Top 100 Death Before Quotes
#1. I wanted my photographs to be as powerful as the last thing a person sees or remembers before death.
Joel-Peter Witkin
#2. It was the first genuinely shining day of summer, a time of year which brought Eleanor always to aching memories of her early childhood, when it seemed to be summer all the time; she could not remember a winter before father's death on a cold wet day.
Shirley Jackson
#3. I really want Americans, and all of us, to be less afraid of death, and know that it's a passage, but that - don't go to the funeral before the day of the funeral.
Valerie Harper
#4. All life is a rhythm," she said as I sat up. "All death is a rhythm suspended, a syncopation before life
resumes.
Samuel R. Delany
#5. In 1856, shortly before his death, Lord Ellesmere gave the painting to the new National Portrait Gallery in London as its founding work. As the gallery's first acquisition, it has a certain sentimental prestige, but almost at once its authenticity was doubted.
Bill Bryson
#6. I dropped the blood-coated chair leg and collapsed to my knees. I couldn't swallow. I couldn't breathe. I was splattered with blood. I'd never beaten someone to death before. It had felt good.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#7. But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State.
Thomas Jefferson
#8. This is what I'm going to remember on the day I die," he said. "Right before I close my eyes, I'm going to remember this, the way your hand feels, the heat of your leg against mine, the smell of the skin on the back of your neck, like burnt sugar.
Sarah Black
#9. The world is full of all sorts of brilliant stuff and I haven't found out all about it yet, so I don't want anyone messing it about or endin' it before I've had the chance to find out about it.
-Adam to DEATH & the 4 horsepeople of the Apocalypse
Neil Gaiman
#10. For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#11. Mama said it's probably because of Suzanne, and that you are never the same after a child dies. That made me wonder what she was like before Clover died, because I don't think I really knew my own mother until I had children, and if she was different before, I don't remember.
Nancy E. Turner
#12. You think that upon the score of fore-knowledge and divining I am infinitely inferior to the swans. When they perceive approaching death they sing more merrily than before, because of the joy they have in going to the God they serve.
Socrates
#13. The best way to live above all fear of death is to die every morning before you leave your bedroom.
Charles Spurgeon
#14. Do we fear death or that of arriving at its door before we are ready?
James R. Paddock
#15. How soon will we accept this opportunity to be fully alive before we die? (88)
Stephen Levine
#16. Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#17. Whether we speak of the death to self or a sinking down in humility and meekness before God or faith in the Lamb of God, it all means one thing - a deliverance from self to find our liberty and our blessedness in the living sacrifice of ourselves for all around us. THE END
Andrew Murray
#18. Never let them see your fear ... it's rule number one. And it's not that I'm afraid. No, I'm not.
I don't fear death.
I've already died too many times before.
I'm a cat with nine lives and I'm already on number twelve. I'm living on borrowed time. When death wants to take me, it'll take me.
J.M. Darhower
#19. As if when someone close to us dies, we momentarily trade places with them, in the moment right before. And as we get over it, we're really living their life in reverse, from death to life, from sickness to health.
David Levithan
#20. Every life is different from any that has gone before it, and so is every death.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#21. Paradise is being able to say at that (second before our death) moment: I made some mistakes, but I wasn't a coward. I lived life and did what I had to do.
Paulo Coelho
#22. Sometimes I feel like my whole life before she died was a dream.
Ann Dee Ellis
#23. It is a tragedy that most of us die before we have begun to live.
Erich Fromm
#24. Before there was a death there had been a life, and before that life a death and that there would be a life after this death too. The circles would continue on without end and everyone who was once connected would be connected again.
M.J. Rose
#25. I Might never find that love my heart has always desired, but I know I will succeed before I die.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
#26. As he was shaking off, it came to Jake Chambers that the Pere would never do this again, or grin at him and point his finger; or cross himself before eating. They had killed him. Taken his life. Stopped his breath and pulse. Save for dreams, the Pere was now gone from the story. Jake began to cry.
Stephen King
#27. The mint from your breath, the milk from your breast, the best of your mind, now in its worst state of condition. From the womb to the tomb, as a mild flower, you break your petals upon blossom, and seize death openly. Leaving your fragrance to spin and dance, one last time before being blown away.
