c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Phoebe asked me, "Tell me, what do you think of the afterlife?"I was a bit nonplussed. I had no idea what she thought, but I knew that the question must be of greater interest to someone of her age than to me. But our conversation had been completely honest, and before I could speak, honesty and tact had joined hands in my answer. "I have no faith at all," I said, "but sometimes I have hope."I rather think," she replied, "that total annihilation is the most comfortable position."I was shaken. The horse clopped on. The children laughed behind us.When I die," she said, "I don't expect to see any of my loved ones again. I'll just become a part of all this." She waved her hand at the surrounding countryside. "That's all right with me.
— Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer
Mothers,fathers,our kind,tell me again that death doesn't matter.Tell me it's just a limitation of vision ,a fold of landscape,a deep flax-and-poppy-filled gully hidden on the hill, pleat in our perception a somersault of existence,natural,even beneficent even a gift,the only key to the red-lacquered door at the end of the hall,"water within water," those old stories.
— Pattiann Rogers
As he walked, the sad faded leaves were driven pitilessly around him by the wind, and under the mingling influences of autumn and evening, a craving for the quietude of the grave … overtook him with unwanted intensity.
— Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-La-Morte
Life is short, death is forever.
— Marsha Qualey, Just Like That
I am dead man alive.
— Santosh Kalwar, I Am Dead Man Alive
I found it idiotically distressing that a sharp finger whistle could no longer summon them outdoors into a playful twilight. An ancient discovery was now mine to make: to leave is to make nothing less than a mortal action. The suspicion came to me for the fist time that they were figures of my dreaming, like the loved dead: my mother and all these vanished boys. And after Mama's cremation I could not rid myself of the notion that she had been placed in the furnace of memory even when alive and, by extension, that one's dealings with others, ostensibly vital, at a certain point become dealings with the dead.
— Joseph O'Neill
Curiosity is a good thing, like onion soup. But too much onion soup makes your breath smell terrible. And too much curiosity can make your whole body smell terrible, if it causes you to be dead. 
— Michael Reisman, Simon Bloom, The Gravity Keeper
Places change imperceptibly – in detail, at least – a good deal,' said the Doctor, making an effort to keep up a conversation that plainly would not go on itself; 'and people too; population shifts – there's an old fellow, sir, they call Death.
— J. Sheridan Le Fanu, The Haunted Baronet And Others: Ghost Stories 1861-70
This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compassion a few hours old. That can happen when people die--the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration. In which estimate lies the greater reality--the uncharitable one permitted us before the funeral, forged, without any claptrap, in the skirmish of daily life, or the one that suffuses us with sadness at the family gathering afterward--this even an outsider can't judge. The sight of a coffin can effect a great change of heart--all at once you find you are not so disappointed in the person who is dead--but what the sight of a coffin does for a mind in its search for the truth, this I don't profess to know.
— Philip Roth, American Pastoral
Your father was no longer a young man. he was already in his fifties.'Fifty-six,' Eddie said blankly.Fifty-six,' the old woman repeated. 'His body had been weakened, the ocean had left him vulnerable, pneumonia took hold of him, and in time, he died.'Because of Mickey?' Eddie said.Because of loyalty,' she said.People don’t die because of loyalty.'They don’t?' she smiled. 'Religion? government? Are we not loyal to such things, sometimes to the death?'Eddie shrugged.Better,' she said, 'To be loyal to one another.
— Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Mr. Codro's destiny is Ptolemaic; in other words, based on fiction. Ptolemaic says it all; it means above all fixed and unchanging, that is to say different from real life which is by nature changing and temporary. It means: not according to natural truth, but according to man's desire and the pretense inspired by his fear of dying and his desire for permanence.
— Alberto Savinio
Only fools insist upon life at any cost.... Others would say that life may be laid down when it becomes too heavy. Where does it go, after all, but into the keeping of the Powers who gave it and will give it once again?
— Sheri S. Tepper, The Revenants
The Death's Field is the mirror which allows us the knowledge of the world we living in.
— Sorin Cerin
But Robin: their dear little Robs. More than ten years later, his death remained an agony; there was no glossing any detail; its horror was not subject to repair or permutation by any of the narrative devices that the Cleves knew. And—since this willful amnesia had kept Robin's death from being translated into that sweet old family vernacular which smoothed even the bitterest mysteries into comfortable, comprehensible form—the memory of that day's events had a chaotic, fragmented quality, bright mirrorshards of nightmare which flared at the smell of wisteria, the creaking of a clothes-line, a certain stormy cast of spring light.
