c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
So, preferring death to capture, I accomplished the most astonishing deeds, and which, more then once, showed me that the too great care we take of our bodies is the only obstacle to the sucess of those projects which require rapid decision, and vigorous and determined execution. In reality, when you have once devoted your life to your enterprises, you are no longer the equal of other men, or, rather, other men are no longer your equals, and whosoever has taken this resolution, feels his strength and resources doubled.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
...the dead have a way of becoming saints in the eyes of their survivors...
— Rachel Vincent, My Soul to Take
Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I dont want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to und3erstand how people answered that question and the question each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
I said, 'I need to know how he died.'He flipped back and pointed at, 'Why?'So I can stop inventing how he died. I'm always inventing.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
There I lay, wearing dead people as armor against death.
— Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle
I am only alive because I have not yet died.
— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
All through life there were distinctions - toilets for men, toilets for women; clothes for men, clothes for women - then, at the end, the graves are identical.
— Leila Aboulela, Minaret
Oh Julie, wouldn’t I know if you were dead? Wouldn’t I feel it happening, like a jolt of electricity to my heart?
— Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity
It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
I melted into the dream as if I had always been there. I knew where I had come from
—  I knew where I was going.
She'll die.' 'Aye. That's a consequence of being alive.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
DEATH: "Mostly they aren't too keen to see me. They fear the sunless lands. But they enter your realm each night without fear."MORPHEUS: "And I am far more terrible than you, sister.
— Neil Gaiman, Preludes & Nocturnes
I tried to hang myself with a bungee cord. I kept almost dying.
— Steven Wright
Here at lastWe shall be free;the Almighty hath not builtHere for his envy, will not drive us hence:Here we may reign secure, and in my choiceTo reign is worth ambition though in Hell:Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.
— John Milton
I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all of my days.
— Victoria Hanley, The Seer and the Sword
She was a wolf. She was death, devourer of the worlds.
— Sarah J. Maas, Queen of Shadows
He could not stand. It was notThat he could not thrive, he was bornWith everything but the will –That can be deformed, just like a limb.Death was more interesting to him.Life could not get his attention.
— Ted Hughes
They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies. Nor can spirits ever be divided, that love and live in the same divine principle, the root and record of their friendship. If absence be not death, neither is theirs. Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass they see face to face; and their converse is free, as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.
— William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude / More Fruits of Solitude
If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.
— Christopher Hitchens
Amy [Winehouse] changed pop music forever, I remember knowing there was hope, and feeling not alone because of her. She lived jazz, she lived the blues.
— Lady Gaga
It's really going to happen. I really won't ever go back to school. Not ever. I'll never be famous or leave anything worthwhile behind. I'll never go to college or have a job. I won't see my brother grow up. I won't travel, never earn money, never drive, never fall in love or leave home or get my own house.It's really, really true.A thought stabs up, growing from my toes and ripping through me, until it stifles everything else and becomes the only thing I'm thinking. It fills me up like a silent scream.
— Jenny Downham, Before I Die
I forgive you," I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.
— Alice Sebold, Lucky
Like the pain of a bad wound, the effect of a deep shock takes some while to be felt. When a child is told, for the first time in his life, that a person he has known is dead, although he does not disbelieve it, he may well fail to comprehend it and later ask--perhaps more than once--where the dead person is and when he is coming back.
— Richard Adams, Watership Down
Yes, Bastille. I keep trying to get killed because it's inconvenient for you.
— Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz Versus the Knights of Crystallia
What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death.
— Dave Barry
I love the name of honor more than I fear death.
— Gaius Julius Caesar
It's a little hard not to worry when my best friend keeps on dying.
— Kristin Cast, Hunted
This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
It's a time of sorrow and sadness when we lose a loss of life.
— George W. Bush
Death is another bar which lies several steps below the normal world. I'm at its threshold, but not yet in it. Its doorway is doorless.
— Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates
...Matt. I didn't think they'd kill you... I'm so sorry...
