131 Quotes About Facing Death

Facing the inevitability of death is a universally shared experience, touching everyone at some point in their lives. It can evoke a wide array of emotions, from fear and anxiety to reflection and acceptance. In times of such deep introspection, words have the power to provide comfort, insight, and perspective. Through the wisdom of those who have pondered mortality, we often find clarity and solace. This compilation of 131 carefully curated quotes on facing death aims to offer readers a profound sense of understanding and peace. Whether you are seeking to conquer fears, reflect on life's transient beauty, or find words that resonate with your journey, these quotes serve as a guiding light through the shadows of uncertainty.

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. “I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.” - Neil Gaiman

3. “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

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

5. “I don't really care. I shouldn't have to care. I shouldn't have to work this hard. I realize now that dying is easy. Living is hard.” - Gayle Forman

6. “And all the winds go sighing, For sweet things dying” - Christina Georgina Rossetti

7. “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

8. “One hand was behind his back, and he held it out, presenting a bouquet of white and smoky purple lilies. “They’re straight from the underworld, by the way. They are everlasting. They won’t die.” - Jess C. Scott

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “Tell Hugh," she whispered.Tell Hugh your freaking self! He's right here! And you're not going anywhere.” - L.J. Smith

16. “DON'T YOU DARE DIE ON ME, JEZEBEL! DON'T YOU DARE! Or I'll follow you to the next world and KILL you.” - L.J. Smith

17. “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

18. “What happens if a car comes? We die.” - Nicholas Sparks

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

20. “Right, well, he'd been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, 'You seem to be feeling better this morning,' and Isben looked at her and said, 'On the contrary,' and then he died.” - John Green

21. “What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.” - Albert Camus

22. “...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

23. “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

24. “Death straps me to the hospital bed, claws its way onto my chest and sits there.I didn't know it would hurt this much. I didn't know that everything good that's ever happened in my life would be emptied out by it.” - Jenny Downham

25. “Piece by piece, my mother is being stolen from me.” - Dorothy Allison

26. “Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rage at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night.Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” - Dylan Thomas

27. “It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.” - Gail Caldwell

28. “In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.” - Ernest Hemingway

29. “Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime” - Samuel Butler

30. “I glimpsed the man's face with the shine of death on it. They laid him down there in the open. They had brought him there to be close to his death, I understood this also at the same moment. For who would wish to see a companion gasp his last on a jolting cart? We desire to keep the dying and the newly dead close before our eyes so as to give them full meed of pity. Our Lord was brought down to be pitied, on the Cross He was too far away.” - Barry Unsworth

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

32. “Come, my child," I said, trying to lead her away. "Wish good-bye to the poor hare, and come and look for blackberries.""Good-bye, poor hare!" Sylvie obediently repeated, looking over her shoulder at it as we turned away. And then, all in a moment, her self-command gave way. Pulling her hand out of mine, she ran back to where the dead hare was lying, and flung herself down at its side in such an agony of grief as I could hardly have believed possible in so young a child."Oh, my darling, my darling!" she moaned, over and over again. "And God meant your life to be so beautiful!” - Lewis Carroll

33. “The Sunlight on the GardenThe sunlight on the gardenHardens and grows cold,We cannot cage the minuteWithin its nets of gold,When all is toldWe cannot beg for pardon.Our freedom as free lancesAdvances towards its end;The earth compels, upon itSonnets and birds descend;And soon, my friend,We shall have no time for dances.The sky was good for flyingDefying the church bellsAnd every evil ironSiren and what it tells:The earth compels,We are dying, Egypt, dyingAnd not expecting pardon,Hardened in heart anew,But glad to have sat underThunder and rain with you,And grateful tooFor sunlight on the garden.” - Louis MacNeice

34. “Dying's a fearful popular activity these days so we often double 'em up.” - John Marsden

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

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

37. “Here, when I say I never want to be without you,somewhere else I am sayingI never want to be without you again. And when I touch youin each of the places we meet,in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dyingand resurrected.When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life,in each place and forever” - Bob Hicok

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

39. “I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.” - Thomas Nagel

40. “I make a joke of it, but... but I'm afraid of death." He straightened up and turned to look into Joseph's eyes. Joseph saw the fear there and was shocked by the intensity of it. "Are you afraid to die, Joseph?" Joseph considered for a moment, then shook his head. "I'm not afraid to now, but then I'm not dying now. When I come to that moment, I will probably be... what's the right word? Maybe frightened in a way that you're frightened when an experience lies before you you've never had. "No more than that?" "I hope not.” - Gilbert Morris

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

42. “And all the while one spirit uttered this,The other one did weep so, that, for pity,I swooned away as if I had been dying,And fell, even as a dead body falls.” - Dante Alighieri

