103 Quotes About Dying

In the tapestry of life, death is an inescapable thread that binds every human experience. While often shadowed by fear and uncertainty, it is a profound aspect of our existence that has inspired countless reflections and musings across time. This collection of 103 quotes about dying offers a unique window into the diverse ways we contemplate the end of life. From philosophical insights to poignant emotions, these quotes serve as a testament to the depth of human understanding and the myriad ways we grapple with mortality. As you explore these words of wisdom, allow yourself to reflect on the impermanence of life and the enduring impact of love and memory.

1. “What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.” - Douglas Adams

2. “if they hadn’t both been pretending, but had had what is called a heart-to-heart talk, that is, simply told each other just what they were thinking and feeling, then they would just have looked into each other’s eyes, and Constantine would only have said: ‘You’re dying, dying, dying!’ – while Nicholas would simply have replied: ‘I know I’m dying, but I’m afraid, afraid, afraid!’ That’s all they would have said if they’d been talking straight from the heart. But it was impossible to live that way, so Levin tried to do what he’d been trying to do all his life without being able to, what a great many people could do so well, as he observed, and without which life was impossible: he tried to say something different from what he thought, and he always felt it came out false, that his brother caught him out and was irritated by it.” - Leo Tolstoy

3. “I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.” - Leonardo da Vinci

4. “I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

5. “I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes--everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor!” - Audre Lorde

6. “Supermarkets this large and clean and modern are a revelation to me. I spent my life in small steamy delicatessens with slanted display cabinets full of trays that hold soft wet lumpy matter in pale colours. High enough cabinets so you had to stand on tiptoes to give your order. Shouts, accents. In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere. Men shout as they die to be noticed, remembered for a second or two. To die in an apartment instead of a house can depress the soul, I would imagine, for several lives to come. In a town there are houses, plants in bay windows. People notice dying better. The dead have faces, automobiles. If you don't know a name you know a street name, a dog's name. 'He drove an orange Mazda.' You know a couple of useless things about a person that become major facts of identification and cosmic placement when he dies suddenly, after a short illness, in his own bed, with a comforter and matching pillows, on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, feverish, a little congested in the sinuses and chest, thinking about his dry cleaning.” - Don DeLillo

7. “Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind your gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth's wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death.How would that be? Just how would that be?” - Stephen King

8. “but as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certain fatal cliffside fall—falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else's degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves.” - Philip K. Dick

9. “And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.” - Mark Doty

10. “Any time you are with anyone or think of anyone you must say to yourself: I am dying and this person too is dying, attempting the while to experience the truth of the words you are saying. If every one of you agrees to practice this, bitterness will die out, harmony will arise.” - Anthony de Mello

11. “Haven't you learned anything, not even with the approach of death? Stop thinking all the time that you're in the way, that you're bothering the person next to you. If people don't like it, they can complain. And if they don't have the courage to complain, that's their problem” - Paulo Coelho

12. “It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

13. “Death is not the end death can never be the end. Death is the road. Life is the traveller. The Soul is the Guide” - Sri Chinmoy

14. “May a man live well-, and long-enough, to leave many joyful widows behind him.” - Roman Payne

15. “Nothing, they say is more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than the time of dying” - Thomas Paine

16. “i love walking in the rain because no one knows im dying” - Christopher Myers

17. “How ironic, she thought, as she fell to her certain death, that at that moment she would have given anything to be a giant goose again.” - Michael Buckley

18. “He wanted to die. He prayed for it. Through the roar in his ears, he begged for it.” - V.S. Carnes

19. “...why can't I stop all the moving and look out over the vast arrangements and find by the contours and colors and qualities of light where my father is, not to solve anything but just simply even to see it again one last time, before what, before it ends, before it stops. But it doesn't stop; it simply ends. It is a final pattern scattered without so much as a pause at the end, at the end of what, at the end of this.” - Paul Harding

20. “There are moments when a rope's end, a pole, the branch of the tree, is life itself, and it is a frightful thing to see a living being lose his hold upon it, and fall like a ripe fruit.” - Victor Hugo