— Tsugumi Ohba, Death Note, Vol. 12: Finis
Life is about moving, it’s about change. And when things stop doing that they’re dead.
— Twyla Tharp
Madlen came to sit beside her on the bed. "Lady Queen," she said with her own particular brand of rough gentleness. "It is not the job of the child to protect her mother. It's the mother's job to protect the child. By allowing your mother to protect you, you gave her a gift. Do you understand me?
— Kristin Cashore, Bitterblue
Isn't life,' she stammered, 'isn't life--' But what life was she couldn't explain. No matter. He quite understood.'Isn't it, darling?' said Laurie.
— Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories
Clearly God was in some kind of mood on my birthday.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
Nothing is ever truly gone... Not for me, nor for any human being. We can only go forward, unless we are guests in some enchantment that is not is ours. We are condemned to an endless present, and we can never go back-the source of all our joy, and all our sorrow." -Hem at Zelika's grave
— Alison Croggon, The Crow
well, death says, as he walks by, I'm going to get you anyhow no matter what you've been: writer, cab-driver, pimp, butcher, sky-diver, I'm going to get you
— Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems
If the thing they were fighting for was important enough to die for then it was also important enough for them to be thinking about it in the last minutes of their lives. That stood to reason. Life is awfully important so if you've given it away you'd ought to think with all your mind in the last moments of your life about the thing you traded it for. So did all those kids die thinking of democracy and freedom and liberty and honor and the safety of the home and the stars and stripes forever? You're goddamn right they didn't.They died crying in their minds like little babies. They forgot the thing they were fighting for the things they were dying for. They thought about things a man can understand. They died yearning for the face of a friend. They died whimpering for the voice of a mother a father a wife a child They died with their hearts sick for one more look at the place where they were born please god just one more look. They died moaning and sighing for life. They knew what was important They knew that life was everything and they died with screams and sobs. They died with only one thought in their minds and that was I want to live I want to live I want to live.He ought to know. He was the nearest thing to a dead man on earth.
— Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun
Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
When I die,' I said to my friend, 'I'm not going to be embalmed. I'm going to be dipped.' Milk chocolate or bittersweet was the immediate concern.
— Adrianne Marcus
The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais
She let her head fall back upon Marius' knees and her eyelids closed. He thought that poor soul had gone. Eponine lay motionless; but just when Marius supposed her for ever asleep, she slowly opened her eyes in which the gloomy deepness of death appeared, and said to him with an accent the sweetness on which already seemed to come from another world:"And then, do you know, Monsieur Marius, I believe I was a little in love with you."She essayed to smile again and expired.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
You're probably wondering what's going to happen to you. That's easy. The same thing is going to happen to you that has happened to every other human being who has ever lived. You're going to die. We all die. That's just how it is.
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
I am always saddened by the death of a good person. It is from this sadness that a feeling of gratitude emerges. I feel honored to have known them and blessed that their passing serves as a reminder to me that my time on this beautiful earth is limited and that I should seize the opportunity I have to forgive, share, explore, and love. I can think of no greater way to honor the deceased than to live this way.
— Steve Maraboli
Death is nothing at all,I have only slipped into the next roomI am I and you are youWhatever we were to each other, that we are still.Call me by my old familiar name,Speak to me in the easy way which you always usedPut no difference in your tone,Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrowLaugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together.Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.Let my name be ever the household world that it always was,Let it be spoken without effect, without the trace of shadow on it.Life means all that it ever meant.It it the same as it ever was, there is unbroken continuity.Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near,Just around the corner.All is well. 
— Henry Scott Holland
Give me a meaningful love or a beautiful death!
— Renee Ahdieh, The Rose & the Dagger
Rest in Peace?’ Why that phrase? That’s the most ridiculous phrase I’ve ever heard! You die, and they say ‘Rest in Peace!’ …Why would one need to ‘rest’ when they’re dead?! I spent thousands of years of world history resting. While Agamemnon was leading his ships to Troy, I was resting. While Ovid was seducing women at the chariot races, I was resting. While Jeanne d’Arc was hallucinating, I was resting. I wait until airplanes are scuttling across the sky to burst out onto the scene, and I’m only going to be here for a short while, so when I die, I certainly won’t need to rest again! Not while more adventures of the same kind are going on.
— Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy
We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood.
— Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
Michael could never remember his father ever having uttered a word about death, as if the Don respected death too much to philosophize about it.
— Mario Puzo, The Godfather
Time was the most precious thing in the world to me, and I’d just given her all of it. Because I was falling for her. Because I cared for her. Because I wanted to give her something to remember me by, even if it would eventually fade like its namesake. Time… what an absolute horror-inducing word
— Rachel Van Dyken, Ruin
We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other ... except through faith.
— Stephen King, Danse Macabre
Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
— Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson
He wipes tears off my face and then snot. He uses his hands. He loves me that much.
— Nina LaCour, Hold Still
I have nothing now but praise for my life. I'm not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more...
— Maurice Sendak
What mancan you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he isdying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed,Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands.
— Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
Death is nature’s way of saying, ‘Your table is ready.
— Robin Williams
Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Your coffin reached the monstrous hole. And a part of me went down into the muddy earth with you and lay down next to you and died with you.
— Rosamund Lupton, Sister
I’d never seen anything like it. First a trial, then a few murders, then dancing. Life goes on. Or, in this case, death continues.
— Charlaine Harris
O weep for Adonis - He is dead." "Peace. He is not dead he doth not sleep - he hath wakened from the dream of life
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life.
— Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before
When darkness falls and eyes stay shutA chain of voices opens up.Let wax not wane give breath to death.p.s. Shhh" -Yvonne Woon(Dead Beautiful)
— Yvonne Woon
On the Death of his ChildDew Evaporates And all our world is dew...so dear, So fresh, so fleeting
— Kobayashi Issa, Japanese Haiku
I became a firefighter because I wanted to save people. But I should have been more specific. I should have named names.
— Jodi Picoult
Reproduction is more pleasurable than death.
— Herman E. Daly
O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, / That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
— William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
You are afraid to die, and you’re afraid to live. What a way to exist.
— Neale Donald Walsch, Home with God: In a Life That Never Ends
I find myself thinking back to something I saw on the local news about a year ago. A teen football player had died in a car accident. The cameras showed all his friends after the funeral—these big hulking guys, all in tears, saying, “I loved him. We all loved him so much.” I started crying, too, and I wondered if these guys had told the football player they loved him while he was alive, or whether it was only with death that this strange word, love, could be used. I vowed then and there that I would never hesitate to speak up to the people I loved. They deserved to know they gave meaning to my life. They deserved to know I thought the world of them.
— David Levithan, Boy Meets Boy
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its students."]
— Hector Berlioz
Mendacity is a system that we live in," declares Brick. "Liquor is one way out an'death's the other.
— Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
I've seen and swam and climbed and lived and driven and filmed. Should it all end tomorrow, I can definitely say there would be no regrets. I am very lucky, and I know it. I really have lived 5,000 times over.
— Benedict Cumberbatch
Relax. They're not going to kill us. They're going to TRY and kill us. And that is a very different thing.
— Steve Voake, The Dreamwalker's Child
The rule is that if they have a weapon and want to take you someplace else, it is so they can kill you slower--Peter
— Laurell K. Hamilton, The Harlequin
Nothing is permanent. The only thing any of us have in common is the inevitable.
— Colleen Hoover, Slammed
Susannah continued. "If and when I go off slow dancing in the ever after, I don't want to look like I've been stuck in a hospital room my whole life. I at least want to be tan.
— Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty
But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being
—  nor can the dead ever be brought back to life.
My life was going to flash before my eyes, but it decided to hide behind my eyes and quake with terror instead.
