141 Profound Death Quotes

Exploring the vast and often intimidating subject of death can evoke a range of emotions and reflections. It's an inevitable aspect of life that has inspired philosophers, poets, and thinkers throughout history to ponder its mysteries and significance. In our curated collection of 141 profound death quotes, we delve into insights that offer comfort, provoke thought, and invite contemplation on mortality and the legacy we leave behind. Whether you're seeking solace during a time of loss or a deeper understanding of the human condition, these quotes provide a meaningful perspective on an experience that connects us all.

1. “Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.” - Sigmund Freud

2. “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.” - John Donne

3. “Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,  So do our minutes hasten to their end;  Each changing place with that which goes before,  In sequent toil all forwards do contend.  Nativity, once in the main of light,  Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,  Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,  And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.  Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth  And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,  Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,  And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:    And yet to times in hope, my verse shall stand.    Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.” - William Shakespeare

4. “A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they've all let him down.” - Nick Hornby

5. “May she wake in torment!" he cried, with frightful vehemence, stamping his foot, and groaning in a sudden paroxysm of ungovernable passion. "Why, she's a liar to the end! Where is she? Not there—not in heaven—not perished—where? Oh! you said you cared nothing for my sufferings! And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—May she wake in torment!" he cried, with frightful vehemence, stamping his foot, and groaning in a sudden paroxysm of ungovernable passion. "Why, she's a liar to the end! Where is she? Not there—not in heaven—not perished—where? Oh! you said you cared nothing for my sufferings! And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” - Emily Brontë

6. “I DON'T HOLD WITH CRUELTY TO CATS.” - Terry Pratchett

7. “There is no remedy for death—or birth—except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.” - Jim Crace

8. “Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there's a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.” - Helen Keller

9. “I think about death sometimes. Analytically, of course.” - Lynne Truss

10. “It’s not contagious, you know. Death is as natural as life. It’s part of the deal we made.” - Mitch Albom

11. “[Children] just cannot be sad too long, it is not in them, as children mourn in little bits here and there like patchwork in their lives.” - Nancy E. Turner

12. “Death has always had a prominent place in my mind. There are times when I think somebody might kill me.” - Dennis Rodman

13. “Dulce Et Decorum EstBent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of disappointed shells that dropped behind. GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And floundering like a man in fire or lime.-- Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.” - Wilfred Owen

14. “And there stood Basta with his foot already on another dead body, smiling. Why not? He had hit his target, and it was the target he had been aiming for all along: Dustfinger’s heart, his stupid heart. It broke in two as he held Farid in his arms, it simply broke in two, although he had taken such good care of it all these years.” - Cornelia Funke

15. “Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, And yet a third of life is passed in sleep.” - Lord George Gordon Byron

16. “One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?” - Margaret Atwood

17. “It was a year for the ages, like 79, like 1346, to name just a few. Forget the scythe, Goddamn it, I needed a broom or a mop. And I needed a vacation. ” - Markus Zusak

18. “When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.” - Virginia Woolf

19. “Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.” - John Donne

20. “Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It's like an amputation, I feel a limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function. And yet, once it is done... life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid and fuller than before. ” - Anne Morrow Lindbergh

21. “Achieving the state of SABLE is not, as many people who live with these knitters believe, a reason to stop buying yarn, but for the knitter it is an indication to write a will, bequeathing the stash to an appropriate heir.” - Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

22. “The death of dogma is the birth of morality.” - Immanuel Kant

23. “Hope is the greatest madness. What can we expect of a world that we enter with the assurance of seeing our fathers and mothers die? A world where, if two beings love each other and give their lives to each other, both can be sure that one will watch the other perish?” - Alfred de Vigny

24. “I am an old man, and I am dying...Will you remember me, Jacob?"I promise, one day, I will join you, Mr. Gold."Mr. Gold's laughter sounded like a trumpet and brought light to the corners of the room.” - Noah BenShea