— Donna Tartt, The Little Friend
In 5-billion years the Sun will expand & engulf our orbit as the charred ember that was once Earth vaporizes. Have a nice day.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
s father's words. But they are as empty on his lips as they feel in my ears. This was has taken everything from him. I see in his eyes how broken he is. how terribly hard he is trying to be his father's son. If he could, he would choose to be back by the campfire we made in the highlands of the Institute. He would return to the days of glory when life was simple, when friends seemed true. But wishing for the past doesn't clean the blood from either of our hands.
— Pierce Brown, Morning Star
Raise from your bed of languorRaise from your bed of dismayYour friends will not come tomorrowAs they did not come todayYou must rely on yourself, they said,You must rely on yourself,Oh but I find this pill so bitter said the poor manAs he took it from the shelfCrying, O sweet Death come to meCome to me for company,Sweet Death it is only you I canConstrain for company.
— Stevie Smith
We have talked about Suzy and about her last days, but it's as if our lives stopped then and there. If I say anything to him about feeling lonesome, he goes outside and does some little chore. I can't tell if he is secretly blaming me, or himself, or just too full of pain to talk. That was the one thing we could always do together. I wish for the old days. I wish for the struggling days and the days of Geronimo, and the days of birthing Charlie with no one but Jack to help me. How happy and in love we were then. I want to be in love again, but all I feel is darkness and shadows. Everything is changed and different
— Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901
The face of the dead man was concealed, of course, our customs not being those of the south, where corpses are carried to the grave in open coffins, that they might – one last time before slipping into the pit – be warmed by the light of the sun.
— Jan Neruda, Prague Tales
Even now, I found it difficult to believe that my father could or might be dying. He had always been a strong man, a good leader. No one had ever seen him with his head bowed in despair or defeat, no one had ever seen him slump in resignation, nor had anyone ever had even so much as a hint from him that he might ever give up. It was hard to picture all that strength drained from my father’s body.
— Ann Marston, Cloudbearer's Shadow
Pain has a threshold and so does death.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
I think about death sometimes. Analytically, of course.
— Lynne Truss, Making the Cat Laugh
May the light be in you forever,May the sun love you and keep you,May the dream make you awaken.For the stars love to shine upon you, And the heavens cry for your loss.May goodness and love flow through you once more,Drink of the light and the love here,Find that we all need you,May your spirit come back across.
— Mina Marial Nicoli, The Magic of Avalon Eyrelin
Life's a queue of small irritations with the Last Door at the end.
— Joe Abercrombie, Half a War
The air smelled of a limited life expectancy.
— Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
I know I should look away, let him grieve in private, but I cannot. The sweet girl that I knew only briefly is the key to this gentle beast who has captured my heart.
— Robin LaFevers, Dark Triumph
There are times when I'm doing QI and I'm going, 'Ha ha, yeah, yeah,' and inside I'm going 'I want to fucking die. I … want … to … fucking … die.'(Source : RHLSTP #18 - @87min32s)
— Stephen Fry
For it would be only for a time. Until what he knew and thought became no longer relevant or necessary and was forgotten. But that was the same with all of us. We were only what we were for a time, at that time. Then our own silver began to mix with the tin of our future to change us. I knew this to be so and grieved for Windlow while I grieved for me. In time I would not be this Peter, even as I now was not the peter of two years ago.... Yet that Peter was not lost.
— Sheri S. Tepper, The True Game
Life is spent hovering round our tomb. Our various sicknesses are but the winds which carry us more or less near to the haven. … Death is our friend, nevertheless we do not recognise it as such, because it presents itself to us under a mask, and that mask inspires us with terror.
— François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe
We were playing a game against an unknown and unforgiving opponent. The stakes were terrible—play well or die—but we didn’t even know the ground rules.
— Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes
Technically, all tattoos are temporary, even permanent ones.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
He saw at least a dozen people still in their seats. Their clothes were torn or blown or burned from their bodies, “completely naked in front, missing limbs, missing faces, some breathing, some moaning, and others just deader than a door nail.
— Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival
EMBALM, v.i. To cheat vegetation by locking up the gases upon which it feeds. By embalming their dead and thereby deranging the natural balance between animal and vegetable life, the Egyptians made their once fertile and populous country barren and incapable of supporting more than a meagre crew. The modern metallic burial casket is a step in the same direction, and many a dead man who ought now to be ornamenting his neighbour's lawn as a tree, or enriching his table as a bunch of radishes, is doomed to a long inutility. We shall get him after awhile if we are spared, but in the meantime, the violet and rose are languishing for a nibble at his gluteus maximus.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
Life makes beggars out of those who have joyful hearts, taxing the living with hardship and tribulation, but the charity of companionship, the currency of shared and unmitigated love, alleviates all disconsolation.
