c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it–our life–hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.‘But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! If only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India.‘The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.
— Marcel Proust
The kiss. Oh, the kiss. What a perfect, unnerving, luscious kiss. He made me feel unhinged . . . like he could take me apart and put me back together again and again.
— Chelsie Shakespeare, The Pull
When we can't understand the science behind something in this world, we make up mythological entities that we can relate to. We personify the forces of nature that mystify us, using our boundless imaginations to comfort us and make us feel like we have some control over these things that are much bigger than we are.
— Chelsie Shakespeare, The Pull
All death reminds us that nothing is promised, only that life was worth it.
— Shannon L. Alder, 300 Questions to Ask Your Parents Before It's Too Late
Anna: Ash, I don't have anything planned with my Mother... She's dead.Ashley: What?Anna: She died when I was seven. She drowned. It's just my Dad and me. I didn't tell you before because I just wanted a fresh start here, because before I moved, everybody knew about it and... I'm sorry.Ashley: ....... You're like a Disney Princess!
— Jessi Kirby, Moonglass
Death is a bored clerk, with too many orders to fill. There is no reckoning. No profound moment. It creeps up on us from behind, and snatches us away while we shit.
— Joe Abercrombie, The Heroes
People had always amazed him, he began. But they amazed him more since the sickness. For as long as the two of them had been together, he said, Gary’s mother had accepted him as her son’s lover, had given them her blessing. Then, at the funeral, she’d barely acknowledged him. Later, when she drove to the house to retrieve some personal things, she’d hunted through her son’s drawers with plastic bags twist-tied around her wrists.	“…And yet,” he whispered, “The janitor at school--remember him? Mr. Feeney? --he’d openly disapproved of me for nineteen years. One of the nastiest people I knew. Then when the news about me got out, after I resigned, he started showing up at the front door every Sunday with a coffee milkshake. In his church clothes, with his wife waiting out in the car. People have sent me hate mail, condoms, Xeroxed prayers…”	What made him most anxious, he told me, was not the big questions--the mercilessness of fate, the possibility of heaven. He was too exhausted, he said, to wrestle with those. But he’d become impatient with the way people wasted their lives, squandered their chances like paychecks.	I sat on the bed, massaging his temples, pretending that just the right rubbing might draw out the disease. In the mirror I watched us both--Mr. Pucci, frail and wasted, a talking dead man. And myself with the surgical mask over my mouth, to protect him from me.	“The irony,” he said, “… is that now that I’m this blind man, it’s clearer to me than it’s ever been before. What’s the line? ‘Was blind but now I see…’” He stopped and put his lips to the plastic straw. Juice went halfway up the shaft, then back down again. He motioned the drink away. “You accused me of being a saint a while back, pal, but you were wrong. Gary and I were no different. We fought…said terrible things to each other. Spent one whole weekend not speaking to each other because of a messed up phone message… That time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, I’m fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness--That’s what makes me sad. Everyone’s so scared to be happy.”	“I know what you mean,” I said.	His eyes opened wider. For a second he seemed to see me. “No you don’t,” he said. “You mustn’t. He keeps wanting to give you his love, a gift out and out, and you dismiss it. Shrug it off because you’re afraid.”	“I’m not afraid. It’s more like…” I watched myself in the mirror above the sink. The mask was suddenly a gag. I listened.	“I’ll give you what I learned from all this,” he said. “Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.
— Wally Lamb, She's Come Undone
Molecules form and dissolve, returning to the primordial soup of atoms. But consciousness survives the death of the molecules on which it rides. What was once a bundle of energy in a sunbeam turns into a leaf, only to fall and change again into soil. The change of state crosses many boundaries. A sunbeam is invisible, whereas leaves and soil are visible.A leaf is alive and growing,whereas sunbeams aren't.the colors of light, leaf, and soil are different, and so on.But all these transformations exist as constructs of the mind.The actual energy present in the sunbeam experiences no change at all.
— Deepak Chopra, The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want
It’s natural to die. The fact that we make such a big hullabaloo over it is all because we don’t see ourselves as part of nature. We think because we’re human we’re something above nature.
— Morrie Schwartz
One of the first signs of the beginnings of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate.
— Franz Kafka
They couldn't keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
The over-weight and out of shape guy who owned the house had apparently decided that having a half-million dollar house meant that he couldn’t afford to hire someone to clean out his gutters. Now he was dead with what looked to me like a broken neck after the ladder had slipped. He’d taken the plunge into his fancy landscaping—complete with rock garden. But hey, his fucking gutters were clean.