21. “That's the good part of dying; when you've nothing to lose, you run any risk you want.” - Ray Bradbury

22. “The best way to die is when you're living.” - Alice Hoffman

23. “live to the fullest or die;and die you will anyway, so start living!” - Christopher S. Hyatt

24. “When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.” - Richard Dawkins

25. “The question of how to spend my life, of what my life is for, is a question posed only to me, and I can no more delegate the responsibility for answering it than I can delegate the task of dying.” - Anthony T. Kronman

26. “The day after Paul Newman was dead, he was twice as dead.” - Maurice Sendak

27. “Writing about the indignities of old age: the daunting stairway to the restaurant restroom, the benefits of a wheelchair in airports and its disadvantages at cocktail parties, giving the user what he described as a child's-eye view of the party and a crotch-level view of the guests.Dying is a matter of slapstick and pratfalls. The aging process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over and runs off laughing. No one should grow old who isn't ready to appear ridiculous.” - John Mortimer

28. “Prate not to me of suicide, Faint heart in battle, not for pride I say Endure, but that such end denied Makes welcomer yet the death that's to be died.” - Stevie Smith

29. “Funerals aren't scheduled.” - Benjamin J. Carey

30. “Silver’s sweet and gold’s our mother, but once you’re dead they’re worth less than that last shit you take as you lie dying.” - George R.R. Martin

31. “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

32. “Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. A legacy is etched into the minds of others and the stories they share about you.” - Shannon Alder

33. “The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.” - Terence McKenna

34. “It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all to soon, the very words "justice," "compassion," "society," "struggle," "evil," would be unheard echoes on an empty air.” - P.D. James

35. “It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.” - Mitch Albom

36. “I breathe in. The water will wash my wounds clean. I breathe out. My mother submerged me in water when I was a baby, to give me to God. It has been a long time since I thought about God, but I think about him now. It is only natural. I am glad, suddenly, that I shot Eric in the foot instead of the head.” - Veronica Roth

37. “You’ve thrown down the gauntlet. You’ve brought my wrath down upon your house. Now, to prove that I exist I must kill you. As the child outlives the father, so must the character bury the author. If you are, in fact, my continuing author, then killing you will end my existence as well. Small loss. Such a life, as your puppet, is not worth living.But… If I destroy you and your dreck script, and I still exist… then my existence will be glorious, for I will become my own master.” - Chuck Palahniuk

38. “Part of this experience involves your being able to say to a person who is dying, "You are loved. You are beautiful. You are like a newborn babe, going into another realm. Release now anyone, and everything, that is a burden to you. Release everything and know that you have lived your life to the fullest. There is no judgment on you. Go in peace, put a smile on your face, and release any judgments you hold. Relax, and allow your life to have meaning as you embark on the next phase of your identity.” - Barbara Marciniak

39. “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

40. “Ian " she said quietly "I'd rather die than go back to you." "Be careful what you ask for you may get what you want.” - Amanda Stephan

41. “Why did it take the threat of dying to truly notice how exquisite a sunrise or sunset could be?” - Suzanne Woods Fisher

42. “A sematary," I say. "A what?" Viola says, looking round at all the square stones marking out their graves. Must be a hundred, maybe two, in orderly rows and well-kept grass. Settler life is hard and it's short and lotsa New World people have lost the battle."It's a place for burying dead folk," I say.Her eyes widen. "A place for doing what?""Don't people die in space?" I ask."Yeah," she says. "But we burn them. We don't put them in holes." She crosses her arms around herself, mouth and forehead frowning, peering around at the graves. "How can this be sanitary?” - Patrick Ness

43. “Everything is about them, not the dying boys and girls in the arena.” - Suzanne Collins

44. “Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.” - Gloria Steinem

45. “She was a dead girl having the worst panic attack shed ever had. Not because she was afraid of dying, but because she knew that she would never live again.” - Tonya Hurley

