. I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
He killed himself for wanting to live.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Death is easy when you've already tried to find it.
— Pierce Brown, Red Rising
Maybe the only good thing about death is that you never have to relive it. You never have to remember the pain.
— Pittacus Lore, The Fallen Legacies
Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.'Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so often, of missing her. But she knew that this was an illusion, a mirage, and that the distance between them was now infinite, unyielding. 
— Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth
People of Panem, we fight, we dare, we end our hunger for justice!” There‘s dead silence on the set. It goes on. And on. Finally, the intercom crackles and Haymitch‘s acerbic laugh fills the studio. He contains himself just long enough to say, “And that, my friends, is how a revolution dies.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
The thing about dead people... The thing is you sound like a bastard if you don't romanticize them, but the truth is... complicated, I guess.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
I take no actions that I wouldn’t publicly recount. If you can’t speak your deeds, then don’t do them.
— Kresley Cole, Dead of Winter
Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them, all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars. In life is death. In death is rebirth. What then is life without death? Life unchanging, everlasting, eternal?-What is it but death-death without rebirth?
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
Birth and death: there was the same consciousness of heightened existence and of her own elevated importance
— J.K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy
If we knew a person was going to die, we'd hold harder to the memories."Fire corrected him, in a whisper. "The good memories.
— Kristin Cashore, Fire
You know how cats do. They hide to die. Dogs come home.
— Thomas Harris, Red Dragon
Sometimes dead is better
— Stephen King, Pet Sematary
Whatever can die is beautiful — more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world. Do you understand me?
— Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
The first kiss can be as terrifying as the last.
— Daína Chaviano, The Island of Eternal Love
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Finnick and I sit for a long time in silence, watching the knots bloom and vanish, before I can ask, 'How do you bear it?'Finnick looks at me in disbelief. 'I don't, Katniss! Obviously, I don't. I drag myself out of nightmares each morning and find there's no relief in waking.'Something in my expression stops him.'Better not give in to it. It takes ten times as long to put yourself together as it does to fall apart.'Well, he must know. I take a deep breath, forcing myself back into one piece.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind
If it means my death, I don't care, because even death will be a sort of freedom.
— Catherine Fisher, Incarceron
Elinor had read countless stories in which the main characters fell sick at some point because they were so unhappy. She had always thought that a very romantic idea, but she’d dismissed it as a pure invention of the world of books. All those wilting heroes and heroines who suddenly gave up the ghost just because of unrequited love or longing for something they’d lost! Elinor had always enjoyed their sufferings—as a reader will. After all, that was what you wanted from books: great emotions you’d never felt yourself, pain you could leave behind by closing the book if it got too bad. Death and destruction felt deliciously real conjured up with the right words, and you could leave them behind between the pages as you pleased, at no cost or risk to yourself.
— Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath
This is what youth must figure out:Girls, love, and living.The having, the not having,The spending and giving,And the meloncholy time of not knowing.This is what age must learn about:The ABC of dying.The going, yet not going,The loving and leaving,And the unbearable knowing and knowing
— E.B. White
when you came you cried and everybody smiled with joy
—  when you go smile and let the world cry for you.
Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.
— William Saroyan
Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit, every minute of every day. Do it! I say. Whatever you want to do, do it now! There are only so many tomorrows.
— Michael Landon Jr.
Men die. It's practically what they're for.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless
Pain was good. If I hurt, it meant I wasn't dead.
— Kristin Cast, Hunted
The dead know everything but they don't give a damn.
— Joanne Harris, Runemarks
Hanged"I hung myself today. Hanged? Whatever,the point is I hanged myself today and I’m stillhanging.I feel fine. Just bored. I keep hoping thatsomeone will come home and cut me downbut then I keep remembering that if I knewsomeone like that I wouldn’t be up here. Bitironic, right? Or is that not ironic? I readsomewhere that, like, anything funny is,in some way, ironic. But I don’t know if it'sfunny or not. I don’t think my brain owns“funny”, you know?I feel taller. I like that.I’ve never been away from my shadow forthis long. It had always clung to my feet,parting momentarily for a quick dive intothe swimming pool. But never for fivehours. I like it. There’s three feet of spacebetween my two and the floor.I wanted something this morning. I may bestuck. But at least I’m three feet closer to it.
— Bo Burnham, Egghead: Or, You Can't Survive on Ideas Alone
You're dead, George. You just don't have the sense to lie down.
— Stephen King, The Dark Half
Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.
— Oscar Wilde
I think that, with age, people come to realize that death is inevitable. And we need to learn to face it with serenity, wisdom and resignation. Death often frees us from a lot of senseless sufferings.