— Michelle Franklin
So it is said, for him who understands Heavenly joy, life is the working of Heaven; death is the transformation of things. In stillness, he and the yin share a single Virtue; in motion, he and the yang share a single flow.
— Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu
Liz Emerson held so much darkness within her that closing her eyes didn't make much a difference at all.
— Amy Zhang
Dead. Even in the silence of my mind I cannot think the word. I cannot acknowledge this most obvious and terrible of truths.
— Melanie Cusick-Jones, Outlanders
I not afraid of dying, I'm afraid of suffering
— Raheem Kirlew
Nothing can dwindle to nothing, as Nature restores one thing from the stuff of another, nor does she allow a birth, without a corresponding death.
— Titus Lucretius Carus, The Way Things Are: The De Rerum Natura
waitingin a life full of little storiesfor a death to come
— Charles Bukowski, Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit
Let's go to Valhalla with the sun on our faces.
— Mark  Lawrence, Prince of Fools
Don't call it death
—  call it moving to Heaven.
One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second.
— Samuel Beckett
There is something more dangerous than the death of one’s body. It is “the undiscovered self”
—  being alive without knowing why.
A human being needs only a small plot of ground on which to be happy, and even less to lie beneath.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings
I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly grey. It was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces.
— Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
A short while later, as I stare down at the bodies of the six men I have just killed, I cannot help but wonder: Do I love killing? Of a certainty, I love the way my body and weapons move as one; I revel in the knowledge of where to strike for maximum impact. And of a certainty, I am good at it.
— Robin LaFevers, Dark Triumph
I just want to die knowing that I’ve made a difference in the world... or at least a difference to someone, no matter how small the difference.
— Eloise Dyson, Divided
Invariably, knowledge dictates life, liberty, and death, but those who have historically occupied the seats of power not only dictate what is defined as knowledge but also dictate what’s included, what’s excluded, and how it is filtered to society vis-à-vis America’s major institutions . . . particularly the educational system; ultimately, shaping the very essence of life.
— Martin Guevara Urbina, Latino Access to Higher Education: Ethnic Realitites and New Directions for the Twenty-first Century
He wasn't supposed to die,' he cried out, somewhat desperately, petulantly, like a spoiled child. But I could hear other thoughts racing between us.Neither are you.Neither am I.
— Patti Smith, Just Kids
Death’s life should have listened to the moonly whispers of breathing in the coldest nights
— Munia Khan
The famed philosopher Diogenes was looking intently at a large collection of human bones piled one upon another. Alexander the Great stood nearby and became curious about what Diogenes was doing. When he asked the old man what he was doing, the rely was, 'I am searching for the bones of your father, but I cannot seem to distinguish them from those of the slaves.' Alexander got the point. All are equal in death.
— Ron Rhodes, The Wonder of Heaven: A Biblical Tour of Our Eternal Home
For every death is a simplification of existence for the others, removes the necessity to show gratitude, the obligation to pay visits.
— Marcel Proust, Time Regained
...the only thing really worth doing in this life is giving love to everyone around you.
— Claire Bidwell Smith, After This: When Life Is Over, Where Do We Go?
The desert was a school, a school where each day, each hour, a final examination was offered, where failure meant death and the buzzards landed to correct the papers.
— Louis L'Amour, Shalako
It's not reasonable to love people who are only going to die.
— Kristin Cashore, Fire
Joan Wernick said she took two lessons from the crash. “You’re going to die when you’re supposed to die.
— Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival
Finally, I will never forget stopping near a lovely young girl still strapped to her seat, breathing slightly. Her blouse was white, her slacks were blue. At the end of the trousers were two snow-white ankle bones where her feet used to be. I had never seen the whiteness of bones that are freshly exposed like that.
— Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival
As he walked along the runway, he came upon a United Airlines pilot. “He tried to sit up,” Martz said. “I saw a huge triangular hole in his forehead and I told him to just lie still and that help was on the way, but it was too late for him.
— Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival
I paid, got up, walkedto the door, openedit.I heard the mansay, "that guy'snuts."out on the street Iwalked northfeelingcuriouslyhonored.
— Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
This is how most stories end in the hospital. Not with crash carts and sirens and electric shocks to the chest, but with an empty room, a crisp white bed, silence.
— Jacob M. Appel, Phoning Home
Not every loss was confirmed by an officer at the door. Nor a telegram with the power to sink a fleet. Loss, often the worst kind, also arrived through the deafening quiet of an absence.
— Kristina McMorris, The Pieces We Keep
Carmen will always be free.
— Prosper Mérimée, Carmen
So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.
— Iris Murdoch, Under the Net
Was. What does was actually mean? The verb to be. Past tense of is. Does it mean that someone is no longer being?
— Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,The bridal of the earth and sky;The dew shall weep thy fall tonight,For thou must die.