46. “Living is too hard right now. Dying is easy. Let me die.” - Kristen Cashore

47. “Flowers, cold from the dew,And autumn's approaching breath,I pluck for the warm, luxuriant braids,Which haven't faded yet.In their nights, fragrantly resinous,Entwined with delightful mystery,They will breathe in her springlikeExtraordinary beauty.But in a whirlwind of sound and fire,From her shing head they will flutterAnd fall—and before herThey will die, faintly fragrant still.And, impelled by faithful longing,My obedient gaze will feast upon them—With a reverent hand,Love will gather their rotting remains.” - Anna Akhmatova

48. “when we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.” - Sogyal Rinpoche

49. “Sterven is echter de eenzaamste gebeurtenis van het leven. We worden er niet alleen door van anderen afgescheiden, maar daarnaast stelt het ons ook bloot aan een nog angstaanjagender vorm van eenzaamheid: het is een scheiding van de wereld zelf.” - Irvin D. Yalom

50. “oxygen Everything needs it: bone, muscles, and even, while it calls the earth its home, the soul. So the merciful, noisy machine stands in our house working away in its lung-like voice. I hear it as I kneel before the fire, stirring with a stick of iron, letting the logs lie more loosely. You, in the upstairs room, are in your usual position, leaning on your right shoulder which aches all day. You are breathing patiently; it is a beautiful sound. It is your life, which is so close to my own that I would not know where to drop the knife of separation. And what does this have to do with love, except everything? Now the fire rises and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red roses of flame. Then it settles to quietude, or maybe gratitude, as it feeds as we all do, as we must, upon the invisible gift: our purest, sweet necessity: the air.” - Mary Oliver

51. “Then the voice - which identified itself as the prince of this world, the only being who really knows what happens on Earth - began to show him the people around him on the beach. The wonderful father who was busy packing things up and helping his children put on some warm clothes and who would love to have an affair with his secretary, but was terrified on his wife's response. His wife who would like to work and have her independence, but who was terrified of her husband's response. The children who behave themselves because they were terrified of being punished. The girl who was reading a book all on her own beneath the sunshade, pretending she didn't care, but inside was terrified of spending the rest of her life alone. The boy running around with a tennis racuqet , terrified of having to live up to his parents' expectations. The waiter serving tropical drinks to the rich customers and terrified that he could be sacket at any moment. The young girl who wanted to be a dance, but who was studying law instead because she was terrified of what the neighbours might say. The old man who didn't smoke or drink and said he felt much better for it, when in truth it was the terror of death what whispered in his ears like the wind. The married couple who ran by, splashing through the surf, with a smile on their face but with a terror in their hearts telling them that they would soon be old, boring and useless. The man with the suntan who swept up in his launch in front of everybody and waved and smiled, but was terrified because he could lose all his money from one moment to the next. The hotel owner, watching the whole idyllic scene from his office, trying to keep everyone happy and cheerful, urging his accountants to ever greater vigilance, and terrified because he knew that however honest he was government officials would still find mistakes in his accounts if they wanted to. There was terror in each and every one of the people on that beautiful beach and on that breathtakingly beautiful evening. Terror of being alone, terror of the darkness filling their imaginations with devils, terror of doing anything not in the manuals of good behaviour, terror of God's punishing any mistake, terror of trying and failing, terror of succeeding and having to live with the envy of other people, terror of loving and being rejected, terror of asking for a rise in salary, of accepting an invitation, of going somewhere new, of not being able to speak a foreign language, of not making the right impression, of growing old, of dying, of being pointed out because of one's defects, of not being pointed out because of one's merits, of not being noticed either for one's defects of one's merits.” - Paulo Coelho

52. “I wish I had a memory of that first violent shove, the shock of cold air, the sting of oxygen into new lungs. Everyone should remember being born. It doesn't seem fair that we only remember dying.” - Lauren DeStefano

53. “At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.” - Benjamin J. Carey

54. “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

55. “I know there's no heaven. I know it all turns to nothingness. But I fear there will be some remnant of me left within that void. Left conscious by some random fluke. Something that will scream out for this. That one speck of my soul will still exist and be left trapped and wanting. For you. For the light. For anything.” - Drew Magary