— Sarah Rees Brennan, The Demon's Lexicon
Now comes the mystery! (last words)
— Henry Ward Beecher
Death, like a host, comes smiling to the door;Smiling, he greets us, on that tranquil shoreWhere neither piping bird nor peeping dawnDisturbs the eternal sleep,But in the stillness far withdrawnOur dreamless rest for evermore we keep.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
Sunsets are loved because they vanish.Flowers are loved because they go.The dogs of the field and the cats of the kitchen are loved because soon they must depart.These are not the sole reasons, but at the heart of morning welcomes and afternoon laughters is the promise of farewell. In the gray muzzle of an old dog we see goodbye. In the tired face of an old friend we read long journeys beyond returns.
— Ray Bradbury, From the Dust Returned
A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves.
— Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
Pain can kill, all on its own: the body goes into shock and shuts down.
— Teri Terry, Slated
Bushido is realized in the presence of death. This means choosing death whenever there is a choice between life and death. There is no other reasoning.
— Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
The dying sun will glow on you without burning, as it has done today. The wind will be soft and mellow and your hilltop will tremble. As you reach the end of your dance you will look at the sun, for you will never see it again in waking or in dreaming, and then your death will point to the south. To the vastness.
— Carlos Castañeda, Journey to Ixtlan
I was diamond on the outside, and I would not break.Inside, though, I was already broken.
— Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants
Nico found a sort of freedom in knowing that eventually, no matter what happened, he would end up at the foot of his father’s throne.
— Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
Only those few who are able to surpass their fear of death completely can fully experience the highest forms of life; not the mundane life of the mortal, but the godly life of the resurrected.
— Zeena Schreck
Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that "I" and all other "things" now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them - to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Indeed you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it's no help to cling to the rocks falling with you. If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.
— Alan W. Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same...They can be neither separated, nor mixed.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
Zalos: 'The world is full of massive things in motion. Little creatures get hurt.
— Robert Fanney, The War of Mists
Papa was a man with silver eyes, not dead ones. Papa was an accordion! But his bellows were all empty. Nothing went in and nothing came out.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
You can still be cool when you’re dead. In fact, it’s much easier, because you aren’t getting old and fat and losing your hair.
— Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
Death is not the endDeath can never be the end.Death is the road.Life is the traveller.The Soul is the Guide...Our mind thinks of death.Our heart thinks of lifeOur soul thinks of Immortality
— Sri Chinmoy
In the middle of life, death comesto take your measurements. The visitis forgotten and life goes on. But the suitis being sewn on the sly.
— Tomas Tranströmer, The Deleted World
Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.
— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
I went on spouting bullshit Encouragements as Gus's parents, arm in arm, hugged each other and nodded at every word. Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.
— Stephen King, Lisey's Story
Everything that happens before Death is what counts.
— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
But some part of him realized, even as he fought to break free from Lupin, that Sirius had never kept him waiting before. . . . Sirius had risked everything, always, to see Harry, to help him. . . . If Sirius was not reappearing out of that archway when Harry was yelling for him as though his life depended on it, the only possible explanation was that he could not come back. . . . That he really was . . .
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Nevertheless, life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either.
— J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla
We only live once. We all have an expiration date after that we will never come again. I am not saying that to make you sad. I am saying that so you can cherish each moment in your life and be grateful that you are here and you are Special
— Pablo
Each child’s story is worthy of telling. There shouldn’t be a sliding scale of death. The weight of it is crushing.
— Anderson Cooper, Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival
to die tomorrow was no worse than dying on any other day. Every day was there to be lived or to mark one’s departure from this world.
— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
So, what do you do when you know you have two days to live? Eat an entire Bitter Chocolate Death cake all by myself. Reread my favorite novel. Buy eight dozen roses from the best florist in town--the super expensive ones, the ones that smell like roses rather than merely looking like them--and put them all over my apartment. Take a good long look at everyone I love.
— Robin McKinley, Sunshine
Cover her face
—  mine eyes dazzle. She died young.
I still loved Granny. It flowed out of my chest. With Granny gone, where would my love go?
— Jessica Maria Tuccelli, Glow
Time moves on for us, for you it stands still. You will be forever ageless as we grow old, your smile will never wrinkle, nor will that shine in your eyes fade..