— Paulo Coelho, The Devil and Miss Prym
Death, I had discovered long ago, was available in varying flavors, and none of them particularly palatable. 
— Jasper Fforde, First Among Sequels
If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you'll die a lot of times.
— Dean Smith
Just when normal life felt almost possible - when the world held some kind of order, meaning, even loveliness (the prismatic spray of light through an icicle; the stillness of a sunrise), some small thing would go awry and the veil of optimism was torn away, the barren world revealed. They learned, somehow, to wait those times out. There was no cure, no answer, no reparation.
— David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
Each of the dancers took a partner, the living with the dead, each to each. Bod reached out his hand and found himself touching fingers with, and gazing into the grey eyes of, the lady in the cobweb dress. She smiled at him.“Hello, Bod,” she said.“Hello,” he said, as he danced with her. “I don’t know your name.”“Names aren’t really important,” she said.“I love your horse. He’s so big! I never knew horses could be that big.”“He is gentle enough to bear the mightiest of you away on his broad back, and strong enough for the smallest of you as well.”“Can I ride him?” asked Bod.“One day,” she told him, and her cobweb skirts shimmered. “One day. Everybody does.”“Promise?”I promise.
— Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.
— The Nightvale Podcast
Tell me what it is like to die," I answered. He dismounted from his horse, looking at me strangely the whole while. "You experience something similar every day," he said softly. "It is as familiar to you as bread and butter." "Yes," I said. "It is like every night when I fall asleep." "No. It is like every morning when you wake up.
— Martine Leavitt, Keturah and Lord Death
The evil that men do lives after them
— The good is oft interred with their bones.
Everyone dies. It is how one lives that matters.
— R.A. Salvatore
Not only had my brother disappeared, but--and bear with me here--a part of my very being had gone with him. Stories about us could, from them on, be told from only one perspective. Memories could be told but not shared.
— John Corey Whaley, Where Things Come Back
When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.
— Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
People once believed that when someone dies, a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead. But sometimes, something so bad happens that a terrible sadness is carried with it and the soul can't rest. Then sometimes, just sometimes, the crow can bring that soul back to put the wrong things right.
— James O'Barr, The Crow
Nothing remains forever, only thing that remain forever is romantically stupid word forever.
— Santosh Kalwar, Quote Me Everyday
Through Rohan over fen and field where the long grass growsThe West Wind goes walking, and about the walls it goes.What news from the West, oh wandering wind, do you bring to me tonight?Have you seen Boromir the Tall by moon or by starlight?‘I saw him ride over seven streams, over waters wide and grey;I saw him walk in empty lands, until he passed awayInto the shadows of the North. I saw him then no more.The North Wind may have heard the horn of the son of Denethor.’Oh, Boromir! From the high walls westward I looked afar.But you came not from the empty lands where no men are.From the mouth of the sea the South Wind flies,From the sand hills and the stones;The wailing of the gulls it bears, and at the gate it moansWhat news from the South, oh sighing wind, do you bring to me at eve?Where now is Boromir the Fair? He tarries and I grieve.‘Ask me not where he doth dwell--so many bones there lieOn the white shores and on the black shores under the stormy sky;So many have passed down Anduin to find the flowing sea.Ask of the North Wind news of them the North Wind sends to me!’Oh Boromir! Beyond the gate the Seaward road runs South,But you came not with the wailing gulls from the grey seas mouth.From the Gate of Kings the North Wind rides,And past the roaring fallsAnd loud and cold about the Tower its loud horn calls.What news from the North, oh mighty wind, do you bring to me today?What news of Boromir the Bold? For he is long away.‘Beneath Amon Hen I heard his cry. There many foes he foughtHis cloven shield, his broken sword, they to the water brought.His head so proud, his face so fair, his limbs they laid to rest;And Rauros, Golden Rauros Falls, bore him upon its breast.’Oh Boromir! The Tower of Guard shall ever northward gazeTo Rauros, Golden Rauros Falls until the end of days.
— J.R.R. Tolkien
Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.
— Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
No - no - no!" someone was shouting. "No! Fred! No!"And Percy was shaking his brother, and Ron was kneeling beside them, and Fred's eyes stared without seeing, the ghost of his last laugh still etched upon his face.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Maybe before you die, it's your ghosts you see.
— Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall
The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die - although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born.
— Erich Fromm, The Sane Society
No, my dog used to gaze at me,paying me the attention I need,the attention requiredto make a vain person like me understandthat, being a dog, he was wasting time,but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,he’d keep on gazing at mewith a look that reserved for me aloneall his sweet and shaggy life,always near me, never troubling me,and asking nothing.