56. “Worry is yet another side effect of dying.” - John Green

57. “LXXIXWhen I die, I want your hands on my eyes.I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands to pass their freshness over me once more.I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you to sniff the sea's aroma that we loved together,to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.I want what I love to continue to live,and you whom I love and sang above everything else.to continue to flourish, full-flowered.So that you can reach everything my love directs you to. So that my shadow can travel along in your hair,so that everything can learn the reason for my song.” - Pablo Neruda

58. “I firmly disbelieve in death. A spirit never dies. Where it wanders when it leaves the flesh, is a cognitive proposition.” - Kellie Elmore

59. “No one can say that death found in me a willing comrade, or that I went easily.” - Cassandra Clare

60. “How mighty you are as death comes upon you and your color fades. Yet from life and lush to bold array, screaming into the night.” - Kellie Elmore

61. “Which do you hate more: breaking your word or dying?""I don't know. I've never done either.” - Gerald Morris

62. “Lew had never seen a dead man before. He just stood there, and looked and looked. Then he went a step closer, and looked some more. 'So that's what it's like!' he murmured inaudibly. Finally Lew reached out slowly and touched him on the face, and cringed as he met the clammy feel of it, pulled his hand back and whipped it down, as though to get something off it. The flesh was still warm and Lew knew suddenly he had no time alibi.He threw something over that face and that got rid of the awful feeling of being watched by something from the other world. After that Lew wasn't afraid to go near him; he just looked like a bundle of old clothes. The dead man was on his side, and Lew fiddled with the knife-hilt, trying to get it out. It was caught fast, so he let it alone after grabbing it with his fingers from a couple of different directions. Next he went through his pockets, thinking he'd be helping to identify him.The man was Luther Kemp, forty-two, and he lived on 79th Street. But none of that was really true any more, Lew thought, mystified; he'd left it all behind. His clothes and his home and his name and his body and the show he'd paid to see were here. But where the hell had he gone to, anyway? Again that weird feeling came over Lew momentarily, but he brushed it aside. It was just that one of the commonest things in life - death - was still strange to him. But after strangeness comes familiarity, after familiarity, contempt. ("Dusk To Dawn")” - Cornell Woolrich

63. “When I came out into the outside room again, I saw her shoe still lying there, where it had come off in the course of our brief wrestle. It looked so pathetic there by itself without an owner, it looked so lonely, it looked so empty. Something made me pick it up arid take it in to her. Like when someone's going away, you help them on with their coat, or their jackboots, or whatever it is they need for going away.I didn't try to put it back on her, I just set it down there beside her close at hand. You're going to need this, I said to her in my mind. You're starting on a long walk. You're going to keep walking from now on, looking for your home. I stopped and wondered for a minute if that was what happened to all of us when we crossed over. Just keep walking, keep on walking, with no ahead and no in-back-of; tramps, vagrants in eternity. With our last hope and horizon - death - already taken away. In the Middle Ages they had lurid colors, a bright red hell, an azure heaven shot with gold stars. They knew where they were, at least. They could tell the difference. We, in the Twentieth, we just have the long walk, the long walk through the wispy backward-stringing mists of eternity, from nowhere to nowhere, never getting there, until you're so tired you almost wish you were alive again. ("Life Is Weird Sometimes" - first chapter of unpublished novel THE LOSER)” - Cornell Woolrich

64. “Its hard to die. Harder to live” - Dan Simmons

65. “You were right to come to see a dying man. It is right that these moments should have witnesses. Everyone has his dream; I would like to live till dawn, but I know I have less than three hours left. It will be night, but no matter. Dying is simple. It does not take daylight. So be it: I will die by starlight” - Victor Hugo

66. “He wore the memory of her embrace like armor, and though he knew it would not save his life, it would be all that was left to him to ease his passage into whatever lay beyond.” - Andrew Levkoff

67. “It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.” - Robert Silverberg

68. “This is how it feels to die: It starts from outside and works its way in.” - Sarah Wylie

69. “What was I was dying for? The sins of the past? The wrongs of the present? Did it even matter?” - Dana Michelle Burnett