— Kendal Rob
We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds & expectations, to burst open & give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so.
— Michael Cunningham, The Hours
And, for one– ten thousandth of a second, all of it fell away, the despair and grief and anger and pain and hunger, and the old Ben Parish rose from the dead. The eyes that impaled. The smile that slayed. In another moment, he would fade, slide back into the new Ben, the one called Zombie, and I understood something I hadn’t before: He was dead, the object of my schoolgirl desires, just as the schoolgirl who desired him was dead.
— Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea
How does one become butterfly?' Pooh asked pensively.'You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar,' Piglet replied.'You mean to die?' asked Pooh.'Yes and no,' he answered. 'What looks like you will die, but what's really you will live on.
— A.A. Milne
I knew that I had been partially right in the storeroom above the bar on Christmas Day. Whoever I had become had to die.
— Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot
John Lennon said life was what happened while you made other plans. So was death.
— Richard Castle, Heat Rises
Having reached 451 books as of now doesn't help the situation. If I were to be dying now, I would be murmuring, "Too bad! Only four hundred fifty-one." (Those would be my next-to-last words. The last ones will be: "I love you, Janet.") [They were. -Janet.]
— Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov
There is no death in remembrance. Remember me, Sarah. Remember me, and a part of me will always be with you." - Martha Carrier to her daughter, Sarah Carrier
— Kathleen Kent, The Heretic's Daughter
Her blood is settled, and her joints are stiff;Life and these lips have long been separated:Death lies on her like an untimely frostUpon the sweetest flower of all the field.
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
We are frightfully concerned with our own deaths, sometimes so much so that we forget the real purpose of our lives
— Brian L. Weiss, Many Lives, Many Masters: The True Story of a Prominent Psychiatrist, His Young Patient, and the Past Life Therapy That Changed Both Their Lives
I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.
— Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America
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
Dude, you don't want to be dead. Take it from me. No-pussy is bad. But dead is like no-pussy times ten.
— Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
I was giving up. I would have given up - if a voice hadn't made itself heard in my heart. The voice said "I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen everyday. I will put in all the hard work necessary. Yes, so long as God is with me, I will not die. Amen.
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi
In the midst of life, we are in death.
— Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None
But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska's genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
Right, well, he'd been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, 'You seem to be feeling better this morning,' and Isben looked at her and said, 'On the contrary,' and then he died.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride, In the sepulchre there by the sea, In her tomb by the sounding sea.
— Edgar Allan Poe
A Second Childhood.”When all my days are endingAnd I have no song to sing,I think that I shall not be too oldTo stare at everything;As I stared once at a nursery doorOr a tall tree and a swing.Wherein God’s ponderous mercy hangsOn all my sins and me,Because He does not take awayThe terror from the treeAnd stones still shine along the roadThat are and cannot be.Men grow too old for love, my love,Men grow too old for wine,But I shall not grow too old to seeUnearthly daylight shine,Changing my chamber’s dust to snowTill I doubt if it be mine.Behold, the crowning mercies melt,The first surprises stay;And in my dross is dropped a giftFor which I dare not pray:That a man grow used to grief and joyBut not to night and day.Men grow too old for love, my love,Men grow too old for lies;But I shall not grow too old to seeEnormous night arise,A cloud that is larger than the worldAnd a monster made of eyes.Nor am I worthy to unlooseThe latchet of my shoe;Or shake the dust from off my feetOr the staff that bears me throughOn ground that is too good to last,Too solid to be true.Men grow too old to woo, my love,Men grow too old to wed;But I shall not grow too old to seeHung crazily overheadIncredible rafters when I wakeAnd I find that I am not dead.A thrill of thunder in my hair:Though blackening clouds be plain,Still I am stung and startledBy the first drop of the rain:Romance and pride and passion passAnd these are what remain.Strange crawling carpets of the grass,Wide windows of the sky;So in this perilous grace of GodWith all my sins go I:And things grow new though I grow old,Though I grow old and die.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton
Justice will prevail!