Anthony Liccione
#28. It's like being on Death Row in an American jail. You are waiting for the door handle to turn, not knowing whether it's a reprieve or just your final breakfast before being executed.
Howard Wilkinson
#29. At the time, I remained relatively calm before that spectacle of horrors, which is perhaps the most telling indication of just how desensitized I had become. The more I witnessed such atrocities and rubbed shoulders with death, the more I desired to stay alive, no matter the cost.
Kang Chol-Hwan
#30. So wise men avoided Usha. The death of her husband ensured that she became inauspicious. The white sari wrapped itself around her shaking body and the lily of her youth wilted before it had even begun to flower.
Paul Haston
#31. This isn't the first time I've faced death, and I don't intend for it to be the last," I said, repeating the same words he'd told me before fighting in that fateful duel. "I've chosen to live a dangerous life, but it's who I am, and that wouldn't change even if we'd never met.
Jeaniene Frost
#32. I cannot conceive an intention in God that Christ should satisfy his justice for the sin of them that were in hell some thousands of years before, and yet be still resolved to continue their punishment on them to all eternity.
John Owen
#33. Whiteness is the color of death, you know, not black. Wetness is life, the breeder and shaper of life. In the beginning the sun was black. So all light was absorbed before it had a chance to return. And our dreams, then, were empty.
Jim Carroll
#34. Saving You
The darkness takes him over,
the sickness pulls him in;
his eyes - a blown out candle,
I wish to go with him.
Sometimes I see a flicker
a light that shone from them;
I hold him to me tightly,
before he's gone again.
Lang Leav
#35. Death and loss, they plague you. So do memories. Like the Mississippi's incessant slap against the levees, they creep up with deceptive sweetness before grabbing your heart and pulling it under.
Karen White
#36. Some guy once told me that skydiving is like cutting your throat and seeing if you can get to the doctor before you bleed to death.
Brock Yates
#37. The future of our fragile, beautiful planet home is in our hands. As God's family, we are stewards of God's creation. We can be wantonly irresponsible, or we can be caring and compassionate. God says, "I have set before you life and death ... Choose life."
Desmond Tutu
#38. Most of us are tiptoeing through life so we can reach death safely. We should be praying, "If I should wake before I die ... " Life can get away from you.
Tony Campolo
#39. Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.
Kahlil Gibran
#40. I dreamed of death the way previously I'd dreamed of the pain leaving me, and the way before that I'd dreamed of gardens and children and weekends away. Death was my elusive lover, treasured and longed for and jealously guarded, and always distant. Always out of reach.
Elizabeth Haynes
#41. They found him guilty, and brother, if Maine had the death penalty, he would have done the airdance before that spring's crocuses poked their heads out of the dirt.
Stephen King
#42. He that dies before sixty, of a cold or consumption, dies, in reality, by a violent death.
Henry Fielding
#43. You know how people say that young people feel immortal? I don't know what they're talking about. I was planning for how I would deal with my death in good conscience well before I even hit puberty.
Nic Pizzolatto
#44. But I account the use that a man should seek of the publishing of his own writings before his death, to be but an untimely anticipation of that which is proper to follow a man, and not to go along with him.
Francis Bacon
#45. you smile to think how lovely it is to have at least danced like a bird before your death.
Auburn McCanta
#46. Did not we vow that we would neither of us be either before or after the other even in travelling the last journey of life? And can you find it in your heart to leave me now?
Murasaki Shikibu
#47. I see before me the Gladiator lie: / He leans upon his hand - his manly brow / Consents to death, but conquers agony.
George Gordon Byron
#48. Would that we could choose the last image we see before death closes our eyes forever to this world.
Nick Hirst
#49. Feel no fear before the multitude of men, do not run in panic,
but let each man bear his shield straight toward the fore-fighters,
regarding his own life as hateful and holding the dark spirits of death as dear as the radiance of the sun.
Tyrtaeus
#50. [The banshee (from ban [bean], a woman, and shee [sidhe], a fairy) is an attendant fairy that follows the old families, and none but them, and wails before a death.
