Top 100 Memory Of Death Quotes
#1. It could go on for years and years,
And has, for centuries,
For being human holds a special grief
Of privacy within the universe
That yearns and waits to be retouched
By someone who can take away
The memory of death.
Herbert Mason
#2. It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined.
Arundhati Roy
#3. If we lose our memory, we lose ourselves. Forgetting is one of the symptoms of death. Without memory we cease to be human beings.
Ivan Klima
#4. That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we're old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner or later we'll lose everyone we love. We're never the same. But somehow we're all right. We go on.
Dean Koontz
#5. Don't order any black things. Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant: leave grief to the children. Wear violet and purple. Be patient with the poor people who will snivel: they don't know; and they think they will live for ever, which makes death a division instead of a bond.
George Bernard Shaw
#6. The voice was Clary's. He would know it from anywhere. He wondered if his mind was conjuring it up now, a sense memory of what he'd most loved during his life to carry him through the process of death. Simon, you stupid idiot! I'm over here! At the window!
Cassandra Clare
#7. Ut when one human creature dies a whole world of hope and memory and feeling dies with him. To be robbed of the dignity of a natural death is a terrible deprivation.
Robertson Davies
#8. I had no business trying to see you leave, see death arrive, I owe you an apology, an elegy, I owe you the drift of memory, the praise of everything, of saying it was the best decision of my life, to hold you full, hold you empty, & live as the only bond between the two.
Bob Hicok
#9. I know that we live after death and again and again, not in the memory of our children, or as a mulch for trees and flowers, however poetic that may be, but looking passionately and egocentrically out of our eyes.
Brenda Ueland
#10. It was Mina this whole time, wasn't it?"
I give him the only thing I can: the cold, hard truth. The one that'll rewrite every memory he has - of him and me, her and me, the two of them, all three of us: "It'll always be Mina.
Tess Sharpe
#11. I'd rather have my last memory be of his death than suffer knowing that his last memory was of mine.
Kiera Cass
#12. She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.
Graham Greene
#13. And the boy whose hair remained the color of lemons forever.
Markus Zusak
#14. If there is a single theme that dominates all my writings, all my obsessions, it is that of memory-because I fear forgetfulness as much as hatred and death.
Elie Wiesel
#15. Maybe he kept the act going as long as possible, till a faked death were the only way to keep my memory of her pure and clean and something worth loving.
Erin Bowman
#16. The earth doesn't care where death occurs ... It's the artist, by coming in and writing about it or painting it or taking a photograph of it, that makes the earth powerful and creates death's memory. Because the land will not remember by itself, but the artist will.
Sally Mann
#17. Perhaps we are given a mom that we might take into death the memory of a lullaby.
Robert Breault
#18. Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death.
Albert Camus
#19. I'm sorry, I didn't mean--"
"To speak of it?" asked the K'mir. Diane nodded. "You have to, just to bleed off the poison from the memory.
Tamora Pierce
#20. It kind of scares me though, to keep wearing it every day like I do. What happens when I run out of it? Will I forget what she looked like? What it looked like when the sun reflected on her hair? The way her pillow always smelled like her? Will my memory of her run out too?
Keary Taylor
#21. She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory-you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he's all out of kilter.
Ray Bradbury
#22. 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
#23. I wondered if there would ever be a day when I didn't think about Alaska, wondered whether I should hope for a time when she would be a distant memory - recalled only on the anniversary of her death, or maybe a couple of weeks after, remembering only after having forgotten.
John Green
#24. How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.
Cormac McCarthy
#25. Life cannot withstand death, but memory is gaining in its struggle against nothingness.
Tzvetan Todorov
#26. Those from whom we were born have long since departed, and those with whom we grew up exist only in memory. We, too, through the approach of death, become, as it were, trees growing on the sandy bank of a river.
Bhartrhari
#27. Many a man looking death, or simply compromise, in the face has been spared the label coward because his faith was bolstered by the memory of heroes who walked before him.
Doug Phillips
#28. You will take his life but you can't take his memory out of us.
Auliq Ice
#29. ... for overstrong was the command to hold fast to each smallest particle of time, to the smallest particle of every circumstance, and to embody all of them in memory as if they could be preserved in memory through all deaths for all times.
Hermann Broch
#30. There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting. Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until death.
Richard Holmes
#31. Most of the time we settle for half and i like it better, even as i know how wrong he was and his death useless, i tremble for i confess that something peversley pure calls to me from his memory
Arthur Miller
#32. He wondered often how he would ever recognize the first chill, flush, twinge, ache, belch, sneeze, stain, lethargy, vocal slip, loss of balance or lapse of memory that would signal the inevitable beginning of the inevitable end.
Joseph Heller
#33. I ask you, what would you do if you could erase one bad memory and retain all that was beautiful in your life? Would you not move heaven and earth - and get loads of therapy - to have that?
Noorilhuda
#34. Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one's memory. And yet, I can't remember it.