— Tsugumi Ohba
Death is not the worst thing; rather, when one who craves death cannot attain even that wish.
— Sophocles, Electra
The only certainty is death.
— Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami
Lay downYour tired & weary head my friend.We have wept too longNight is fallingAnd you are only sleepingWe have come to this journey's endIt's time for us to goTo meet our friendsWho beckon usTo jump againFrom across a distant skyA C-130 comes to carry usWhere we shall all wait For the final green lightIn the light ofThe pale moon risingI see far on the horizonInto the world of night and darknessFeet and knees togetherTime has ceasedBut cherished memories still lingerThis is the way of life and all thingsWe shall meet againYou are only sleeping.
— José N. Harris, Mi Vida
Death is our constant companion, and it is death that gives each person's life its true meaning.
— Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage
I've never been in love. I will die without knowing what it feels like to need to see one person's face when you go to sleep at night, to crave seeing it when you wake up. I wish I knew. 
— Libba Bray
Remember me, even if it's only in a corner and secretly. Don't let me go.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
If you go to your death rather than do everything you might to prevent what is happening, you are merely committing suicide and trying to make yourself feel better about it. That is the act of a coward. It is beneath contempt.
— Jim Butcher, Dead Beat
Occasionally they would hear a harsh croak or a splash as some amphibian was disturbed, but the only creature they saw was a toad as big as Will's foot, which could only flop in a pain-filled sideways heave as if it were horribly injured. It lay across the path, trying to move out of the way and looking at them as if it knew they meant to hurt it.'It would be merciful to kill it,' said Tialys.'How do you know?' said Lyra. 'It might still like being alive, in spite of everything.''If we killed it, we'd be taking it with us,' said Will. 'It wants to stay here. I've killed enough living things. Even a filthy stagnant pool might be better than being dead.''But if it's in pain?' said Tialys.'If it could tell us, we'd know. But since it can't, I'm not going to kill it. That would be considering our feelings rather than the toad's.'They moved on.
— Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
Where is Polonius? HAMLET 	 In heaven. Send hither to see. If your messenger find him not there, seek him i' th' other place yourself. But if indeed you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
How can I begin to tell you how much I miss you without using those three common words that can't even start to express the magnitude nor the depth of my emotions. How can I write in my own blood while wanting to revert its color. The color of blood is similar to "I miss you". It has been raped by writers and lovers constantly, ever since Cain and Abel. I want to be able to create a new alphabet that can simply stand in front of you without bowing. I want to use new metaphors that would erupt like volcanoes between the phrases of my readers' souls. Metaphors such as your absence is similar to eating salt straight from the shaker while thirst is devouring my tongue. Metaphors such as the lack of your presence is like being straddled behind the glass of my own senses.
— Malak El Halabi
The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?
— Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
I began to feel that all the people I'd ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man's wife lived on inside him.
— Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary.
— Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz
How many more times do we have to come to terms with death before we find safety?" he asked. He waited a few minutes, but the three of us didn't say anything. He continued: "Every time people come at us with the intention of killing us, I close my eyes and wait for death. Even though I am still alive, I feel like each time I accept death, part of me dies. Very soon I will completely die and all that will be left is my empty body walking with you. It will be quieter than I am.
— Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
No matter how much he talked, she never answered him, but he knew she was still there. He knew it was like the soldiers he had read about. They would have an arm or a leg blown off, and for days, even weeks after it happened, they could still feel the arm itching, the leg itching, the mother calling.
— Pat Cunningham Devoto, Out of the Night That Covers Me
Death, my son, is a good thing for all men; it is the night for this worried day that we call life. It is in the sleep of death that finds rest for eternity the sickness, pain, desperation, and the fears that agitate, without end, we unhappy living souls.
— Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie
Do you wanna play? Everyone's dead, so I got bored. Did you come to play with me?--Wrath
— Hiromu Arakawa
When he died, I went about like a ragged crow telling strangers, "My father died, my father died." My indiscretion embarrassed me, but I could not help it. Without my father on his Delhi rooftop, why was I here? Without him there, why should I go back? Without that ache between us, what was I made of?