— George Herbert, The Temple: The Poetry of George Herbert
How obvious can it be? ... The purpose of makeup is to defy the degradations of time, and time is just a synonym for death.
— Dean Koontz, False Memory
Seems like everything lead up to this dayand it's just like every day that's ever been.Sun goin' up and then the sunit goin' down.
— Jerry Garcia
Tombstones covered the dale, the smooth marble surfaces bright. She had spent days here as a teenager, though not out of any awareness of mortality. Like every adolescent, she intended to live forever.
— Thomm Quackenbush, We Shadows
A funeral is no place for secrets.
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day
Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over, and death is so certain an entrance to happiness – to glory?
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Bad business last night. Chances are, that would be all Graham had to say about the death of a man he had known his whole life. These folk knew all about death. They killed their own livestock. They died from fevers, falls, or broken bones gone sour. Death was like an unpleasant neighbor. You didn't talk about him for fear he might hear you and decide to pay a visit.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
Strangest problems of life seem clearing
—  but clouds sweep between--Is my journey’s end coming?
Poor little girl. Poor little girl," Nan says, and at first I think she is speaking of the baby, perhaps it is a girl after all. But then I realize she is speaking of me, a girl of thirteen years, whose own mother has said that they can let her die as long as a son and heir is born.
— Philippa Gregory, The Red Queen
I am beginning to be sorry that I ever undertook to write this book. Not that it bores me; I have nothing else to do; indeed, it is a welcome distraction from eternity. But the book is tedious, it smells of the tomb, it has a rigor mortis about it; a serious fault, and yet a relatively small one, for the great defect of this book is you, reader. You want to live fast, to get to the end, and the book ambles along slowly; you like straight, solid narrative and a smooth style, but this book and my style are like a pair of drunks; they stagger to the right and to the left, they start and they stop, they mutter, they roar, they guffaw, they threaten the sky, they slip and fall...And fall! Unhappy leaves of my cypress tree, you had to fall, like everything else that is lovely and beautiful; if I had eyes, I would shed a tear of remembrance for you. And this is the great advantage in being dead, that if you have no mouth with which to laugh, neither have you eyes with which to cry.
— Machado de Assis, Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas
I have faced death this night, and I have called his bluff.
— Lucien LaCroix
This is what I feared would come; this is what I have dreaded. It is not very bright and honorable as you have always thought it; it is not like a ballad. It is a muddle and a mess, and a sinful waste, and good men have died and more will follow.
— Philippa Gregory, The Red Queen
Jango danced
—  and the tune that he danced to was Death.
It’s your call. You want to go back home, go ahead. But if I were you, I wouldn’t. Home is death.
— Jeff Abbott, Panic
She had thought he was dead, or at least not totally alive, and you could not still be dating someone you believe had an autopsy, so it was not really cheating.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Danse Macabre (Night's Dream, #2)
Live life while you have it; the fact that you have it is highly improbable, the fact that you will lose it is guaranteed.
— Philip DeFranco
Marvin: – La necrofilia ce l’abbiamo sepolta dentro. Uno dei miei libri, Storia della tortura e della morte, parla delle atrocità che abbiamo commesso in nome della giustizia e della vendetta. Spesso erano peggiori dei crimini originali. L’uomo è un animale sanguinario.
— Joe R. Lansdale, Act of Love
Eins var algengt hjá okkur ef spurt var um líðan einhvers manns: iss hann er feitur; en það þýddi að honum liði vel, eða einsog sagt mundi vera í Danmörku, að hann væri hamingjusamur. Ef einhverjum leið illa, þá var sagt sem svo: æ það hálfsér á honum; og væri sá nær dauða en lífi sem um var rætt, þá var sagt: æ það er í er í honum einhver lurða. Ef einhver var um það bil að verða ellidauður, þá var sagt: æjá hann er hættur að bleyta smjörið. Um þann sem lá banaleguna var sagt: já hann er nú að berja nestið auminginn. Um dauðvona ungling var sagt að það liti ekki út fyrir að hann ætti að kemba hærurnar.
— Halldór Laxness, The Fish Can Sing
Death is the night sky, the background against which the fleeting fireworks of life are displayed, an empty stage upon which the drama of life is played.
— James Rozoff
She watched as the dancing lights of madness swirled and flickered in his eyes like the fires of hell, and she knew that there would never be anything that could quench those fires except death. Vanessa knew that Jango had become his own Grim Reaper.
— Cedric Nye, Jango's Anthem
They go on to this better place, you know, which is what they wanted all along. But you and me, we're still left behind with all the questions they couldn't answer.
— Jodi Picoult, The Pact
Time owed an alliance to the undying.