25. “I think I fell in love with her, a little bit. Isn't that dumb? But it was like I knew her. Like she was my oldest, dearest friend. The kind of person you can tell anything to, no matter how bad, and they'll still love you, because they know you. I wanted to go with her. I wanted her to notice me. And then she stopped walking. Under the moon, she stopped. And looked at us. She looked at me. Maybe she was trying to tell me something; I don't know. She probably didn't even know I was there. But I'll always love her. All my life.” - Neil Gaiman

26. “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

27. “I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition or to have feared the apparition of a spirit. Darkness had no effect upon my fancy, and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm.” - Mary Shelley

28. “To His Coy MistressHad we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood, And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires and more slow; An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest; An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart. For, lady, you deserve this state, Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust; The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapped power. Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Thorough the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.” - Andrew Marvell

29. “Your father was no longer a young man. he was already in his fifties.'Fifty-six,' Eddie said blankly.Fifty-six,' the old woman repeated. 'His body had been weakened, the ocean had left him vulnerable, pneumonia took hold of him, and in time, he died.'Because of Mickey?' Eddie said.Because of loyalty,' she said.People don’t die because of loyalty.'They don’t?' she smiled. 'Religion? government? Are we not loyal to such things, sometimes to the death?'Eddie shrugged.Better,' she said, 'To be loyal to one another.” - Mitch Albom

30. “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

31. “If words had weight, a single sentence from Death would have anchored a ship.” - Terry Pratchett

32. “Don't fear the gods,Don't worry about death;What is good is easy to get, andWhat is terrible is easy to endure.” - Epicurus

33. “When the dead departed, they took away any falsehoods that they might have allowed us to believe while alive; we who are left behind have to embark on a different life, since the dead are no longer here to help us deceive ourselves.” - Yiyun Li

34. “Whatever happens to your body, your soul will survive, untouched...” - J.K. Rowling

35. “The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation's problems would be another 100 Year War.” - Hunter S. Thompson

36. “How do you tell if something's alive? You check for breathing.” - Markus Zusak

37. “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” - J. Robert Oppenheimer

38. “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.” - Bill Bass

39. “Whatever can die is beautiful — more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world. Do you understand me?” - Peter S. Beagle

40. “You were born a child of light’s wonderful secret— you return to the beauty you have always been.” - Aberjhani

41. “Qui mori didicit servire dedidicit.” - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

42. “Look at your own povertywelcome itcherish itdon't be afraidshare your deathbecause thus you will share your love and your life” - Jean Vanier

43. “The death of these people might have changed the world, Grace, so we might have changed the world, Grace, so we sometimes have to look at death not as something sad, but as something to be glad for. Sometimes death changes our lives in ways we never expect. It can bring with it every emotion; we have to learn to recognize the ones that help us and the ones that hurt us. And we also have to be willing to accept that with everything else, death also brings with it love. That is why we must always be grateful and appreciate it, even if it brings some sadness with it.” - S.L. Naeole

44. “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

45. “If you love someone, you're not supposed to want them to come back. Better a peaceful sleep in the earth than the life of a zombie--not really dead but not really alive, either.” - Cassandra Clare

46. “I just found this world a hard place to be good in,’ says Bunny, then he closes his eyes and, with an expiration of breath, goes still.” - Nick Cave

47. “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

48. “Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.” - Christopher Hitchens

49. “And there they ring the walls, the young, the lithe. The handsome hold the graves they won in Troy; the enemy earth rides over those who conquered.” - Aeschylus

50. “Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.” - Joseph Campbell

51. “Posterity has never made the grave's embrace less cruel. It simply assuages our fear of death, because there is no better cure for out inevitable morality then the illusion of a beautiful eternity. But there is one illusion I still hold dear: that is the thought of an enlightened nation. That is the only future I still dream of.” - Yasmina Khadra

52. “The Epistle of our being is written with letters full of blood drained from the love of God's Word.” - Sorin Cerin

53. “I believed in the faith of faith without acknowledging his quality of being an absolute truth.” - Sorin Cerin