— Kiran Desai
In my kind of falling, there’s no landing. There’s only hitting the ground. Hard. Dead, or wanting to be dead. So the whole time you’re falling, it’s the worst feeling in the world. Because you feel you have no control over it. Because you know how it ends.
— David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson
When along the pavement,Palpitating flames of life,People flicker around me,I forget my bereavement,The gap in the great constellation,The place where a star used to be
— D.H. Lawrence
It was not my intention to collapse; no, I would die standing.
— Knut Hamsun, Hunger
I thought about suicide all the time, but it seemed toomuch effort, swallowing all those pills or jumping off things. If I'd lived out in the country I would have found a quiet stretch of railway track, and lain on it, fallen asleep, so that I would never have known when my last moment came. In London, the minimum tube fare had gone up so much that even to get near the line cost a fortune. Suicide seemed an extravagance I couldn't afford. People never leave you alone, either; I knew that if I'd tried to lie down on the line, any number of commuters would have pulled me off again, so that I didn't delay their train.  There must have been murderers out there who wanted to kill, with no way of finding those who wanted to be dead. If there had been some way of contacting them, a date-with-death line, I would have called them to set up a meeting. The current ways of death seemed too haphazard; it was all left up to chance. Had Chance come up, tapped me on the shoulder, said "Oi, you - long black tunnel, white light, off you go," I wouldn't have complained. It was like having frostbite all over - feeling numb and in pain at the same time.
— Helena Dela, The Count
The light at the end of the tunnel is just the light of an oncoming train.
— Robert Lowell
And anyway, it’s not as though I’ll never see Mum again, is it?
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Listen, children:Your father is dead.From his old coatsI'll make you little jackets;I'll make you little trousersFrom his old pants.There'll be in his pocketsThings he used to put there,Keys and penniesCovered with tobacco;Dan shall have the penniesTo save in his bank;Anne shall have the keysTo make a pretty noise with.Life must go on,Though good men die;Anne, eat your breakfast;Dan, take your medicine;Life must go on;I forget just why.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
From too much love of livingFrom hope and fear set free,We thank with brief thanksgivingWhatever gods may beThat no life lives for ever;That dead men rise up never;That even the weariest riverWinds somewhere safe to sea.Then star nor sun shall waken,Nor any change of light:Nor sound of waters shaken,Nor any sound or sight:Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,Nor days nor things diurnal;Only the sleep eternalIn an eternal night.
— Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Garden of Proserpine
Oh, the torment bred in the race, the grinding scream of deathand the stroke that hits the vein,the hemorrhage none can staunch, the grief,the curse no man can bear.But there is a cure in the house, and not outside it, no,not from others but from them,their bloody strife. We sing to you,dark gods beneath the earth.Now hear, you blissful powers underground --answer the call, send help.Bless the children, give them triumph now.
— Aeschylus, The Oresteia Trilogy: Agamemnon/The Libation-Bearers/The Furies
He's waiting for yu, young queen.'Shocked, I stared at Seoras. 'Heath?'The Warrior's look was wise and understanding - his voice gentle. 'Aye, yur Heath probably does await you somewhere in the future, but it is of your Guardian I speak.
— P.C. Cast, Awakened
th. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
If words had weight, a single sentence from Death would have anchored a ship.
— Terry Pratchett
Death doesn't really worry me that much, I'm not frightened about it... I just don't want to be there when it happens.
— Woody Allen
We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.
— John Banville, The Sea
Only happy people have nightmares, from overeating. For those who live a nightmare reality, sleep is a black hole, lost in time, like death.
— Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier
Death isn't peaceful; it is just nothing. Everything is gone. No more sunrises, no more hopes, no more fears. Nothing.
— Linda Howard, Kill and Tell
My love, do you recall the object which we saw,That fair, sweet, summer morn!At a turn in the path a foul carcassOn a gravel strewn bed,Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman,Burning and dripping with poisons,Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant wayIts belly, swollen with gases.
— Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs Du Mal
If Under fell, if Over leaped,If death was life and Death life reaped,Something rises from the gloom,To make the Underland a tombHear it scratching down below,Rat of long forgotten snow,Evil cloaked in coat of White,Will the Warrior drain your light?What could turn the Warrior week?What do burning Gnawers seek?Just a barely speaking pup That holds the Land of Under upDie the baby, die his heartDie his most essential partDie the peace that rules the hour,Gnawers have their key to power
— Suzanne Collins, Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane
Here lies a gentleman boldWho was so very braveHe went to lengths untold,And on the brink of the graveDeath had on him no hold.By the world he set small store--He frightened it to the core--Yet somehow, by Fate's plan,Though he'd lived a crazy man,When he died he was sane once more.
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Can’t clean up after you anymore, baby brother, so don’t punk out. Make it count.
— Rachel Vincent, Reaper
Let me go: take back thy gift:Why should a man desire in any wayTo vary from the kindly race of men,Or pass beyond the goal of ordinanceWhere all should pause, as is most meet for all?...Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?‘The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.’- Tithonus
— Alfred Tennyson
Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, "the love of nature" seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
He was dead, all right. He had been shot, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled. Either somebody had really had it in for him or four people had killed him. Or else it was the cleverest suicide I'd ever heard of.
— Richard S. Prather, Take a Murder, Darling
She already felt dead in everything but name. What remained to be taken from her? She longed to be enfolded, welcomed, into the earth - to breathe no more, love no more, hurt no more
— Alan Brennert, Moloka'i
We are all the fools of time and terror: DaysSteal on us and steal from us; yet we live,Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.
— George Gordon Byron
It hurts when they're gone. And it doesn't matter if it's slow or fast, whether it's a long drawn-out disease or an unexpected accident. When they're gone the world turns upside down and you're left holding on, trying not to fall off.
— Walter Mosley, Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore
[W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy.
— Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Popularity is teenage heroin.
— Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants
Darkling I listen; and, for many a timeI have been half in love with easeful Death...
— John Keats, The Complete Poems
To look upon its grass grown yard, where the sunbeams seem to sleep so quietly, one would think that there at least the dead might rest in peace.
— Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Last reason for reading horror: it’s a rehearsal for death. It’s a way to get ready. People say there’s nothing sure but death and taxes. But that’s not really true. There’s really only death, you know. Death is the biggie. Two hundred years from now, none of us are going to be here. We’re all going to be someplace else. Maybe a better place, maybe a worse place; it may be sort of like New Jersey, but someplace else. The same thing can be said of rabbits and mice and dogs, but we’re in a very uncomfortable position: we’re the only creatures—at least as far as we know, though it may be true of dolphins and whales and a few other mammals that have very big brains—who are able to contemplate our own end. We know it’s going to happen. The electric train goes around and around and it goes under and around the tunnels and over the scenic mountains, but in the end it always goes off the end of the table. Crash.
— Stephen King
And after a while...I mean, how do you choose? Who gets to live? Part of life is that...well, some people have to die. My powers aren't a prescription you can get filled as needed.
— Richelle Mead, Shadow Kiss
It’s odd, isn’t it? People die every day and the world goes on like nothing happened. But when it’s a person you love, you think everyone should stop and take notice. That they ought to cry and light candles and tell you that you’re not alone.
— Kristina McMorris, Letters From Home
When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die. . . . (90)
— Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
We have once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create.
— Stephen King, The Green Mile
Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?'What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing
— Don DeLillo, White Noise
And death doesn't wait for you when your rested and ready. It sneaks up on you when your exhausted and hungry and cold and so scared you can't even see straight
— Lili St. Crow, Betrayals
I know that I shall die struggling for breath, and I know that I shall be horribly afraid. I know that I shall not be able to keep myself from regretting bitterly the life that has brought me to such a pass; but I disown that regret. I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
The monster nevers dies.
— Stephen King, Cujo