43. “He's lost his colour very far from here,Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry” - Wilfred Owen

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “Dark circles under my eyes sink deeper and deeper into my skull, in contrast to my pale skin there is an undeniable resemblance to a fresh corpse.” - Dee Remy

49. “…and he wasn't reconciled to dying. Dora told him he was going to a better world. "Mebbe, mebbe," says poor Ben, "but I'm sorter used to the imperfections of this one.” - L.M. Montgomery

50. “Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.” - John Green

51. “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

52. “There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being.” - Aleksandar Hemon

53. “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

54. “I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

55. “.....listening means learning to hear someone's inner world and deepest feelings with far greater attention in order that we don't let our own assumptions get in the way. The dying may speak in images far more akin to dreamland than the world of everyday reality. In order to understand them we have to make adjustments to comprehend a poetic form of expression that is sometimes elusive but actually far more expressive than the world of facts.” - Robert L. Wise

56. “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

57. “Yeah.You got me through” - Alyxandra Harvey

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

59. “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

60. “And sometimes we die to prove that we lived.” - Fábio Moon

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

62. “We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.” - Chuck Klosterman

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

64. “I think it's something like Mr. Peter Sloane and the octogenarians. The other evening Mrs. Sloane was reading a newspaper ans she said to Mr. Sloane 'I see here that another octogenarian has just died. What is an Octogenarian, Peter?' And Mr. Sloane said he didn't know, but they must be very sickly creatures, for you never heard tell of them but they were dying.” - L. M. Montgomery

65. “What we call life...is the combination of the Five Aggregates, a combination of physical and mental energies. These are constantly changing; they do not remain the same for two consecutive moments. Every moment they are born and they die. 'When the Aggregates arise, decay and die, O bhikkhu, every moment you are born, decay, and die.' This, even now during this life time, every moment we are born and die, but we continue. If we can understand that in this life we can continue without a permanent, unchanging substance like Self or Soul, why can't we understand that those forces themselves can continue without a Self or a Soul behind them after the non-functioning of the body?” - Walpola Rahula

66. “It is early, early morning. It's that time when it's still dark but you know the day is coming. Blue is bleeding through black. Stars are dying.” - Markus Zusak

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

68. “Let my heiress have full rights,Live in my house, sing songs that I composed.Yet how slowly my strength ebbs,How the tortured breast craves air.The love of my friends, my enemies' rancorAnd the yellow roses in my bushy garden,And a lover's burning tenderness—all thisI bestow upon you, messenger of dawn.Also the glory for which I was born,For which my star, like some whirlwind, soaredAnd now falls. Look, its fallingProphesies your power, love and inspiration.Preserving my generous bequest,You will live long and worthily.Thus it will be. You see, I am content,Be happy, but remember me.” - Anna Akhmatova

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

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

76. “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

77. “Just as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire, and my lamp is burning low, the horrible contraction will begin in my chest. I shall only have time to reach the bell, and pull it violently, before the sense of suffocation will come. No one will answer my bell. I know why. My two servants are lovers, and will have quarrelled. My housekeeper will have rushed out of the house in a fury, two hours before, hoping that Perry will believe she has gone to drown herself. Perry is alarmed at last, and is gone out after her. The little scullery-maid is asleep on a bench: she never answers the bell; it does not wake her. The sense of suffocation increases: my lamp goes out with a horrible stench: I make a great effort, and snatch at the bell again. I long for life, and there is no help. I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. 0 God, let me stay with the known, and be weary of it. I am content. Agony of pain and suffocation - and all the while the earth, the fields, the pebbly brook at the bottom of the rookery, the fresh scent after the rain, the light of the morning through my chamber window, the warmth of the hearth after the frosty air - will darkness close over them for ever?Darkness-darkness-no pain-nothing but darkness: but I am passing on and on through the darkness: my thought stays in the darkness, but always with a sense of moving onward ... ("The Lifted Veil")” - Mary Ann Evans

78. “I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow men. But we have all a chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven - the living only from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind. While the heart beats, bruise it - it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognition - make haste - oppress it with your ill-considered judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations. The heart will by and by be still - ubi saeoa indignatio ulterius cor lacerate nequit; the eye will cease to entreat; the ear will be deaf; the brain will have ceased from all wants as well as from all work. Then your charitable speeches may find vent; then you may remember and pity the toil and the struggle and the failure; then you may give due honour to the work achieved; then you may find extenuation for errors, and may consent to bury them ("The Lifted Veil")” - Mary Ann Evans

79. “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

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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living, or get busy dying.” - Stephen King

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

85. “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

86. “Maybe you had to be dying to finally get to do what you wanted.I fidgeted around with the puzzle pieces for a while longer, but I wasn't lucky. Nothing seemed to fit without a whole lot of work.Then I had this thought: What if it was enough to realize that you would die someday, that none of this would go on forever? Would that be enough?” - Carol Rifka Brunt