— Pablo Neruda
Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay; the worst is death and death will have his day.
— William Shakespeare, Richard II
I have grown weary of literature: silence alone comforts me. If I continue to write, it’s because I have nothing more to accomplish in this world except to wait for death. Searching for the word in darkness. Any little success invades me and puts me in full view of everyone. I long to wallow in the mud. I can scarcely control my need for self-abasement, my craving for licentiousness and debauchery. Sin tempts me, forbidden pleasures lure me. I want to be both pig and hen, then kill them and drink their blood.
— Clarice Lispector
What is this thing you call substance abuse? All I wanna do is forget and get loose.Drinking and smoking over and overWhat's so great about a life that's sober?There's nothing cool about being youngWhen the monsters of night have stolen the sun.I'm tired of searching for words in the sky.All I wanna do is drink and die. Nothing is real. It's all a big lie. All I wanna do is drink and die. There's nothing cool about being youngWhen the monsters of night have stolen the sun.
— Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Last Night I Sang to the Monster
At the end of her life she was aware of heat but not pain. She had time to consider his eyes, eyes of that blue which is the color of the sky at first light of the morning. She had time to think of him on the Drop, riding Rusher flat out with his black hair flying back from his temples and his neckerchief rippling; to see him laughing with an ease and freedom he would never find again in the long life which stretched out for him beyond hers, and it was his laughter she took with her as she went out, fleeing the light and heat in to the silkly, consoling dark, calling to him over and over as she went, calling bird and bear and hare and fish.
— Stephen King, Wizard and Glass
We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.
— Liam Callanan, The Cloud Atlas
This is the secret that none dares tell who fights for a cause. Dying, we are all alike.
— Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Dart
Death is an inevitability, isn't it? You become more aware of that when you get to my age. I don't worry about it. I'm ready for it. When I go, I want to go doing what I do best. If I died tomorrow, I couldn't complain. It's been good.
— Lemmy Kilmister
I wish I had a memory of that first violent shove, the shock of cold air, the sting of oxygen into new lungs. Everyone should remember being born. It doesn't seem fair that we only remember dying.
— Lauren DeStefano, Fever
Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life—a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple—the painter is giving you a secret message. He’s telling you that living things don’t last—it’s all temporary. Death in life. That’s why they’re called natures mortes. Maybe you don’t see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer—there it is.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, everything should just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment'.
— Andy Warhol
The many men, so beautiful!And they all dead did lie:And a thousand thousand slimy thingsLived on; and so did I.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relationships with this best and truest friend of mankind that death's image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling.
— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Only one thing mattered: this was not a Horcrux. Dumbledore had weakened himself by drinking that horrible potion for nothing. Harry crumpled the parchment in his hand and his eyes burned with tears as behind him Fang began to howl.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
I was caught in a love triangle with one dead side.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
If there be light, then there is darkness; if cold, heat; if height, depth; if solid, fluid; if hard, soft; if rough, smooth; if calm, tempest; if prosperity, adversity; if life, death.
— Pythagoras
Who but the mad would choose to keep on living? In the end, aren't we all just a little crazy?
— Libba Bray, Going Bovine
You must know that I am made of death, from head to foot, and it is a corpse who loves you and adores you and will never, never leave you!
— Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera
Grimly, she realized that clocks don't make a sound that even remotely resembles ticking, tocking. It was more the sound of a hammer, upside down, hacking methodically at the earth. It was the sound of a grave. 
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
I g-g-guess...I'm dead?" she heard her own voice call out, strangely high-pitched and thin.For a long time, she heard nothing else. And then:"Hi, Dead. I'm Dan.
— Peter Lerangis, The Sword Thief
With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything...
— Saul Bellow, Herzog
Grief is love turned into an eternal missing
— Rosamund Lupton, Sister
Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.
— Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Death always wins.
— Kelly Creagh, Nevermore
Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It just changes shape.
— Sheri Reynolds
Makhluk kecil kembalilah. Dari tiada ke tiada. Berbahagialah dalam ketiadaanmu.
— Soe Hok Gie, Catatan Seorang Demonstran
That night, the Raka conspirators had plenty of news to report, particularly Ochobu. Aly had not known that the mages of the Chain had been laboring to eliminate any mages who had worked magic on the Crown’s behalf. So far they had killed seven of the most powerful.Chelaol would call this count of the dead another ‘good start,’ Aly thought grimly. This crude business of counting up lives taken struck her as a bad idea. It took the horror from death. When Ochobu named four mages on Lombyn who had had been killed in the streets of their towns, it had been about numbers, not lives. Maybe this is how you become a Rittevon, she thought. You get used to the dead being described as numbers, not fathers or daughters or grandparents.She turned to Dove when Ochobu finished, 'don’t ever be like this,' she urged. 'don’t think that it doesn’t matter if you only hear of murder as a number. If you keep it at a distance.