54. “Loneliness is the standard that separates life from death.” - Sorin Cerin

55. “War would end if the dead could return.” - Stanley Baldwin

56. “There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.” - José Saramago

57. “Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.” - Graham Greene

58. “I exist here, now. I'm not much interested in the future. Or, more precisely put, I do not believe in the future. To exaggerate a little, I have no faith that I will still exist tomorrow or the day after. What is more, I absolutely detest retrospection. That dislike is balances only by my desire to make my way back home as quickly as possible.” - Yohji Yamamoto

59. “Then Mount Jerome for the protestants. Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world.” - James Joyce

60. “Death, everyone fears it in one way or another but when I stood in front of it myself, face to face, I felt no fear.” - Atarah L. Poling

61. “Anyway, lots of warrior tribes think that when they die, they go to a heavenly land somewhere," said the toad. "You know, where they can drink and fight and feast forever? So maybe this is theirs.""But this is a real place!""So? That's what they believe. Besides, they're only small. Maybe the universe is a bit crowded and they have to put heavens anywhere there's room? I'm a toad, so you'll appreciate that I'm having to guess a lot here.” - Terry Pratchett

62. “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

63. “Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist- that is, I don't make the mistake of thinking that the... cosmos... gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.” - H. P. Lovecraft

64. “Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are callingFrom glen to glen, and down the mountain sideThe summer's gone, and all the flowers are dying'Tis you, 'tis you must go and I must bide.But come ye back when summer's in the meadowOr when the valley's hushed and white with snow'Tis I'll be here in sunshine or in shadowOh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so.And if you come, when all the flowers are dyingAnd I am dead, as dead I well may beYou'll come and find the place where I am lyingAnd kneel and say an "Ave" there for me.And I shall hear, tho' soft you tread above meAnd all my dreams will warm and sweeter beIf you'll not fail to tell me that you love meI'll simply sleep in peace until you come to me.I'll simply sleep in peace until you come to me.” - Fred E. Weatherly

65. “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

66. “Desire is half of life; indifference is half of death.” - Kahlil Gibran

67. “Smrt je preseljenje iz kuće u kuću. To nije nestanak već drugo rođenje. Kao što prsne ljuska jajeta kad se pile potpuno razvije, tako dođe vrijeme da se rastave duša i tijelo. Smrt je nužnost u neizbježnosti prelaska u drugi svijet, u kome čovjek dostiže svoj puni uspon.” - Meša Selimović

68. “How little we have, I thought, between us and the waiting cold, the mystery, death--a strip of beach, a hill, a few walls of wood or stone, a little fire--and tomorrow's sun, rising and warming us, tomorrow's hope of peace and better weather . . . What if tomorrow vanished in the storm? What if time stood still? And yesterday--if once we lost our way, blundered in the storm--would we find yesterday again ahead of us, where we had thought tomorrow's sun would rise?” - Robert Nathan

69. “She slid open the box, extracted a match, and struck it with a flourish. The flame flared up in the gloom of the unlit room, a tiny golden beacon. For a moment, Oma Kristel held it aloft, then the unthinkable happened. The match slipped out of her fingers and fell straight onto her pink mohair bosom. With a whooomph! like the sounds of a gas furnace firing up, the hairspray with which Oma Kristel had doused herself ignited, obliterating her in a column of flames.” - Helen Grant

70. “We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love” - Madame de Stael

71. “Like many people, I feel like celebrating. Remember this feeling. It is human, and can help us understand when others express bloodlust.” - John Green

72. “Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.” - Ernest Hemingway

73. “[...] death follows us around for a reason. It's because death is our best adviser. There is nothing more powerful than a person who is prepared to live right now, in this instant, fully accepting that this may be their last moment on earth.” - A.C. Ping

74. “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

75. “Cine n-ar dori să moară visând că moare?” - Saşa Pană

76. “Of course what I'm about to share isn't true for me but...Friends, somebody said, are "god's apology for relations." (p. 129)” - Christopher Hitchens