W.B.Yeats
#51. Death has to be waiting at the end of the ride before you truly see the earth, and feel your heart, and love the world.
Jean Anouilh
#52. Well, as to that, all I'll say is, you can't take out a fellow's heart before he's ready to give it up.
Louis Bayard
#53. Everything that happens before Death is what counts.
Ray Bradbury
#54. God may thunder His commands from Mount Sinai and men may fear, yet remain at heart exactly as they were before. But let a man once see his God down in the arena as a Man-suffering, tempted, sweating, and agonized, finally dying a criminal's death-and he is a hard man indeed who is untouched.
John Bertram Phillips
#55. If I could mimic the dynamic of any Shakespearean marriage, I'd choose to mimic the Macbeths - before the murder, ruthless ambition, and torturous descents into madness and death, that is.
Jillian Keenan
#56. When you suffer a loss, there is before the death and after the death - those become your two existences and your two realities.
Sophia Bush
#57. My death and life, My bane and antidote, are both before me.
Joseph Addison
#58. Death scared me because I feared nothingness. If I had been nothing before I was born, then I could imagine that I would be nothing once I died.
Rachel Reiland
#59. As long as you don't make waves, ripples, life seems easy. But that's condemning yourself to impotence and death before you are dead.
Jeanne Moreau
#60. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip.
Roger Ebert
#61. Every man must be made to realize that further retreat is impossible. He must realize with his mind and heart that this is a matter of life and death of the Soviet state, of the life and death of the people of our country ... the Nazi troops must be stopped now, before it is too late.
Leonid Brezhnev
#62. The greatest distance in this World is not that between living and death, it is when I am just before you, and you don't know that I Love You.
Rabindranath Tagore
#63. Plenty of people detested Michael Jackson before his death wiped away the world's collective memory. Timberlake was originally dismissed as just another boy-bander. Legions have joined in a 'Hate Anne Hathaway' movement. Elvis, the Rolling Stones, Kristen Bell, even Mozart had haters.
Kurt Eichenwald
#64. Even on especially hard days, I began to notice him everywhere, setting a table before me in the presence of my enemies, pursuing me with his love. Both the child and the cynic walk through the valley of the shadow of death. The cynic focuses on the darkness; the child focuses on the Shepherd.
Paul Miller
#65. Before the battle they had been discussing whether there might be life after death, and Windham and Rochester had made a pact that if there was, the first to die would come back and tell the other. But, said Rochester, he [Windham] never did.
Jenny Uglow
#66. Go mortals, sweat, pant, toil, range the lands and seas to pile up riches you cannot keep; glory that will not last. The life we lead is a sleep; whatever we do, dreams. Only death breaks the sleep and wakes us from dreaming. I wish I could have woken before this.
Francesco Petrarca
#67. Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
("Byzantium")
W.B.Yeats
#68. It was another country. It was a country for the young, a country where you died before you got old.
Maggie Stiefvater
#69. He'd never sat vigil for someone before - didn't know what he was supposed to do other than wait. And lust for the man sitting by his side. As if Death weren't enough to fight off, the world had to go and throw Desire into the fray as well.
Rhys Ford
#70. Do what is right and what is good.
Bryeison to Alasdair before going to his death on the battlefield.
Michelle Franklin
#71. Ere the dolphin dies
Its hues are brightest. Like an infant's breath
Are tropic winds before the voice of death.
Fitz-Greene Halleck
#72. I've never feared death before. I've always been willing to die. Sometimes I even welcomed it, wishing for this all to be over and finally find peace in an endless sleep. But when I look at you, I see possibility, and I start to do what I know better than to do - I wonder
Emalynne Wilder
#73. The property is cursed. Death dwells here. These rivers run with the blood of those who came before you. Life may not trespass, and when it tries, it will surely be snuffed out.
Denise Daisy
#74. And I would like current or future politicians to make sure every avenue of diplomacy, and what you have, are exhausted before sending young men and women off to death and serious injury.
Tomas Young
#75. Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales was expected to clock in at anywhere between 100 and 120 chapters. Unfortunately, the dude only managed to finish 24 tales before he suffered an insurmountable and permanent state of writer's block commonly known as death.