— Diana Rowland, My Life as a White Trash Zombie
Losing someone you love is harder. One minute they're there, the next they're gone. There were times I wished they would rise up from the dead.
— Denise Grover Swank, Chosen
You have tasted of death now,” said the old man. “Is it good?” “It is good,” said Mossy. “It is better than life.”“No,” said the old man: “it is only more life.
— George MacDonald, The Golden Key
Yes, I lay in my grave. But if you lie in a grave long enough, you get accustomed to it and you don't want to part from it. He had given me a pill of cyanide, He and his wife and their son also carried such pills. We all lived with death, and I want you to know that one can fall in love with death. Whoever has loved death cannot love anything else any more. When the liberation came and they told me to leave, I didn't want to go. I clung to the threshold like an ox being dragged to the slaughter. ("Hanka")
— Isaac Bashevis Singer, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now
And this evening when I close my eyes against the darkness and think about her, I'll imagine iridescent wings fluttering, if only for a moment, against cloudless blue skies.
— Nancy Stephan, The Truth About Butterflies: A Memoir
If I lie down on my bed I must be here,But if I lie down in my grave I may be elsewhere.
— Stevie Smith, Selected Poems
What is birthday, but a celebration of death.
— Aphole
Death will be a great relief. No more interviews.
— Katharine Hepburn
Some historians subsequently said that the twentieth century actually started in 1914, when war broke out, because it was first war in history in which so many countries took part, in which so many people died and in which airships and airplanes flew and bombarded the rear and towns and civilians, and submarines sunk ships and artillery could lob shells ten or twelve kilometers. And the Germans invented gas and the English invented tanks and scientists discovered isotopes and general theory of relativity, according to which nothing was metaphysical, but relative.And when Senegalese fusiliers first saw an airplane they thought it was a tame bird and one of the Senegalese soldiers cut a lump of flesh from a dead horse and threw it as far as he could in order to lure it away. And airships and airplanes flew through the sky and the horses were terribly frightened. And writers and poets endeavored to find new ways of expressing it best and in 1916 they invented Dadaism because everything seemed crazy to them. And in Russia they invented a revolution. And the soldiers wore around their neck or wrist a tag with their name and the number of their regiment to indicate who was who, and where to send a telegram of condolences, but if the explosion tore off their head or arm and the tag was lost, the military command would announce that they were unknown soldiers, and in most capital cities they instituted an eternal flame lest they be forgotten, because fire preserves the memory of something long past. And the fallen French measured 2,681 kilometers, the fallen English 1,547 kilometers, and the fallen Germans, 3,010 kilometers, taking the average legth of a corpse as 172 centimeters. And a total of 15, 508 kilometers of soldiers fell worldwide. And in 1918 an influenza known as Spanish Flu spread throughout the world killing over twenty million people. Pacifists and anti-militarists subsequently said that these had also been victims of the war because the soldiers and civilian populations lived in poor conditions of hygiene, but epidemiologists said that the disease killed more people in countries where there was no war, such as Oceania, India or the United States, and the Anarchists said that it was a good thing because the world was corrupt and heading for destruction.
— Patrik Ouředník, Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century
Yet for quixotic reasons--namely, that I enjoyed writing obits--I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city's dead. For even less money. It was a strange and inexplicable career move.
— Avi Steinberg, Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian
You may remember that on earth—though of course we never confessed it—the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.
— George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
Walking thru this graveyard, I realize times were never really hard. We live, we love, we let it go. The world ain't changed me at all.
— Kevin Dalton
How could a person have and do all these stupid things--clip coupons and double lock the front door--and then one day just cease to exist?
— J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement
Love is not love that wounded bleeds And bleeding sullies slow. Come death within my hands and I Unto my love will go.
— Stevie Smith, Selected Poems
A dead Christ I must do everything for
—  a living Christ does everything for me.
I'm not afraid of being dead. I'm just afraid of what you might have to go through to get there.
— Pamela Bone
But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man’s best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.
— Mark Twain
To his way of thinking, the only thing more natural than death was sex.
— Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot
Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn't seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
Believe it or not each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die
— Tom Schulman
The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
When God issues a call to us, it is always a holy call. The vocation of dying is a sacred vocation. To understand that is one of the most important lessons a Christian can ever learn. When the summons comes, we can respond in many ways. We can become angry, bitter or terrified. But if we see it as a call from God and not a threat from Satan, we are far more prepared to cope with its difficulties.