70. “Being dead does have its advantages.”-Alastor” - Dana Michelle Burnett

71. “Death loves death, not life. Dying people love to know that others die with them; it is a comfort to learn you are not alone in the kiln, in the grave.” - Ray Bradbury

72. “And he's alone there, with the unconscious pilot lying a little way off for company, and some other guy he's never even seen, only spoken to over the radio.He wants to sleep so badly - dying they call it - and he can't. Something's bothering him to keep him awake. ("Jane Brown's Body")” - Cornell Woolrich

73. “Reading Aloud to My Father I chose the book haphazardfrom the shelf, but with Nabokov's firstsentence I knew it wasn't the thingto read to a dying man:The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began,and common sense tells us that our existenceis but a brief crack of lightbetween two eternities of darkness.The words disturbed both of us immediately,and I stopped. With music it was the same --Chopin's Piano Concerto — he asked meto turn it off. He ceased eating, and dranklittle, while the tumors briskly appropriatedwhat was left of him.But to return to the cradle rocking. I thinkNabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss.That's why babies howl at birth,and why the dying so often reachfor something only they can apprehend.At the end they don't want their handsto be under the covers, and if you should putyour hand on theirs in a tentative gestureof solidarity, they'll pull the hand free;and you must honor that desire,and let them pull it free.” - Jane Kenyon

74. “We Let the Boat DriftI set out for the pond, crossing the ravine where seedling pines start up like sparks between the disused rails of the Boston and Maine.The grass in the field would make a second crop if early autumn rains hadn't washed the goodness out. After the night's hard frost it makes a brittle rustling as I walk.The water is utterly still. Here and therea black twig sticks up. It's five years today, and even now I can't accept what cancer did to him -- not death so much as the annihilation of the whole man, sense by sense, thought by thought, hope by hope.Once we talked about the life to come. I took the Bible from the nightstand and offered John 14: "I go to prepare a place for you.""Fine. Good," he said. "But what about Matthew? 'You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.'" And he wept.My neighbor honks and waves driving by. She counsels troubled students; keeps bees; her goats follow her to the mailbox.Last Sunday afternoon we went canoeing on the pond. Something terrible at school had shaken her. We talked quietly far from shore. The paddlesrested across our laps; glittering dropsfell randomly from their tips. The lightaround us seemed alive. A loon-itinerant-let us get quite close before it dove, coming upafter a long time, and well away from humankind” - Jane Kenyon

75. “It isn't dying I'm afraid of, it isn't that at all; I know what it is to die, I've died already. It is the endless obliteration, the knowledge that there will never be anything else. That's what I can't stand, to try so hard and to end in nothing. You know what I mean, don't you? ... I really loved to write.” - Cornell Woolrich

76. “Welcome to Final Forum. Use this board to communicate with other who are completers. Please note: Participants may not attempt to dissuade or discourage self termination. Disregard for free will informed consent will result in immediate removal from the board. Future access to Through-The-Light will be denied. This board is monitored at all times."That's comforting. I've been to suicide boards before where people get on and say stuff like, "Don't do it. Suicide is not the answer."They don't know the question.Or, "Life's a bitch. Get used to it."Thanks."Suicide is the easy way out."If it's so easy, why am I still here?And my favorite: "God loves you. Life is the most precious gift from God. You will break God's heart if you throw His gift away."God has a heart? That's news to me.People on boards are very, very shallow.The Final Forum has a long list of topic, including: Random Rants, Bullied, Divorce, Disease, So Tired, Hate This Life, Bleak, Bequests, Attempts.Already I like this board. I start with Random Rants.” - Julie Anne Peters

77. “Where have you been?" I asked weakly. A few minutes ago I would have rather died than questioned him. Let him know I care. But I'm too sick to be strong, kick ass Rayne at the moment."Vegas" he says.I raise an eyebrows. "Uh, okay. Win anything?" I can't believe he was off gambling as I lay dying. I mean, I know poker is hot and all, but couldn't he have waited a couple of days for that straight flush?"I got what I went for, if that's what you mean.""What, a lap dance?"He chuckes. "Even sick, you're still funny, Rayne.” - Mari Mancusi