— Thomm Quackenbush, We Shadows
If you Have ever Fainted, You Are a stranger in the land of the dead!
— Antoni Omeihe
Before she knew it, she was just another set of eyes in a dusty attic, waiting for the stairs to creak.
— Kelly Moran, An Insomniac's Dream: A Collection of Poems and Short Stories
You think it's so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain't.
— Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia
It has always been this way. Death is followed by birth. To reach paradise, man must pass through inferno. - Bertrand Zobrist
— Dan Brown, Inferno
And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again...
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Was that what it was really like to be alive? The feeling of darkness dragging you forward?How could they live with it? And yet they did, and even seemed to find enjoyment in it, when surely the only sensible course would be to despair. Amazing. To feel you were a tiny living thing, sandwiched between two cliffs of darkness. How could they stand to be alive?
— Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
We love because we can lose. If there was no threat of separation, no death to shake us to our core, we probably wouldn't love much at all.
— Donna Lynn Hope
On their deathbed men will speak true, they say.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Húrin
I answer the heroic question, 'Death, where is thy sting?' with 'It is in my heart and mind and memories.
— Maya Angelou
I -- I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.' But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And, by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died only yesterday -- nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time -- his death and her sorrow -- I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together -- I heard them together.
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Man. Being mostly dead is hard on a guy.
— Jim Butcher, Cold Days
Everyone facing death, especially premature death, like us, will be kicking themselves about each wasted hour.
— Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
— Iris Murdoch
Death, he had come to believe, was a corrosive thing, and the more he was around it , the more it gnawed away at who he was.
— Christopher Paolini, Inheritance
And in the years when your shadow leaned clear across the land as you lay abed nights with your heartbeat mounting to the billions, his invention must let a man drowse easy in the falling leaves like the boys in autumn who, comfortably strewn in the dry stacks, are content to be a part of the death of the world...
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Where death follows, there’s life. When darkness surrounds you in a world of chaos, search and you’ll eventually find the light.
— Lee Argus, Chance Escape
An aged man is but a paltry thing,A tattered coat upon a stick, unlessSoul clap its hands and sing, and louder singFor every tatter in its mortal dress
— W.B. Yeats
Like they just wanted to enjoy The Gus Waters Show while it was still in town.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
If birth is a manifestation of life, death is another.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Only the dead has seen th end of war
— Mirza Tabish
When the little mouse, which was loved as none other was in the mouse-world, got into a trap one night and with a shrill scream forfeited its life for the sight of the bacon, all the mice in the district, in their holes were overcome by trembling and shaking; with eyes blinking uncontrollably they gazed at each other one by one, while their tails scraped the ground busily and senselessly. Then they came out, hesitantly, pushing one another, all drawn towards the scene of death. There it lay, the dear little mouse, its neck caught in the deadly iron, the little pink legs drawn up, and now stiff the feeble body that would so well have deserved a scrap of bacon.The parents stood beside it and eyed their child's remains.
— Franz Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks
I'm like a machine being run over its RPM limit: The bearings are overheating - a minute longer, and the metal is going to melt and start dripping and that'll be the end of everything. I need a quick splash of cold water, logic. I pour it on in buckets, but the logic hisses on the hot bearings and dissipates in the air as a fleeting white mist. Well, of course, it's clear that you can't establish a function without taking into account what its limit is. And it's also clear that what I felt yesterday, that stupid "dissolving in the universe," if you take it to its limit, is death. Because that's exactly what death is - the fullest possible dissolving of myself into the universe. Hence, if we let L stand for love and D for death, then L = f (D), i.e., love and death...
— Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
Passando fra gli insorti che si scostavano con religioso rispetto, [papà Mabeuf] continuò dritto verso Enjolras che indietreggiava impietrito, gli strappò la bandiera, e senza che nessuno osasse trattenerlo né aiutarlo, quel vecchio ottuagenario col capo vacillante, ma col piede fermo, salì lentamente la scala di pietre costruita nella barricata. Lo spettacolo era così serio che tutto all'intorno dissero: «Giù il cappello!». A ogni gradino che saliva diventava sempre più terribile: i suoi capelli canuti, il volto decrepito, l'ampia fronte calma e rugosa, gli occhi incavati, la bocca attonita e semiaperta, il vecchio braccio che sosteneva la bandiera rossa, uscivano dall'ombra e ingigantivano nel sanguinoso chiarore della torcia, e sembrava di vedere lo spettro del 1793 sorgere dalla terra inalberando la bandiera del terrore.Quando fu all'ultimo gradino, quando quel fantasma tremante e terribile, ritto su quel mucchio di rovine dinanzi a milleduecento fucili invisibili, si drizzò in faccia alla morte come se fosse più forte di essa, tutta la barricata assunse nelle tenebre un aspetto colossale e soprannaturale. Vi fu uno di quegli istanti di silenzio che accompagnano i prodigi. In mezzo a quel silenzio il vegliardo sventolò la bandiera rossa e gridò:«Viva la Rivoluzione! Viva la Repubblica! Fratellanza! Uguaglianza! E morte!».