— R.C. Sproul, Surprised by Suffering
Ever peaceful be you slumberThough your days were few in numberOn this earth-spite took its toll-Yet shall heaven have your soulWith pure love we did regard youFor your loved one did we guard youBut you came not to the groomOnly to a chill dark tomb
— Alexander Pushkin, The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights
And one cried wee, wee, wee, all the way—" Jessica breaking down in a giggle as he reaches for the spot along her sweatered flank he knows she can't bear to be tickled in. She hunches, squirming, out of the way as he rolls past, bouncing off the back of the sofa but making a nice recovery, and by now she's ticklish all over, he can grab an ankle, elbow— But a rocket has suddenly struck. A terrific blast quite close beyond the village: the entire fabric of the air, the time, is changed—the casement window blown inward, rebounding with a wood squeak to slam again as all the house still shudders. Their hearts pound. Eardrums brushed taut by the overpressure ring in pain. The invisible train rushes away close over the rooftop.....
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Please, please, help me grow to be like them, the ones'll soon be here, who never grow old, can't die, that's what they say, can't die, no matter what, or maybe they died a long time ago but Cecy calls, and Mother and Father call, and Grandmere who only whispers, and now they're coming and I'm nothing, not like them who pass through walls and live in trees or live underneath until seventeen-year rains flood them up and out, and the ones who run in packs, let me be the one! If they live forever, why not me?
— Ray Bradbury
So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more.
— Epicurus
Death is alive, they whispered. Death lives inside life, as bones dance within the body. Yesterday is within today. Yesterday never dies.
— Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird's Daughter
Life's only choosing when to die. Life's a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It's a tremendous relief not to have to choose.
— Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed
A complete life may be one ending in so full identification with the non-self that there is no self to die.
— Bernard Berenson
When an animal dies, another of the same species may cling to the body, eat the body, or look bored. Bees expel dead bodies from the hive or, if that is impossible, embalm them in honey. Elephants "say" a ritualistic good-bye, and touch their dead before slowly walking away. Corvids often accept the death of a companion without much fuss, but they at times have “funerals,” where scores of birds lament over the corpse of a deceased crow. But it is a bit odd that people should investigate whether animals “comprehend death,” as if human beings understood what it means to die. Is death a prelude to reincarnation? A portal to Heaven or Hell? Complete extinction? Union with all life? Or something else? All of these views can at times be comforting, yet people usually fear death, quite regardless of what they claim to believe.In the natural world, killing seems a casual affair. Human beings, of course, kill on a massive scale, but most of us can only kill, if at all, by softening the impact of the deed through rituals such as drink or prayer. The strike of a spider, a heron, or a cat is swift and, seemingly, without inhibition or remorse. They pounce with a confidence that could indicate ignorance, indifference, or else profound knowledge. Could this be, perhaps, because animals cannot conceive of killing, since they are not aware of death? Could it be because they understand death well, far better than do human beings?If animals envision the world not in terms of abstract concepts but sensuous images, the soul might appear as a unique scent, a rhythmic motion, or a tone of voice. Death would be the absence of these, though without that absolute finality that we find so severe. Perhaps the heron that snaps a fish thinks his meal lives on, as he one day will, in the form of currents in the pond.
— Boria Sax, The Raven and the Sun: Poems and Stories
To learn to die is to learn to live. Death is the giver of life.
— Michael Foley, The Age Of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard To Be Happy
The dead person is not truly dead until the last person who rememebers them dies.
— Sarah Monette, The Mirador
The scribbled signature black, onto the blinding global white, onto the thick soupy red.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull.
— Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.
— Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
How am I going to tell the kids? How do I tell the man that I love, the man that I swore I’d grow old with that we won’t have that happy ending that he and I have worked so hard for? How do I say goodbye to all of you? How do I let go?
— Nicole Ireland, A Second Chance
You know what love is because you've studied it, not because you've felt it. You never will. You know what love is? It's this insidious thing that infects your eyes and ears, spreads to every inch of skin, the follicles of hair on the skin, the lips, the tongue, a hundred million microscopic organisms crawling on you. They commandeer the hollow of your thorax and your guts, your arms, your legs, your head, and other extremities. You cease to be yourself. You are now a vessel of impressions and thoughts of the person you love, of wishes for her, of dreams of her. You're jealous of the air she breathes because she takes it inside her all day and needs it to live; it becomes her, as you want to. You cast your thoughts of her and you an hour, a day, a week, a year, a hundred years into the future. No thought has the power to push itself as far into the future as the thought of love—not even thoughts of fame, or wealth, or death.