— Tamora Pierce, Trickster's Queen
And what does it mean -- dying? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and only the five we know are lost at death, while the other ninety-five remain alive.
— Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
He would never be any different and now Scarlett realize the truth and accepted it without emotion—that until he died Gerald would always be waiting for Ellen, always listening for her. Her was in some dim borderline country where time was standing still and Ellen was always in the next room. The mainspring of his existence was taken away when she died and with it has gone his bounding assurance, his impudence and his restless vitality. Ellen was the audience before which the blustering drama of Gerald O'Hara had been played Now the curtain had been rung down forever, the footlights dimmed and the audience suddenly vanished, while the stunned old actor remained on his empty stage, waiting for his cues.
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
The family exists for many reasons, but its most basic function may be to draw together after a member dies.
— Stephen King
Wait," said Butler. "Just wait, Holly. Artemis has a plan." He squinted through the green dome. "What is your plan, Artemis?"All Artemis could do was smile and shrug.
— Eoin Colfer, The Last Guardian
But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills,And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me,And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’dTo dwell in presence of immortal youth,Immortal age beside immortal youth,And all I was, in ashes. - Tithonus
— Alfred Tennyson
Summer came.For the book thief, everything was going nicely.For me, the sky was the color of Jews.When their bodies had finished scouring for gaps in the door, their souls rose up. When their fingernails had scratched at the wood and in some cases were nailed into it by the sheer force of desperation, their spirits came toward me, into my arms, and we climbed out of those shower facilities, onto the roof and up, into eternity's certain breadth. They just kept feeding me. Minute after minute. Shower after shower.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Every night death came, slowly, painfully, and every morning Maddox awoke in bed, knowing he'd have to die again later. That was his greatest curse and his eternal punishment.
— Gena Showalter, The Darkest Night
If anyone stops us, as long as we mumble something pretentious about the glory of death, we should be fine.
— Derek Landy
We should keep the dead before our eyes, and honor them as though still living
— Confucius
Death is more universal than life
—  everyone dies but not everyone lives.
You don't have friends in here, you'll soon come to understand that. You get attached to someone, then you'll just lose them. They'll get shanked or they'll jump or they'll be taken one night.
— Alexander Gordon Smith, Lockdown
Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous possessive love that grabs at what it can.
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.
— Roger Zelazny, Prince of Chaos
Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.
— R.D. Laing
[HAMILTON]I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory
— Lin-Manuel Miranda
An eye for an eye my friend.
— Tsugumi Ohba
Suicide sometimes proceeds from cowardice, but not always; for cowardice sometimes prevents it; since as many live because they are afraid to die, as die because they are afraid to live
— Charles Caleb Colton
Do you know why hurricanes have names instead of numbers? To keep the killing personal. No one cares about a bunch of people killed by a number. '200 Dead as Number Three Slams Ashore' is not nearly as interesting a headline as 'Charlie kills 200.' Death is much more satisfying and entertaining if you personalize it.Me, I'm still waitin' for Hurricane Ed. Old Ed wouldn't hurt ya, would he? Sounds kinda friendly. 'Hell no, we ain't evacuatin'. Ed's comin'!
— George Carlin, Brain Droppings
Everyone you have ever loved in your life becomes a part of your soul. They never leave. They're always inside you, and you can bring them out whenever you want.
— Nate Kenyon, Sparrow Rock
Got it. Demon. Death. Doom.
— Kami Garcia, Beautiful Creatures
After my mom died she ate my father up completely. She would have hated it. Every minute of his life since then has been marked by her absence, every action has lacked dimension because she is not there to measure against. And when I was young I didn't understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird. If I had to live on without you I know I could not do it. But I hope, I have this vision of you walking unencumbered, with your shining hair in the sun. I have not seen this with my eyes, but only with my imagination, that makes pictures, that always wanted to paint you, shining; but I hope that this vision will be true, anyway.
— Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.
— Don DeLillo, White Noise
They say that somewhere in Africa the elephants have a secret grave where they go to lie down, unburden their wrinkled gray bodies, and soar away, light spirits at the end.
— Robert McCammon, Boy's Life
The worst part of writing fiction is the fear of wasting your life behind a keyboard. The idea that, dying, you'll realize you only lived on paper. Your only adventures were make-believe, and while the world fought and kissed, you sat in some dark room masturbating and making money.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Stranger than Fiction