Tom Stoppard
#35. In his bleak mercy, Death forever strips The soul of light and memory, rendering blind Our vision, lest surmounted deeps appal, As when on mountain-heights a glance behind Betrays with knowledge, and the climber slips Down gulfs of fear to some enormous fall.
Clark Ashton Smith
#36. I don't expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever. - Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after death
Isaac Asimov
#37. She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love
nothing, now, but bones.
Kim Edwards
#38. If the idea of death during this period had, as we have seen, cast a gloom over love, the memory of love had for a long time now helped me not to be afraid of death. For I understood that dying was not something new but quite the reverse, that since my childhood I had already died a number of times.
Marcel Proust
#39. Parting and death are both terribly painful. But to keep nursing the memory of a love so great you can't believe you'll ever love again is a useless drain on a woman's energies.
Banana Yoshimoto
#40. So these things happen, deep in our lives. We do not speak of them. We hide them even from ourselves, but they do not leave us.
David Malouf
#41. You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.
J.D. Salinger
#42. 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
#43. The only balm to sorrow is memory; the only salve for the pain of losing someone to death is acknowledging the life that existed before.
Nina Sankovitch
#44. Such an incredible waste of energy, to work your ass off for sixty years, then shrivel up, die, and be nothing more than a memory - if you're lucky enough to leave someone behind who will remember you. There must be more. Don't you think?
Ellen Hopkins
#46. Who can be worried without the light of a memory?
Sorin Cerin
#47. Since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.
David Eagleman
#48. [Beveridge] was a driven man, right to the end; his last words, enunciated clearly from his death bed at the age of eighty-four, showed that the aging social reformer was still haunted by the memory of those sick men on the East London streets. 'I have a thousand things to do,' he said, and died.
T.R. Reid
#49. Most people are not really scared of death. They are merely terrified of being taken to a mortuary and/or being buried or cremated and/or being forgotten.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#50. No one will sing songs in our memory. We are the last of the Free Companies of Khatovar. Our traditions and memories live only in these Annals. We are our own mourners.
Glen Cook
#51. Crow shrugged. "What is death? The loss of a body? The loss of the animating spark? If that's the case, I am dead.
"Or is life the persistence of memory and emotion, volition and desire?" Crow went on, as if in a debate with himself. "If that's the case, I am very much alive.
Cinda Williams Chima
#55. if you'd like, i can show you the trophy case on the way out so you can bask in the achievements of the alumni who are now old enough to be suffering from erectile dysfunction, memory loss, and death.
John Green
#56. How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.
Gustave Flaubert
#57. He felt his heart was going to explode, his body burned while his mind tried to reconstitute the ashes of who he once had been.
Jorge Silva Rodighiero
#58. I would prefer to believe that things possess the power of recall, of recollection. That things are memoirs of the existences that once were theirs, if only we knew how to read them.
Norman Lock
#59. On the mountains of memory by the world's wellsprings, in all man's eyes, where the light of life of him is on all past things, death only dies.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
#60. The flame of the inn is dim tonight,
Too many vacant chairs.
The sun has lost too much of its light,
Too many songs have taken flight,
Too many ghosts on the stairs.
Charon, here's to you as man against man,
I wish I could pick 'em the way you can!
Grantland Rice
#61. Once upon a different time, there was a girl who lived in a kingdom of death. Wolves howled up her arm. A whole pack of them--made of tattoo ink and pain, memory and loss. It was the only thing about her that ever stayed the same.
Ryan Graudin
#62. Reiko had not kept a diary and was now denied the pleasure of assiduously rereading her record of the happiness of the past few months and consigning each page to the fire as she did so.
- Death in Midsummer and Other Stories
Yukio Mishima
#64. The death of those considered expendable to achieve such goals only leaves blood to drown the earth with the memory of corruption and confusion.
Tami Egonu
#65. Time blunts the pain and creates a mist over one's memory - at least in the case of death and sorrow. Other types of pain linger longer.
Melanie Dickerson
#66. Death and his scythe do not come. No sweeping black capes or ethereal escapes. There's no pearly gate, no prisms of colors as his soul slips away. The stillness is cold steel. The silence is empty with no memory to mend it.
Laura Kreitzer
#67. Having a child isn't a deal you strike with life. As I said: a child is a gift. And what remains after a child is gone is the memory of the years it was allowed to live. Not its death
Carsten Jensen
#68. 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
#69. How people die remains in the memory of those who live on
Cicely Saunders
#70. If I should die," said I to myself, "I have left no immortal work behind me - nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.
Dan Simmons
#71. The monument of death will outlast the memory of the dead. The Pyramids do not tell the tale which was confided to them; the living fact commemorates itself.
Henry David Thoreau
#72. With every cell of my being and with every fiber of my memory I oppose the death penalty in all forms. I do not believe any civilized society should be at the service of death. I don't think it's human to become an agent of the angel of death.
Elie Wiesel
#73. I want to know what's wrong with loving someone for life? Even when they're dead? What exactly is wrong with that? Why should I put him away, out of my mind? Like he's out of fashion. Does no one love for ever any more? Is no one built for the long road?