— Matthew Sharpe, Jamestown
Gone, but only until we get there
— Jo Royston, Bury Farm
You, why are you so afraid of war and slaughter? Even if all the rest of us drop and die around you, grappling for the ships, you’d run no risk of death: you lack the heart to last it out in combat—coward!
— Homer, The Iliad
All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.
— David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
The only cure for a real hangover is death.
— Robert Benchley
Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.
— Thomas McGuane
Let him submit to me! Only the god of death is so relentless, Death submits to no one—so mortals hate him most of all the gods. Let him bow down to me! I am the greater king, I am the elder-born, I claim—the greater man.
— Homer, The Iliad
What branch does not have its leaves and which twig will not have its flowers?
— Sorin Cerin, Wisdom Collection: The Book of Wisdom
The universal pervasion of ugliness, hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language...everything. Unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious.
— Wilfred Owen, The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
We’re organisms; we’re conceived, we’re born, we live, we die, and we decay. But as we decay we feed the world of the living: plants and bugs and bacteria.
— William M. Bass, Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales
And yet," said Poirot, "suppose an accident-""Ah, no, my friend-""From your point of view it would be regrettable, I agree. But nevertheless let us just for one moment suppose it. Then, perhaps, all these here are linked together - by death.
— Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express
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
— Philip Roth, American Pastoral
The only advantage of knowledge is that it can justify suffering.
— Sorin Cerin, Wisdom Collection: The Book of Wisdom
Never trust a man who teaches about death but yet had no real experience at all about it.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
Whilst the wolflets bayed, A grave was made, And then with the strokes of a silver spade, It was filled to make a mound. And for two cold days and three long nights, The father tended that holy plot; And stayed by where his wife was laid, In the grave within the ground.
— Roman Payne, Cities & Countries
For two days I went about my business. I travelled the globe as always, handing souls to the conveyor belt of eternity.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.
— Roland Barthes
One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too old.
— George Orwell, Decline Of The English Murder and Other Essays
Because beauty consits of it's own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their movement and their death.
— Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
They understand death, they stand there in the church under the skies that have a beginningless past and go into the never-ending future, waiting themselves for death, at the foot of the dead, in a holy temple. - I get a vision of myself and the two little boys hung up in a great endless universe with nothing overhead and nothing under bbut the Infinite Nothingness, the Enormousness of it, the dead without number in all directions of existence whether inward into the atom-worlds of your own body or outward to the universe which may only be one atom in an infinity of atom-worlds and each atom-world only a figure of speech - inward, outward, up and down, nothing but emptiness and divine majesty and silence for the two little boys and me.
— Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler
Who can be worried without the light of a memory?
— Sorin Cerin, Wisdom Collection: The Book of Wisdom
Lieb Liebchen, leg ‘s Händchen aufs Herze mein; -Ach, hörst du, wie’s pochet im Kämmerlein,Da hauset ein Zimmermann schlimm und arg,Der zimmert mir einen Totensarg.Es hämmert und klopfet bei Tag und bei Nacht;Es hat mich schon längst um den Schlaf gebracht.Ach! sputet Euch, Meister Zimmermann,Damit ich balde schlafen kann.
— Heinrich Heine, Das Buch der Lieder
It was not right, thought Han Fei-tzu, for his wife to die before him: her ancestor-of-the-heart had outlived her husband. Besides, wives should live longer than husbands. Women were more complete inside themselves. They were also better at living in their children. They were never as solitary as a man alone.
— Orson Scott Card, Xenocide
That kind of imagination is why we're not dead.
— Rebecca McKinsey, Anterria
We are born and then we die. And in between lies only this strange darkness that we can’t break.
— Cristian Mihai, La Tiers Du Cylindre
Does anyone else day dream about what it would be like if specific age groups just dropped dead all across the world?
— Christy Leigh Stewart
In the moment before I crossed over, I knew that the priests and magicians of Egypt were fools and charlatans for promising to prolong the beauties of life beyond the world we are give. Death is no enemy, but the foundation of gratitude, sympathy, and art. All of life's pleasures, only love owes no debt to death.
— Anita Diamant
Life is just one long day separated into sections by sleep. Life never stops happening until you are dead. So whatever happens-love, grief, hate, shame- never disappears. It just gets easier to live with. It just scabs over, waiting for something else significant to happen.
— Sunshine O'Donnell, Open Me
I'll fall.''You wont fall.''I'll fall. I'll fall and I'll die.'As I said it, I could see it happening. The foot stepping on air, pulling the rest of my body with it, tree limbs breaking as I plummeted down. 'No,' he said, his voice assured, 'You'd never do that to me.