87. “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

88. “When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.” - Ray Bradbury

89. “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

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

91. “Madoka: Won't anyone notice that Mami-san is dead?Homura: Mami Tomoe's only relatives are distant relations. It will be quite some time before anyone files a missing persons report. When one dies on that side of the wards, not even a body is left behind. She'll wind up forever a "missing person"... That is what happens to magical girls in the end.Madoka: ...That's too cruel! Mami-san has been fighting all alone for a long time for everyone's sake! For no one to even notice that she's gone... That's just too lonely a fate...Homura: It is just that kind of contract that gives us the power in the first place. It isn't for anyone else's sake. We fight on for the sake of our own prayer. So for no one to notice... for the world to forget us... That is just something we have to accept.” - Magica Quartet

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

93. “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

94. “There is absolutely no way someone cannot be affected, or cannnot learn vital lessons by being forced to dwell in the margins of a hindering repose as the one loved by so very few."Dying and Loving It” - Milkweed L. Augustine

95. “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

96. “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

97. “Because through the heavy water, I heard the sound of an angel calling my name, calling me to the only heaven I wanted.” - Stephenie Meyer

98. “I wanted to ask my father about his regrets. I wanted to ask him what was the worst thing he'd ever done. His greatest sin. I wanted to ask him if there was any reason why the Catholic Church would consider him for sainthood. I wanted to open up his dictionary and find the definitions for faith, hope, goodness, sadness, tomato, son, mother, husband, virginity, Jesus, wood, sacrifice, pain, foot, wife, thumb, hand, bread, and sex. "Do you believe in God?" I asked my father."God has lots of potential," he said."When you pray," I asked him. "What do you pray about?""That's none of your business," he said. We laughed. We waited for hours for somebody to help us. What is an Indian? I lifted my father and carried him across every border.” - Sherman Alexie The Toughest Indian in the World

99. “I would not be dying if it were not for her. I would have stayed home, as I have always stayed home, and I would have been safe, and I would have done the one thing I have always wanted to do, which is to grow up.” - John Green

100. “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

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

102. “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

103. “I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into my belly. (p. 52)” - Barbara Blatner

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

105. “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

106. “Convinced that we're living the whole time that we're dying.We decide to go out walking the whole time that you're talking.Convinced that you're living whole time that I'm dying.” - Tegan Quin

107. “You can call me Grandpa, if that does it for you.” - R.K. Lilley

108. “It’s not that we have to leave this life one day, it's how many things we have to leave all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, wine, summertime, drunkenness, and the physics of falling leaves, clothing, myrrh, perfumed hair, flirting friends, two strangers' glance; the reflection of the moon, with words like, 'Soon' ... 'do you want me?' ... '...to lie enlaced' ... 'and sleep entwined' thinking ahead, with thoughts behind...?' Ô, Why!Why can’t we leave this life slowly?” - Roman Payne

109. “A good death is a death in solidarity with others. To prepare ourselves for a good death, we must develop or deepen this sense of solidarity.” - Henri Nouwen

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

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

112. “How nice it would be to be dead if only we could know we were dead. That is what I hate, the not being able to turn round in the grave and to say It is over.” - Edward Thomas

113. “This is your war now.' I despised myself for the cheesy sentiment, but what else did I have?'Some war,' he said dismissively. 'What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Graze, with a predetermined winner.” - John Green

114. “Peter Van Houten was the only person I’d ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it’slike to be dying, and (b) not have died.” - John Green

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

116. “It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and -what will perhaps make you wonder more - it takes the whole of life to learn how to die.” - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

117. “It's different when the person you love dies. There's an awful finality to death. But it is final. The end. And there's the funeral, family gatherings, grieving, all of those necessary rituals. And they help, believe me. When the object of your love just disappears, there's no way to deal with the grief and pain.” - Barbara Taylor Bradford

118. “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

119. “Dying’s easy. It’s living that’s hard.” - Sherrilyn Kenyon

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

121. “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

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

123. “Losing you're co-remember meant losing the memory itself.” - John Green

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “GPs are almost the only doctors these days who understand all problems, can see the whole person…spend time with the dying…see things through to the end.” - Jane Wilson-Howarth

129. “I dreamed of dying, long before my dreams have died.” - Anthony Liccione

130. “The train blows, just when I was forgetting. Forgetting that I am here alone. And I wonder if those cars got held up by its passing, just as I have yours.” - Kellie Elmore

131. “I miss your face. That big bright smile. You always had it, in any weather. It's hard for me to find one these days. These cold November days. Except when I think of you.” - Kellie Elmore