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Losing you're co-remember meant losing the memory itself.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Life into death— Life’s other shape, No rupture, Only crossing.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
Every thought about death takes a moment of life away.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Maybe one did have to be smart in order to kill.
— Markelle Grabo, The Spell Master
Unless a reincarnationist is willing to say there was a 'first generation' of souls created with the first humans, he is exposed to absurdity by the recency of human life on the planet.
— Christopher Hitchens
Mais, dans la mort d’un homme, un monde inconnu meurt, et je me demandais quelles étaient les images qui sombraient en lui.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Instead, I opened my eyes to find the thing in front of my face, wafting dead horse breath across my chin and up my nose, its mouth like a gaping maw; its eyes, two giant wormholes, twisting and bending with some apparitional substance that could have been space and time if I’d known anything about physics.
— Shannon Celebi, 1:32 P.M.
[Jesus] tilted His head back, pulled up one last time to draw breath and cried, "Tetelestai!" It was a Greek expression most everyone present would have understood. It was an accounting term. Archaeologists have found papyrus tax receipts with "Tetelestai" written across them, meaning "paid in full." With Jesus' last breath on the cross, He declared the debt of sin cancelled, completely satisfied. Nothing else required. Not good deeds. Not generous donations. Not penance or confession or baptism or...or...or...nothing. The penalty for sin is death, and we were all born hopelessly in debt. He paid our debt in full by giving His life so that we might live forever.
— Charles R. Swindoll
You too, you took an interest in the world. That was long ago. I want you to cast your mind back to then. The domain of the rules was no longer enough for you; you were unable to love any longer in the domain of the rules; so you had to enter into the domain of the struggle. I ask you to go back to that precise moment. It was long ago, no? Cast your mind back: the water was cold. You are far from the edge, now. Oh yes! How far from the edge you are! You long believed in the existence of another shore; such is no longer the case. You go on swimming, though, and every movement you make brings you closer to drowning. You are suffocating, your lungs are on fire. The water seems colder and colder to you, more and more galling. You aren't that young anymore. Now you are going to die. Don't worry. I am here. I won't let you sink. Go on with your reading.
— Michel Houellebecq, Whatever
And some day there will be nothing left of everything that has twisted my life and grieved it and filled me so often with such anguish. Some day, with the last exhaustion, peace will come and the motherly earth will gather me back home. It won't be the end of things, only a way of being born again, a bathing and a slumbering where the old and the withered sink down, where the young and new begin to breathe. Then, with other thoughts, I will walk along streets like these, and listen to streams, and overhear what the sky says in the evening, over and over and over.
— Hermann Hesse
It feels weird, being out in the real world again. Around people just living their lives like normal. Their presence is oppressive. The very fact that the world is going on as usual, like nothing ever happened, makes me want to scream. I know it's irrational to expect everything to grind to a halt because of June, but still. A wave of anxiety builds in my chest, my head pounding so loud it drowns out the noise of people talking and tapping away on their laptops.
— Hannah Harrington, Saving June
In the center lay the exploded carcass of a lonely sperm whale that hadn't lived long enough to be disappointed with its lot.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
It's what's known as an origin myth. What happened to me? That's no myth.
— Meg Cabot, Abandon
more. To have days cut off and at their end. To never again..........anything.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Secrets of a Noble Key Keeper
They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought[.]
— Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room
No tabloid will ever print the startling news that the mummified body of Jesus of Nazareth has been discovered in old Jerusalem. Christians have no carefully embalmed body enclosed in a glass case to worship. Thank God, we have an empty tomb. The glorious fact that the empty tomb proclaims to us is that life for us does not stop when death comes. Death is not a wall, but a door.
— Peter Marshall
One day u will be the message...a message for those who still alive...
— Fayrouz Yasser
You can't make me do nothing but die!
— Richard Wright, Native Son
Maybe Laney's right. Maybe June did love me. But I'm far less certain that she knew I loved her. Did she realise how much I needed her around? It's not like I ever told her. I was too wrapped up in my own world to notice what was going on in hers. Even if she did know, it wasn't enough to count. It wasn't enough to make her stay. So really, what did it matter, in the end? wasn't enough. There's no excuse. There is nothing that will ever make that okay.
— Hannah Harrington, Saving June
Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.