— Kamila Shamsie, Kartography
I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Galápagos
And will 'a not come again? And will 'a not come again? No, no, he is dead, Go to thy death bed: He will never come again.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
He held her and rocked her, believing, rightly or wrongly, that Ellie wept for the very intractability of death, its imperviousness to argument or to a little girl’s tears; that she wept over its cruel unpredictability; and that she wept because of the human being’s wonderful, deadly ability to translate symbols into conclusions that were either fine and noble or blackly terrifying. If all those animals had died and been buried, then Church could die	(any time!)	and be buried; and if that could happen to Church, it could happen to her mother, her father, her baby brother. To herself. Death was a vague idea; the Pet Sematary was real. In the texture of those rude markers were truths which even a child’s hands could feel.
— Stephen King, Pet Sematary
To enter into the realm of contemplation, one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience as joy, as being. [Every form of intuition and experience] die to be born again on a higher level of life.
— Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
One mile farther and I come to a second grave beside the road, nameless like the other, marked only with the dull blue-black stones of the badlands. I do not pause this time. The more often you stop the more difficult it is to continue. Stop too long and they cover you with rocks.
— Edward Abbey, Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside
I am afraid of reduction. After a lifetime's independence- yes, selfish independence- I am terrified of being reduced to childhood once more, to helplessness, to seas of confusion from which the cruel lucid intervals poke up like rock shoals. I don't want to sit in my chair and be fed, much less do I want to be handed over to medical professionals.
— Rosie Thomas, Iris & Ruby
COSMIC DANCER""I was dancing when I was twelveI was dancing when I was aaahI danced myself right out the wombIs it strange to dance so soonI danced myself right out the wombI was dancing when I was eightIs it strange to dance so lateI danced myself into the tombIs it strange to dance so soonI danced myself into the tombIs it wrong to understandThe fear that dwells inside a manWhat's it like to be a loonI liken it to a balloonI danced myself out of the wombIs it strange to dance to soonI danced myself into the tombBut then again once moreI danced myself out of the wombIs it strange to dance so soonI danced myself out of the womb.
— Marc Bolan, Marc Bolan Lyric Book
In ten years time I’ll be… (dead) sixty.
— Neil Gaiman, Signal to Noise
The moon had risen behind him, the color of a shark's underbelly. It lit the ruined walls, and the skin of his arms and hands, with its sickly light, making him long for a mirror in which to study his face. Surely he'd be able to see the bones beneath the meat; the skull gleaming the way his teeth gleamed when he smiled. After all, wasn't that what a smile said? Hello, world, this is the way I'll look when the wet parts are rotted.
— Clive Barker, The Great and Secret Show
Till her appointed course be run;Till on the darkness faint her breathFlown to the silent void, and DeathSit crowned upon the ashen sun.(“The Testimony of the Suns”)
— George Sterling, The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror
Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.
— William Goodman
So, sweeting, why were you threatening to throw Tate out of the house? What did he say?”Leather brushed her chin as he tipped it up. Serious dark eyes met hers. “What did he say?”She glanced around; surely the footmen were too far away to hear. “He wanted to join us in our bed.”“I’ll run him through.”“No! Perhaps he only said it to goad you into a duel. Perhaps it was intended as a way to kill you.”“It was an insult to you, love. That can’t be ignored.”“And so you rush inexorably toward death. I don’t care if he stands on a Drury Lane stage and calls me a courtesan, I won’t have you risking your life.
— Sharon Page, Black Silk
It's not the dead even. They're gone. Nothing you can do about that. It's what's left behind - the echo. These woods you're walking through. There are some old timers who think a sound echoes here forever. Makes sense when you think about it. That Billingham kid. I'm sure he screamed. He screams, it echoes, just bounces back and forth, the sound getting smaller and smaller, but never entirely disappearing. Like a part of his is still calling out, even now.
— Harlan Coben, The Woods
Death, with its ancestral weight of terrors, is merely the abandonment of an unserviceable shell at the time the spiritis reintegrated into the unified energy of the cosmos. The end of life, like birth, is a stagein a voyage, and deserves the compassion we accord to its beginnings. There is absolutely no virtue in prolonging the heartbeat and tremors of a body beyond its natural span...
— Isabel Allende
Why is edamame always ready to expire? It´s so urgent for a vegetable. Edamame. It sounds like an assisted form of suicide. Is there an advertising concept in this?
— Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce
The desire of death will not always lead you to death but the fear of death will.