Josephine Hart
#74. People have two deaths: the first at the end of their lives, when they go away, and the second at the end of the memory of their lives, when all who remember them are gone. Then a person quits the world completely.
Raghu Karnad
#75. What made Olive the saddest about the Gardners was that everyone wanted to be enshrined in someone's memory. It was the only way of living on after death, really: in the minds of loved ones. Memories were the only things that made aging bearable, a way of reverting to better, simpler days.
Andrea Lochen
#76. May you hear my feeble voice! It will tell you that here below there is a heart full of the memory of you.
Herculine Barbin
#77. People misunderstood death, they died not of too little life but of too much life, that as the skin withered and the future grew short it was the past that took on flesh, until ultimately the sheer accumulation of experience and memory became too heavy to carry.
Dorothy Gilman
#78. You surround the dead with veneration and memory, you dream of immortality, and in your myths and legends there's always someone being resurrected, conquering death. But were your esteemed late great-grandfather really to suddenly rise from the grave and order a beer, panic would ensue.
Andrzej Sapkowski
#79. The calla lilies are in bloom again. Such a strange flower - suitable to any occasion. I carried them on my wedding day, and now I place them here in memory of something that has died.
Katharine Hepburn
#80. Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.
From an Irish headstone
Richard Puz
#81. With death, all suffering would end. Doubt would end. Shame and guilt would end. All her questions would end. Memory - most mercifully of all - would end. She could quietly excuse herself from life.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#82. Every loss which we incur leaves behind it vexation in the memory, save the greatest loss of all, that is, death, which annihilates the memory, together with life.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#83. O, never from the memory of my heart
Your dear, paternal image shall depart,
Who while on earth, ere yet by death surprised,
Taught me how mortals are immortalized;
How grateful am I for that patient care
All my life long my language shall declare.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#84. For there will be no memory of the wise man or of the fool; in the days to come all will be forgotten, and alas, the wise man dies the same death as the fool!
Anonymous
#85. I'm always going to be with you, you know. As long as you remember me, I will exist. Memory is a form of existence, life after death.
Andrea Speed
#86. It had been a war of kingly poisons, in the air, in the memory, in the blood.
Sebastian Barry
#87. Eventually, that feeling fades, but there is always the memory of those days. When you're young, everything is butterflies. What I mean is - it's all new. I guess he was telling you to still believe, to hold on to your butterflies.
Brian Joyce
#88. And I got to thinking about the moral meaning of memory, per se. And what it means to forget, what it means to fail to find and preserve the connection with the dead whose lives you, or I, want or need to honor with our own.
June Jordan
#89. History, memory - that is what makes us human, that, and our knowledge of death: 'by man came death'. For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is the root of the struggle for power.
Saul Bellow
#90. Little by little she had been discovering the uncertainty of her husband's step, his mood changes, the gaps in his memory, his recent habit of sobbing while he slept, but she did not identify these as the unequivocal signs of final decay but rather as a happy return to childhood.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#91. And in the gloaming of her dwindling strength there yawned a loneliness so total it was beyond death, a loneliness that obliterated all memory, the loneliness of a childhood where she'd not even had her own name
Junot Diaz
#92. Do you think the memory of someone should dictate how we live going forward?' he asks, threading and unthreading his fingers together.
'It depends,' I say. 'I think you can probably honor someone's memory, but you can't live for them, because that means living in the past.
Alexandra Bracken
#93. Blessed be Thou, my Lord Jesus Christ, who didst foretell Thy death before the time, and in the Last Supper didst wonderfully consecrate Thy precious Body of material bread, and also charitably gave it to Thy Apostles, in memory of Thy most worthy Passion
Brigit Of Kildare
#94. I am: yet what I am none cares or knows, My friends forsake me like a memory lost; I am the self-consumer of my woes, They rise and vanish in oblivious host, Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost; And yet I am, and live with shadows tost.
John Clare
#95. Every work cancels the dark. Every work is a hymn from the other side of memory to a memory that is spellbound. Beauty is death's gift to vulgar life so that it can live in beauty.
Edmond Jabes
#96. Men passionately desire to live after death, but they often pass away without noticing the fact that the memory of a really good person always lives. It is impressed upon the next generation, and is transmitted again to the children. Is that not an immortality worth striving for?
Pyotr Kropotkin
#97. Death discredits. Survival is the whole success. The voice of the dead goes away. There isn't any memory. The power that's established fills the earth and destiny is whatever survives, so whatever is is right.
Saul Bellow
#98. But undying memories stood like sentinels in her breast. When the notes of doves, calling to each other, fell on her ear, her eyes sought the sky, and she heard a voice saying, Majella!
Helen Hunt Jackson
#99. I've filled my whole life trying to preserve the memory of living, in the fight against dying. Perhaps the only thing I've done, since stopping death is impossible, is to show this fight. The fight itself does not satisfy us either.
Christian Boltanski
#100. In [man's] mouth is ever the bittersweet taste of life and death, unknown to the trees. Without respite he is dragged by the two wild horses, memory and hope; and he is tormented by a secret that he can never tell.
Hope Mirrlees