— Paul Theroux
They are trying to take you back from me now, and they will—but only for a brief, little while—
— Maryrose Wood, The Poison Diaries
Nobody seems to understand that in such matters the tact and sympathy should come from the one who is about to die, not the poor bugger who has to take the news.
— Stephen Fry, The Hippopotamus
...it does not matter if we are forgotten; what matters is the effect we have on those around us and those who come after us. What matters is how our own lives affect the larger, perpetual community of the living.
— Lynn Schooler, Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey into the Human Heart
What if he could see this, his own skull, yellow and eroded? Two centuries old. Would he still speak? Would he speak, if he could see it, the grinning, aged skull? What would there be for him to say, to tell the people? What message could he bring?What action would not be futile, when a man could look upon his own aged, yellowed skull?
— Philip K. Dick, The Skull
Wenn jemand starb, dem du dein Herz geschenkt hattest, nahm er es dann mit?
— Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes
We must learn to accept ourselves in the painful experiment of living. We must embrace the spiritual adventure of becoming human, moving through the many stages that lie between birth and death.
— Johann Baptist Metz, Poverty of Spirit
MortalityOh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?Like a swift-fleeting meteor, a fast-flying cloud,A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave,He passes from life to his rest in the grave.The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade,Be scattered around, and together be laid;And the young and the old, the low and the high,Shall molder to dust, and together shall lie.Yea, hope and despondency, pleasure and pain,Are mingled together in sunshine and rain;And the smile and the tear, the song and the dirge,Still follow each other, like surge upon surge.'Tis the wink of an eye - 'tis the draught of a breath -From the blossom of health to the paleness of death,From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroudOh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?
— William Knox
This isolation, this deep pit in the bottom of my stomach, didn't have to hurt so much." - Aquamarine Rosabelle bonus included in Dreams, Smiles, and Bloody Tears
— Chamera Sampson
Y todavía los que no murieron bajo las chozas ni se rajaron los huesos bajo los árboles ni se desangraron bajo las cuevas, ciegos de miedo y de ira acabaron despedazándose entre sí. Los pocos que no sufrieron quebranto, como recuerdo de la simpleza de sus corazones, se transformaron en monos.
— Popol Vuh
Abby could smell his hot breath in her face. It reeked like dead apples left to rot in the scorching summer sun.
— Greever Williams, On Tenterhooks
A los mortales os hace falta compañía porque tenéis tristeza, deseos y un tiempo limitado de vida.
— Jackson Pearce, As You Wish
Can I tell you something? It wasn't so bad. Not so bad at all right then, me scowling at the dirt, James in his bed, the way it always always was. Look, if that's all that happened, if his dying just meant that I would be waiting for him to say something instead of listening to him say something, it would have been fine.
— Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House
Morire biologicamente, è il perfezionarsi di uno stato in cui ci troviamo già ora.
— Guido Morselli, Dissipatio H.G.
It may seem to you that your life is over now. Your future without the person you love is no future at all.Death is a head-on collision with your plans.But everything in life--the gold fillings of your teeth, the cotton of your sheets, the air you breathe, all the food you will ever eat--everything there is was born from a collision.Inside every single thing that lives is a debt to a distant star that died.Nothing new is ever created without one thing colliding into another.And something new is created when the person you love dies.Because they are not the only ones who die: you die, too. The person you were when you were with them is gone just as surely as they are.This is what you should know about losing somebody you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.
— Augusten Burroughs, This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.
Even death, faced with the option of death or life, she would choose life.
— José Saramago, Death with Interruptions
I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly . . . I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
The Nevernever is dying, human. It grows smaller and smaller every decade. Too much progress, too much technology. Mortals are losing their faith in anything but science. Even the children of man are consumed by progress. They sneer at the old stories and are drawn to the newest gadgets, computers, or video games. They no longer believe in monsters of magic. As cities grown and technology takes over the world, belief and imagination fade away, and so do we.""What can we do to stop it?" I whispered."Nothing." Grimalkin raised a hind leg and scratched an ear. "Maybe the Nevenever will hold out till the end of the world. Maybe it will disappear in a few centuries. Everything dies eventually, human.
— Julie Kagawa, The Iron King
Suffering is part of life,' she said. 'All the parts of life are jumbled up together; you can't separate out just the one thing.' She parred his hand again, kindly. 'I could let you kill me now, lovely man, and have peace and good dreams forever. But who knows what I get instead, if I stay? Maybe time to see a new grandchild. Maybe a good joke that sets me laughing for days. Maybe another handsome young fellow flirting with me.' She grinned toothlessly, then let loose another horrible, racking cough. Ehiru steadies her with shaking hands. 'I want every moment of my life, pretty man, the painful and the sweet alike. Until the very end. If these are all the memories I get for eternity, I want to take as many of them with me as I can.