— Santosh Kalwar
All primitive people are frightened of owls,' said Harley. 'The villagers here are scared to death of the gufo. Birds of ill omen. If they see one, they think they'll die. But they never do. See one, I mean, of course,' he added with a laugh.
— Francis Brett Young, Cold Harbour
Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.
— Don DeLillo
This showed once again that everyone had something different to lose in this battle. Some were concerned for their lives, and some for those they cared most about: rays, sea horses, even the chickens that ran free in the streets of the city because they couldn't all be caught in time.
— Kai Meyer, Pirate Wars
Some of us hover when we weep for the other who wasdying since the day they were born.
— Lisa Loeb
Dr. Beall gave him the first shot, followed closely by the second.He said, "I'll check for a heartbeat."I said, "You don't need to. I can see it in his eyes."Dewey was gone.
— Vicki Myron, Dewey the Library Cat: A True Story
We're so old that the winds of age echo along our ribs and pick at our eye sockets. We could be gone tomorrow. A chill, say, or a little slip on the cliff side. I feel as fragile as a dried flower. I rattle a little in the moving air, but I'm only coherent dust-a shape of what once was. My essence is going.
— Sheri S. Tepper, The Revenants
Wherever you look there is so much loss and folly to contemplate.
— Rosie Thomas, Iris & Ruby
Then, already, it had brought to his mind the silence brooding over beds in which he had let men die. There as here it was the same solemn pause, the lull that follows battle; it was the silence of defeat. But the silence now enveloping his dead friend, so dense, so much akin to the nocturnal silence of the streets and of the town set free at last, made Rieux cruelly aware that this defeat was final, the last disastrous battle that ends a war and makes peace itself an ill beyond all remedy. The doctor could not tell if Tarrou had found peace, now that all was over, but for himself he had a feeling that no peace was possible to him henceforth, any more than there can an armistice for a mother bereaved of a son or for a man who buries his friend.
— Albert Camus
The conversation progressed, bumper-car style, to a very heated discussion about death and the survival of the soul. It amazes me that we, as a species, can argue so fervently over something that is, when all is said and done, unknowable and unprovable. Nonetheless, we all arrive at conclusions and cleave to our certainties: that there is nothing but the Void; or that we will find ourselves writing an admissions exam at the Pearly Gates.
— Bill Richardson, Bachelor Brothers' Bed & Breakfast
After I am dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.
— Marcus Porcius Cato
We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and the understanding of them cease first.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Each day death corrodes what we call living, and life ceaselessly swallows our desire for the void.
— Jindřich Štyrský, Emilie přichází ke mně ve snu
…Not that it was unjust; not that the scales were forced out of balance. Where there had been good, it showed as clearly. Kindnesses, accomplishments, all those were present, too.
— Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come
Yes, he is here in thisopen field, in sunlight, amongthe few young trees set outto modify the bare facts--he's here, but onlybecause we are here.When we go, he goes with usto be your hands that neverdo violence, your eyesthat wonder, your livesthat daily praise lifeby living it, by laughter.He is never alone here,never cold in the field of graves.
— Denise Levertov
We read off the ancient Hebrew words, with no idea of what they might mean, and the congregation responds with more words that they don't understand either. We are gathered together on a Saturday morning to speak gibberish to each other, and you would think, in these godless times, that the experience would be empty, but somehow it isn't. The five of us, huddled together shoulder to shoulder over the bima, read the words aloud slowly, and the congregation, these old friends and acquaintances and strangers, all respond, and for reasons I can't begin to articulate, it feels like something is actually happening. It's got nothing to do with God or souls, just the palpable sense of goodwill and support emanating in waves from the pews around us, and I can't help but be moved by it. When we reach the end of the page, and the last "amen" has been said, I'm sorry that' it's over. I could stay up here a while longer. And as we step down to make our way back to the pews, a quick survey of the sadness in my family's wet eyes tells me that I'm not the only one who feels that way. I don't feel any closer to my father than I did before, but for a moment there I was comforted, and that's more than I expected.
— Jonathan Tropper, This is Where I Leave You
The lapse of ages changes all things - time - language - the earth - the bounds of the sea - the stars of the sky, and everything 'about, around, and underneath' man, except man himself, who has always been and always will be, an unlucky rascal. The infinite variety of lives conduct but to death, and the infinity of wishes lead but to disappointment. All the discoveries which have yet been made have multiplied little but existence.
— George Gordon Byron
It is when we are faced with death that we turn most bookish.
— Jules Renard
Glory is the sunshine of the dead
— Honoré de Balzac
They had...finished their lives before their death – which is not always the end of life and often comes long before the end.
— Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques
Everybody was dying, or already dead, or leaving other people, and the year was dying into winter, and the only thing to do was make some noise.
— Marina Endicott, Good to a Fault
That bodies should be lent us, while they can afford us pleasure, assist us in acquiring knowledge, or doing good to our fellow creatures, is a kind and benevolent act of God - when they become unfit for these purposes and afford us pain instead of pleasure-instead of an aid, become an encumbrance and answer none of the intentions for which they were given, it is equally kind and benevolent that a way is provided by which we may get rid of them. Death is that way.
— Benjamin Franklin
As he watches the sun rise, what grieves him is that he failed her. He thinks of the terror she felt. They tell him it was quick, as if that will somehow confine the horror.
— Nancy Horan, Loving Frank
Corpses sour you. They are bad for objectivity.
— Bertolt Brecht
She's had a long life. Now she's going to the Lord." "Frankly it creeps me out a little when you say things like that," Simon said. "It shouldn't. If you don't like 'Lord,' pick another word. She's going home. She's going back to the party. Whatever you like." "I suppose you have some definite ideas about an afterlife." "Sure. We get reabsorbed into the earthly and celestial mechanism." "No heaven?" "That's heaven." "What about realms of glory? What about walking around in golden slippers?" "We abandon consciousness as if we were waking from a bad dream. We throw it off like clothes that never fit us right. It's an ecstatic release we're physically unable to apprehend while we're in our bodies. Orgasm is our best hint, but it's crude and minor by comparison.
— Michael Cunningham, Specimen Days
Auntie Phyl's last months in the care home were extra pieces. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate enough to die swiftly and suddenly, in full possession of our faculties and our fate, but more and more of us will be condemned to linger, at the mercy of anxious or indifferent relatives, careless strangers, unwanted medical interventions, increasing debility, incontinence, memory loss. We live too long, but, like the sibyl hanging in her basket in the cave at Cumae, we find it hard to die.
— Margaret Drabble, The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws
A dead dog is more quiet than a house on the steppes, a chair in a empty room.
— Per Petterson, Jeg forbanner tidens elv
Erik, Erik! I saved your life! Remember? You were scentenced to death! But for me you would be dead by now. 
— Gaston Leroux
I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death.
— William Saroyan
The man now retrieved a linen cloth and stuffed it deep into Katherine’s mouth. “Death,” hewhispered to her, “should be a quiet thing.
— Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol
The Angel of Death is the invisible Angel of Life. 
— Henry Mills Alden
But one wants the idea of Death, you know, as something large and unknowable, something that allows a person to stretch himself out. Especially one wants it if one is tired. Or perhaps what one wants is simply a release from sensation, from all consciousness for ever....
— Stevie Smith
Death always knew how to connect vice with misfortune.
— Jindřich Štyrský, Emilie přichází ke mně ve snu
While he was waiting, leaning on the counter at a coffee place, he remembered the dream he'd had the night before about Antonio Jones, who had been dead for several years now. As before, he asked himself what Jones could have died of, and the one answer that occurred to him was old age. One day, walking down some street in Brooklyn, Antonio Jones had felt tired, sat down on the sidewalk, and a second later stopped existing.
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
It’s when I have to acknowledge the past and all of those nameless, faceless people I’d assassinated, that I unravel inside.
— Cheyenne McCray, The First Sin
The sum of his life was a unique melody, hauntingly beautiful and powerful.
— Ann Marston, Kingmaker's Sword
Open questions like love, life, death, struggle and sex are our experiences, our opinions are not answers but they still remain mysterious unanswered questions. Let it be Open. 
— Santosh Kalwar
Awareness of mortality exerts a unique power to focus the mind and heart on essentials.
— Columba Stewart, Prayer and Community: The Benedictine Tradition
I wonder if my first breath was as soul-stirring to my mother as her last breath was to me. – From 14 Days: A Mother, A Daughter, A Two-Week Goodbye
— Lisa Goich
When your people are lying dead around you, don't come crying to me...
— Sarah J. Maas, Heir of Fire
It was Mina this whole time, wasn’t it?" I give him the only thing I can: the cold, hard truth. The one that’ll rewrite every memory he has - of him and me, her and me, the two of them, all three of us: "It’ll always be Mina.
— Tess Sharpe, Far From You
We are all dust passing through the air, the difference is, some are flying high in the sky, while others are flying low. But eventually, we all settle on the same ground.