77. “But I was awake, sitting by the window looking down at the trailer and Mr. Zoltan's truck. I could not sleep. That is how it is with folks my age. We take naps during the day, and then we cannot sleep at night. I think that it is because God is getting us ready for the grave. Is that right? Did He ever tell you? ("The Little Stranger")” - Gene Wolfe

78. “Furthermore, as the body suffers the horrors of disease and the pangs of pain, so we see the mind stabbed with anguish, grief and fear. What more natural than that it should likewise have a share in death?” - Lucretius

79. “Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.” - Dan Chaon

80. “No drowning man can know which dropOf water his last breath did stop” - Charles Sedley

81. “I was realizing, for the first time, that everything goes on, turns gray, is ruined in the living. That there is no end to our story until death comes and the body decays...” - Carmen Laforet

82. “The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live.” - Kenzaburō Ōe

83. “They said she killed herself.Everyone was saying It. What started out as a rumor, quietly whispered among small gatherings of polite people, quickly grew into something that was openly discussed in a large gatherings of impolite people. I was so sick of hearing them talk about It. They questioned me. Over and over again, trying to find out If i knew what happened. But my answers didn't change. Yet It never failed-someone else would ask, as if one day my reply would suddenly be different. I didn't know, but i should have...and I've been haunted ever since.” - Jessica Verday

84. “WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEART OF MEN?The Death of Rats looked up from the feast of the potato. SQUEAK, he said.Death waved a hand dismissively. WELL, YES, OBVIOUSLY ME, he said. I JUST WONDERED IF THERE WAS ANYONE ELSE.” - Terry Pratchett

85. “Heavy misfortunes have befallen us, but let us only cling closer to what remains, and transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet live. Our circle will be small, but bound close by the ties of affection and mutual misfortune. And when time shall have softened your despair, new and dear objects of care will be born to replace those of whom we have been so cruelly deprived.” - Mary Shelley

86. “It seems like our town has closed down these days leading up to the funeral. Old people still sit on their porches and talk, but their conversations aren't sprinkled with laughter anymore. Since the new, little kids haven't played outside, as if their moms are afraid someone might snatch them out of their yards and send them off to war.” - Kimberly Willis Holt

87. “Endings are not always bad. Most times they're just beginnings in disguise.” - Kim Harrison

88. “If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.” - C.S. Lewis

89. “Whatever is destroyed, the act of destruction does not vary much. Beauty if vapour from the pit of death.” - J. A. Baker

90. “Visitors offering their condolences, thinking to comfort me, said "Life goes on." What nonsense, I thought, of course it doesn't. It's death that goes on; Ian is dead now and will be dead tomorrow and next year and forever. There's no end to that. But perhaps there will be an end to the sorrow of it.” - Mary Ann Shaffer

91. “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

92. “If anyone stops us, as long as we mumble something pretentious about the glory of death, we should be fine.” - Derek Landy, Death Bringer

93. “Every night death came, slowly, painfully, and every morning Maddox awoke in bed, knowing he'd have to die again later. That was his greatest curse and his eternal punishment.” - Gena Showalter

94. “There was a pretty young woman I used to see pegging out sheets and I worried that she would grow old there and that no one would know how beautiful she was. And maybe she would die without ever having really lived.” - Sebastian Faulks

95. “The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.” - Sylvia Plath

96. “The little things of life, sweet and excellent in their place, must not be the things lived for; the highest must be sought and followed; the life of heaven must be begun here on earth.” - L.M. Montgomery

97. “The back door of every tomb opens on a hilltop.” - George MacDonald

98. “Grief is love turned into an eternal missing” - Rosamund Lupton

99. “It's gonna hurt, now," said Amy. "anything dead coming back to life hurts.” - Toni Morrison

100. “That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life.” - Susan Sontag

101. “Wasn't there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi?” - Lionel Shriver