Jacopo Della Quercia
#76. Leonard asks me if there's anything I need to know before he dies, I think about it for a minute, turn to him, say what's the meaning of life, Leonard? He laughs, says that's an easy one, my son, it's whatever you want it to be.
James Frey
#77. The moment before I jump is filled with anxiety and what-ifs. But then as soon as I enter the air, I'm filled with this calmness and that's the main attraction to it. That's why I do these death-consequence pursuits or arts.
Dean Potter
#78. Now I know that here is something higher than heaven and deeper than ocean and stranger than life and death and time. I know now what I did not know before.
Kahlil Gibran
#79. As she cried, I could feel growing there, as had once before, a presence between us: the tiny perfect form of Sherry nestled between her parents' bodies. Our bodies were shaped by her absence, by the almost unbearable weight of her loss.
Robert J. Wiersema
#80. All those before us have gone into the darkness without assurance of logic or fact or persuasive theory, with only a slender thread of hope or all too shakable convention of faith. And they have been able to sustain that slim hope in the face of darkness, then so must I.
Dan Simmons
#81. We have seen death before, Marnie and I, a mountain of ice melting over time, drops of water freezing at your core reminding you every day of that which has vanished, but the despair we know today is a sadness sailing sorrow through every bone and knuckle.
Lisa O'Donnell
#82. In my despair I remember
that there is life after death;
there is life after death
and I have no problem.
But I ask:
Oh my God,
is there life before death?
Mourid Barghouti
#83. secular people don't believe in life after death, but rather, they believe in life before death.
Phil Zuckerman
#84. I do not fear death. I see what has gone before, through eyes that are not of this body. When I dream, my visions are of days yet to be.
Cathy M. Donnelly
#86. In fact, death seems to have been a rather late invention in evolution. One can go a long way in evolution before encountering an authentic corpse.
George Wald
#87. Earth should suspect a man who has no tears of compassion and eject into the outer space until he learns humility. Outer space and death might be of the same origin, where one chances upon egolessness just before lifelessness. Earth only asks for egolessness.
Adam Kovacevic
#88. I gaze at his pale skin as this energy hits me. My jaw is clamped tight as my eyes squeeze out the pain. I've felt this before. It's like he's telling me to let him go.
LeeAnn Whitaker
#89. Before death overpowers us, we have great things to accomplish by performing right actions.
Mata Amritanandamayi
#90. It occurs to me that there is so much I never knew about him
his past, his role in the resistance, what his life was like in the Wilds, before he came to Portland, and I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.
Lauren Oliver
#91. The Japanese had a very strong belief in Bushido, death before dishonour. They were fighting for their country; they were the aggressors in World War II.
Steven Spielberg
#92. All beings tremble before violence. All love life. All fear death. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?
Gautama Buddha
#93. Is there life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup,
We hug our little destiny again.
Seamus Heaney
#94. We go to partake of death. And it is in these moments, before the blades are unsheated, before blood wets the ground and screams fill the air, that the futility descends upon us all. Without our armor, we would all weep.
Steven Erikson
#95. A verse came to mind, one that has comforted Kari before. It was the shortest verse in the Bible: Jesus wept. If he cried over Jerusalem, if he cried over the death of Lazarus, surely he was crying now over the death of her dreams, the death of her marriage.
Karen Kingsbury
#96. He and I ... we share a bond. Not love, exactly. It goes beyond that. He is mine as surely as sun follows moon across the sky. Mine before ever I knew he existed. Mine until death and beyond.
Juliet Marillier
#97. Things are different when you go back to them, they seem to have more power to enter into us more sadly, more deeply, more gently than before, to merge with the death which is slowly, pleasantly, sneakily growing inside us, and which we train ourselves to resist a little less each day.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#98. As Your Life Flashes Before Your Eyes At The Point Of Death, Let's Hope The Ad Breaks Have Been Edited Out
Dean Cavanagh
#99. Before I met Oscar, I was fine. But then I met him, and I knew him, and I loved him, and he died, and after that, in an Oscarless world, I couldn't go back to the way I was before I knew him, because I wasn't the same person anymore. He mutated me.
Charles Baxter
#100. The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die - although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born.
Erich Fromm
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