— Anthony Liccione
What are you doing to me?” he asked the crow, tearful. Teaching you how to fly. “I can’t fly!” You’re flying right now. “I’m falling!” Every flight begins with a fall, the crow said.
— George R.R. Martin
I believe that to be the world's greatest livingwriterthere must be somethingterribly wrong with you.I don't even want to be the world's greatestdead writer.just being dead would be fairenough.
— Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
You can’t avoid the inevitability of death. It comes at you one way or another, and takes us all to the same place in the end. To apologize for it is to apologize for the sun shining or the rain falling. It is what it is.
— Catherine Doyle
And I don't believe you dead. How can you be dead if I still feel you? Maybe, like God, you changed into something different that I'll have to speak to in a different way, but you not dead to me Nettie. And never will you be.
— Alice Walker, The Color Purple
I wanted to listen to him, but I did not want to answer now. That strange responsibility we feel towards others when they speak, to offer them the solace of any answer. Poor humans! And anyway he had not asked a question. He was merely floating there in the room, insubstantial, a living man in the midst of life, dying imperceptibly on his feet, like all of us.
— Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
لا شئ يجعل الإنسان مستعد للموت .. مثل العمر الطويل
— أنيس منصور, قالوا
These are the ushers of Martius: before himHe carries noise, and behind him he leaves tears.Death, that dark spirit, in's nervy arm doth lie,Which being advanc'd, declines, and then men die.
— William Shakespeare, Coriolanus
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,And our hearts, though stout and brave,Still, like muffled drums, are beatingFuneral marches to the grave.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Voices of the Night
The world has a very serious problem, my friend' Shiva went on. 'Poor children still die by their millions. Westerners and the global rich -- like me -- live in post-scarcity society, while a billion people struggle to get enough to eat. And we're pushing the planet towards a tipping point, where the corals die and the forests burn and life becomes much, much harder. We have the resources to solve those problems, even now, but politics and economics and nationalism all get in the way. If we could access all those minds, though...
— Ramez Naam, Crux
People have gotten used to living a botched-up life — to be anxious, insecure, hateful, jealous, and in various states of unpleasantness through the day — slowly humanity has begun to see it as normal. None of these things are normal. These are abnormalities. Once you accept them as part of life they become normal because the majority has joined the gang of unpleasantness. They are all saying, "Unpleasantness is normal. Being nasty to each other is normal. Being nasty to myself is normal." Someone trusted that you would be doing good things at least to yourself and said, "Do unto others what you do unto yourself." I am telling you, never do unto others what you are doing to yourself! By being with people, I know what they are doing to themselves is the worst thing. Fortunately, they are not doing such horrible things to others. Only once in a while they are giving a dose to others, but to themselves they are giving it throughout the day.
— Sadhguru, Life and Death in One Breath
He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to depart.
— Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
We often pity the poor, because they have no leisure to mourn their departed relatives, and necessity obliges them to labor through their severest afflictions: but is not active employment the best remedy for overwhelming sorrow--the surest antidote for despair? It may be a rough comforter: it may seem hard to be harassed with the cares of life when we have no relish for its enjoyments; to be goaded to labor when the heart is ready to break, and the vexed spirit implores for rest only to weep in silence: but is not labor better than the rest we covet? and are not those petty, tormenting cares less hurtful than a continual brooding over the great affliction that oppresses us? Besides, we cannot have cares, and anxieties, and toil, without hope--if it be but the hope of fulfilling our joyless task, accomplishing some needful project, or escaping some further annoyance.
— Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey
Brush snapped. The stag shambled forth from the outer darkness. It loomed above Scobie, its fur rank and steaming. Black blood oozed from gashes along its flanks. Beneath a great jagged crown of antlers its eyes were black, its teeth yellow and broken. Scobie fell to his knees, palms raised in supplication. The stag nuzzled his matted hair and its long tongue lapped at the muddy tears and the streaks of drying blood upon the man’s upturned face. Its muzzle unhinged. The teeth closed and there was a sound like a ripe cabbage cracking apart.
— Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All
Bargains, bargains, El-ahrairah," he said. "There is not a day or night but a doe offers her life for her kittens, or some honest captain of Owsla his life for his Chief Rabbit's. Sometimes it is taken, sometimes it is not. But there is no bargain, for here what is is what must be.
— Richard Adams, Watership Down
You had once asked me if I was afraid of death. I said I was afraid of not living. I don’t want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook
Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?
— Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
In crime and enmity they lie Who sin and tell us love can die, Who say to us in slander's breath That love belongs to sin and death.
— John Clare, Poems Chiefly from Manuscript