102. “And some day there will be nothing left of everything that has twisted my life and grieved it and filled me so often with such anguish. Some day, with the last exhaustion, peace will come and the motherly earth will gather me back home. It won't be the end of things, only a way of being born again, a bathing and a slumbering where the old and the withered sink down, where the young and new begin to breathe. Then, with other thoughts, I will walk along streets like these, and listen to streams, and overhear what the sky says in the evening, over and over and over.” - Hermann Hesse

103. “[I]t was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanity concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation.Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. If one member of a pair fainted from hunger in front of an SS officer, the other would prop him up.Survival . . . could only be a social achievement, not an individual accident, wrote Eugene Weinstock, a Belgian resistance fighter and Hungarian-born Jew who was sent to Buchenwald in 1943.Finally the death of one member of a pair often doomed the other. Women who knew Anne Frank in the Bergen-Belsen camp said that neither hunger nor typhus killed the young girl who would become the most famous diarist of the Nazi era. Rather, they said, she lost the will to live after the death of her sister, Margot.” - Blaine Harden

104. “What glitters may not be gold; and even wolves may smile; and fools will be led by promises to their deaths.” - Lauren Oliver

105. “Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,The bridal of the earth and sky;The dew shall weep thy fall tonight,For thou must die.” - George Herbert

106. “some men neverdieand some men never livebut we're all alive tonight.” - Charles Bukowski

107. “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

108. “However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, orcomplain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn'tthis be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who willnever even be offered life in the first place?” - Richard Dawkins

109. “At that moment his soul is fuller of the tomb and him who lies there than of the altar and Him of whom it speaks. Such stages have to be gone through, I believe, by all young and brave souls, who must win their way through hero-worship to the worship of Him who is the King and Lord of heroes.” - Thomas Hughes

110. “She's realized the real problem with stories -- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.” - Neil Gaiman

111. “Death, it seems," Garp wrote, "does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.” - John Irving

112. “Mientras cubría la distancia entre Sant Berger y mi casa, sentí que la negrura de la noche iba tiñendo mi alma. Sin que pudiera explicármelo, un malestar había empezado a roerme desde dentro como una fiera oculta. Me sentía huérfano de la vida.” - Francesc Miralles

113. “Uvijek se nešto radi po prvi put. Po prvi put se rađamo. Samo jedanput i umiremo.” - Jasna Horvat

114. “Movement turns dead dogs into maggots and daisies, and flour butter sugar an egg and a tablespoon of milk into Abernethy biscuits, and spermatozoa and ovaries into fishy little plants growing babyward if we take no care to stop them.” - Alasdair Gray

115. “She took the posters downtown that afternoon. She filled a rolling suitcase with them ... she took a stapler. And a box of staples. And hope. I think of those things. The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape, the hope. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and hop.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

116. “That's how I want to go. Taking my own way out and totally pissing everybody off at the end.” - L.J. Smith

117. “However cozy things seemed, the facts of life were the same. You couldn't escape death: It would get us all in the end.” - Rachel Ward

118. “It had been a war of kingly poisons, in the air, in the memory, in the blood.” - Sebastian Barry

119. “The serious writer was aware of a paradox at the heart of his art: his inner world, the place of the strongest stories, was infinite, but it was also embedded in – if this was possible! – an even more infinite universe of all things to write about. It was like seeing the Grand Canyon from outer space – a huge gorge that looked like a thin trickle, impossible to miss, hard to hit.” - Marcus Speh

120. “Death is life's way of telling you, you've been recalled” - Josh Stern

121. “Cry no tears for us, my friend.” I pry at her fingers, panicking to be released in fear that she may drag me into death with her. She croaks again, “Lend no aches to the dreams of yesterday.” From the corpse of Warren, his greyish gums smack from whatever goo has settled in his mouth, “Allow the tide sweep free the bay.” Then together they sing in zombie choir, “And home the ships sailing send.” - Nathan Reese Maher

122. “What do you do with your anger when the person you're mad at goes off and dies? Bury it? Bury it inside you?” - Elizabeth Chandler