— N.K. Jemisin, The Killing Moon
Death isn't funny." "Then why are there so many jokes about death? Jill, with us — us humans — death is so sad that we must laugh at it.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
There are far more reasons for death than there are for life.
— Sergei Lukyanenko, The Last Watch
I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.
— Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
You are well aware that it is not numbers or strength that bring the victories in war. No, it is when one side goes against the enemy with the gods' gift of a stronger morale that their adversaries, as a rule, cannot withstand them. I have noticed this point too, my friends, that in soldiering the people whose one aim is to keep alive usually find a wretched and dishonorable death, while the people who, realizing that death is the common lot of all men, make it their endeavour to die with honour, somehow seem more often to reach old age and to have a happier life when they are alive. These are facts which you too should realize (our situation demands it) and should show that you yourselves are brave men and should call on the rest to do likewise.
— Xenophon, The Persian Expedition
Believe me, Doctor, if your life ends in suddenness you will be glad it did, and if it does not you will wish it had. You will want suddenness, Doctor.
— Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife
Mr. Asher, you can resist who you are for only so long. Finally, you just decide to go with fate.
— Christopher Moore, A Dirty Job
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies heonly appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people tocry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always willexist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we canlook at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent allthe moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just anillusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on astring, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.'When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a badcondition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of othermoments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say whatthe Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "so it goes.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
Adam pressed his hand to his face. Sighed. "Right. It's just that… He died. And I'm so freaking pissed off, I swear I'd punch him in the face if he were standing right here.
— Kristina McBride, One Moment
Do the thing you love to do. Hank Williams died at the ripe old age of twentynine. Stevie Ray Vaughan at thirty-five. Jesus at thirtythree. Don’t think you’re special and the Lord’s gonna bless you with time.
— Jill S. Alexander, Paradise
That's what life is all about - you're busy, I'm busy, and the end result is death. Sooner or later, that's what it comes to. ("The Death Of Wang Asao")
— Xiao Hong, Selected Stories Of Xiao Hong
All that tread,The globe are but a handful to the tribes,That slumber in its bosom.
— William Cullen Bryant
Psychology is a subject of life, death, and in-betweens.
— Santosh Kalwar
How do you give something away with the knowledge that you will get it back in three days, and then claim it to be the 'Ultimate Sacrifice'?
— Jake Jesser
Love makes you stupid. Love makes you weak. Love will kill you all one day, and it’s going to kill you today.
— J.X. Burros
I was just walking around saying “We’re all gonna die!” I never got over it. I went to class, I did what I had to do, but I was a gibbering idiot. It never went away. I never again felt the same way about life and death.
— Anne Rice
The only way to find out if you're immortal is to make it to the end of time and look around to see if you're still alive. Until you've done that, all you know is that you haven't died yet.
— John Patrick Lowrie, Dancing With Eternity
Wasn't there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi?
— Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
For that half-hour in the hospital delivery room I was intimate with immensity, for that half-minute before birth I held her hands and for that duration we three were undivided, I felt the blood of her pulse as we gripped hands, felt her blood beat in the rhythm that reached into the baby as she slipped into the doctor's hands, and for a few days we touched that immensity, we saw through her eyes to an immense intimacy, saw through to where she had come from, I felt important being next to her, and the feeling lasted when we entered our car for the drive home, thinking to myself that we weren't to be trusted with our baby, the feeling lasting while I measured us against the landscape, the February rain, the pewter sky, and then the rain freezing to the roadway, the warmth of the interior of the car with its unbreakable transparent sky dome and doors, until the car spun on the ice in the lane and twirled so that I could take an hour to describe how I threw up my hands in anguish as the baby slipped from her arms and whipped into the face of her mother reflected in the glass door, and she caught the baby back into her arms as the car glided to a stop in its usual place at the end of the drive, and nothing but silence and a few drops of blood at a nostril suggested that we would now be intimate with the immensities of death ("Interim")
— William S. Wilson, Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka
I had been allowed to believe in man's innate goodness for the twenty-two years of my life, and I had hoped to carry the belief with me to my grave.
— Charlotte Rogan, The Lifeboat
In life one of Midnight’s favourite movies had been It’s a Wonderful Life, a touching story where a man called George Bailey is shown how poor the world would have been if he’d never existed, but now the young ghost of Midnight Merlot was sat imagining himself not as the kind hero of his own narrative, but, - but as the anti-George.
— Tom Conrad
Signý knew she would die a thousand deaths upon seeing another woman with him, bearing his children, raising them with him. All the while, Signý, caged in his dungeons, hearing all the painful details of his life with someone else, drowning in her own despair, her love for him turning to hatred. A more tragic life, she could not imagine.
— Farrah Naseem