78. “Is it really worth dying for the person you love?”[Maureen] thinks about this for a moment. “That’s not the real question, Oliver. What you should be asking is, Can you live without her?” - Jodi Picoult

79. “Unborn eternity does not die; existence is dying and falls asleep in the eternity beyond existence.” - Dejan Stojanovic

80. “blue-gold sky, fresh cloud, emerald-black mountain, trees on rocky ledges, on the summit, the tiny pin of a telephone tower-all brilliantly clear, in shadow and out. and on and through everything everywhere the sun shines without reservation (p. 97)” - Barbara Blatner

81. “I don't want to be dying. I want to be dead.” - Lisa Cander

82. “We're always on breath away from something--living or dying--, sometimes it just can't be helped.” - Heather Gudenkauf

83. “Her body accepted my brutal seed and took it to swell within, just as the patient earth accepts a falling fruit into its tender soil to cradle and nourish it to grow. Came a time, just springtime last, our infant child pushed through the fragile barrier of her womb. Her legs branched out, just as the wood branches out from these eternal trees around us; but she was not hardy as they. My wife groaned with blood and ceased to breathe. Aye!, a scornful eve that bred the kind of pain only a god can withstand.” - Roman Payne

84. “When we're alive, life consumes us. But when we die, all of the color and the motion is gone so quickly, it's as though it can no longer stand to be wasted on us.” - Lauren DeStefano

85. “Dying is beautiful- even the first time around, at the ripe old age of 20. It’s not easy most of the time, but there is real beauty to be found in knowing that your end is going to catch up with you faster than you had expected, and that you have to get all your loving and laughing and crying done as soon as you can.” - Norma Klein

86. “I have a habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am now leading a posthumous existence.” - John Keats

87. “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

88. “Am I ever angry or frustrated? I only feel angry sometimes when I see waste, when things that we waste are what people need, things that would save them from dying. Frustrated? No, never.” - Mother Teresa

89. “Wars are indeed fought by children, by young people who have little to say in where they are sent to die.” - Jeff Shaara

90. “All who are born are always dying.” - Mitch Albom

91. “It’s what happens when you shoot someone,” Wayne pointed out. “At least, usually someone has the good sense to get dead when you go to all the trouble to shoot them.” - Brandon Sanderson

92. “Life and death lived inside each other. That's what occured to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountains.” - Peter Heller

93. “I was learning that when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.” - Will Schwalbe

94. “You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead.” - zadie smith

95. “And as if he had read her thoughts, the old man murmured, 'What a blessing it is to die in your own bed, under your own roof, with your family surrounding you, full of the knowledge that you have lived as thoroughly as you wanted to.” - Anita Rau Badami

96. “Like they just wanted to enjoy The Gus Waters Show while it was still in town.” - John Green

97. “With a sigh, he grabbed hold of his chair and lifted himself out of it, then wrote on the blackboard: How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? - A.Y.'I'm going to leave that up for the rest of the semester,' he said.'Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I don't want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to understand how people have answered that question and the questions each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.” - John Green

98. “Apparently people commonly died when their loved ones were out of the room. Bathroom break. Quick trip down to the cafeteria for a grilled cheese. It was easier to die if you didn't have family members to worry about at that exact moment.Easier for the one who was dying, maybe.” - Naomi Shihab Nye

99. “Dying is the last thing I will ever do.” - John Barrymore

100. “It is not possible to express the most precious insights, To see all that craves to be seen, To visit even the closest neighbors in the universe, To learn all that needs to be learned, To live without dying, And I am sad about it.But I livedAnd I am happy about that.” - Dejan Stojanovic

101. “I don't feel so sad when somebody dies, Julio, because they fly away to explore the stars and planets. When it's our turn we join them in exploring the universe.” - Gilbert Hernández

102. “God didn’t design your life so you would constantly fall down, but he does hope that you will be brought to your knees.” - Shannon L. Alder

103. “Dying for someone is easy." J.T. murmured now; as if reading my mind."Living for yourself, that's hard.” - Lisa Gardner