123. “With riddles as black as coals, and answers as invisible as our past, I can only depend upon the crest of the rolling wave I now traversed; a romance worshiped only by the dreamer in us all, a psithurism of trust making its way through the years of our ascension to one day climb above the kaleidoscopic canopy of this mortal coil.” - Dave Matthes

124. “I saw to the south a man walking. He was breaking ground in perfect silence. He wore a harness and pulled a plow. His feet trod his figure's blue shadow, and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. He turned back as if to check the furrow, or as if he heard a call. Again I saw another man on the plain to the north. This man walked slowly with a spade, and turned the green ground under. Then before me in the near distance I saw the earth itself walking, the earth walking dark and aerated as it always does in every season, peeling the light back: The earth was plowing the men under, and the space, and the plow. No one sees us go under. No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. The green fields grow up forgetting. Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present.” - Annie Dillard

125. “If I did not believe in life, if I were to lose faith in the woman I love, if I were to lose faith in the order of things, even if I were to become convinced, on the contrary, that everything is a disorderly, damned, and perhaps devilish chaos, if I were struck even by all the horrors of human disillusionment-still I would want to live, and as long as I have bent to this cup, I will not tear myself from it until I've drunk it all!” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov

126. “Live free or die.” - Lauren Oliver

127. “And with that, Umasi reached down and slung Zyid's lifeless body over his shoulder, stoically bearing the morbid burden in silence. Slowly, solemnly, the two brothers turned as one to face the warm, beckoning glow of the rising sun, together for one last time.” - Isamu Fukui

128. “I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.” - Daniel Keyes

129. “About this time, whether he felt there wasn't sufficient drama in his life or that he was determined not to be outdone by Miss McCabe, he decided that he was dying.” - John McGahern

130. “Man. Being mostly dead is hard on a guy.” - Jim Butcher

131. “The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

132. “The more one loves, the heavier the meaning of death becomes, and the deeper the sense of loss.” - Otsuichi

133. “Do people look the same when they go to heaven, mommy?""I don't know. I don't think so.""Then how do people recognize each other?""I don't know, sweetie. They just feel it. You don't need your eyes to love, right?” - R.J. Palacio

134. “and I told myself -- as I've told myself before -- that the body shuts down then the pain gets too bad, that consciousness is temporary, that this will pass. But just like always, I didn't slip away. I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown.” - John Green

135. “My dad was nothing but a bingo call.” - Ripley Patton

136. “One of life's great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred pound Coke machine, one need worry about little else.” - Stephen King

137. “When shall I be dead and rid Of all the wrong my father did? How long, how long 'till spade and hearse Put to sleep my mother's curse?” - T.H. White

138. “Why bother inflicting enormous pain on yourself when sooner or later Life would certainly get around to doing it for you?” - Jeff Lindsay

139. “You can't tell that the coffin holds the body of a boy.He wasn't even sixteen but his coffin's the same size as a man's would be.It's not just that he was young, but because it was so sudden. No one should die the way he did; that's what the faces here say.I think about him, in there, with all that space, and I want to stop them. I want to open the box and climb in with him. To wrap him up in a duvet. I can't bear the thought of him being cold.And all the time the same question flails around my head, like a hawkmoth round a light-bulb: Is it possible to keep loving somebody when they kill someone you love?” - C.J. Flood

140. “Con los ojos fijos en Napoleón pensaba en la insignificancia de la grandeza, en la insignificancia de la vida cuyo objeto nadie comprendía, en la insignificancia mayor aún de la muerte cuyo sentido permanecía oculto e impenetrable a los humanos” - Leo Tolstoy

141. “But Hazael only said, "I brought you a present."Liraz took the flower, looked at it, and then a Hazael, expressionless. And then she ate it. She chewed the flower and swallowed it."Hmm," said Hazael. "Not the usual response.""Oh, do you give flowers often?""Yes," he said. He probably did. Hazael had a way of enjoying life in spite of the many restrictions they lived under, being soldiers, and worse, being Misbegotten. "I hope it wasn't poisonous," he said lightly.Liraz just shrugged. "There are worse ways to die.” - Laini Taylor