Top 100 Quotes About Death And Dying
#1. When your partner gets cancer, then life changes. Your timetable and reference for your normal routines and the way you view life, all this changes. Because you're dealing with death. You're dealing with the possibility of death and dying.
Pierce Brosnan
#2. Of emotions, of love, of breakup, of love and hate and death and dying, mama, apple pie, and the whole thing. It covers a lot of territory, country music does.
Johnny Cash
#3. I think I'm very stoic. Death and dying are things that I'm used to.
Edmund White
#4. Death and dying makes us into children once again, in truth, one last time, there in our final wailing cries. More than one philosopher has claimed that we ever remain children, far beneath the indurated layers that make up the armour of adulthood.
Steven Erikson
#5. Approaches to death and dying reveal much of the attitude of society as a whole to the individuals who compose it. The development of ideas of what constitutes a good death can even be traced to prehistory.
Cicely Saunders
#6. I think that nothing teaches you more about life than death and dying.
Patti Davis
#7. Looking mortality straight in the eyeis n easy feat. To avoid the exercise, we choose to stay blindfolded, in the dark as to the realities of death and dying. But ignorance is not bliss, only a deeper kind of terror.
Caitlin Doughty
#8. Do not ask the definition of a friend. He/She is that one without whose company death and dying set in earlier and living is made more pleasurable.
Rod McKuen
#9. It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.
Jakob Bohme
#10. Knowing about reincarnation helps us relax. It assists us with an understanding of death and dying. Death is not an end, quite the contrary.
Frederick Lenz
#11. Anna Deavere Smith's new one-woman show bills itself as being about health care, but the truth is that 'Let Me Down Easy' is mostly about the grimmer subject of death and dying.
Terry Teachout
#12. So heavenly love shall outdo hellish hate,
Giving to death, and dying to redeem,
So dearly to redeem what hellish hate
So easily destroy'd, and still destroys,
In those who, when they may, accept not grace.
John Milton
#13. My doctor told me that I drastically needed to lose weight. Fear of death and dying motivated meto make many lifestyle changes that led me to eventually shed over 100 pounds.
Kelly Price
#14. Our attitudes toward retirement, marriage, recreation, even our feelings about death and dying may make much more of an impression than we realize.
Eda LeShan
#15. Death and dying provide a meeting-point between the Tibetan Buddhist and modern scientific traditions. I believe both have a great deal to contribute to each other on the level of understanding and of practical benefit.
Dalai Lama
#16. It's life, that's all. There are no happy endings, just happy days, happy moments. The only real ending is death, and trust me, no one dies happy. And the price of not dying is that things change all the time, and the only thing you can count on is that there's not a thing you can do about it.
Jonathan Tropper
#17. We know everyone we love is going to die, but we don't know it, can't possibly believe it, she thought, or long ago I would have gone and started digging until I had a hole big enough to lie down in.
Rae Meadows
#18. His eyesight was possessed by the colours of trauma, cracking and bubbling like an old Super Eight film to remind him of his near-death drowning some two months ago in that very moment when he needed to act.
Luke Taylor
#19. A person gets built and stands for a few years and then nature's demolition team comes in.
Dan Groat
#20. I think first of the children. What the hell am I supposed to tell them? Then I think about money, the house, all those things no widow will tell you ever crossed her mind.
Shannon Celebi
#21. You dont have to know a soul to know what I know
to expect what I'm expecting
to feel yourself alive and dying in your chest every minute of the livelong day
When you're young you wanta cry, when you're old you wanta die. But that's too deep for you now, Ti mon Pousse
Jack Kerouac
#22. We all of us waited for him to die. The family sent him a check every month, and hoped he'd get on with it quietly, without too much vulgar fuss.
John Osborne
#24. Dying only means moving into a nicer house.
We have only gone into the next room.
We still are what we have always been.
We aren't far away. We are only on the other side of the pathway.
Kerry Okines
#25. It was a strange staging for death, for the woman on the high bed was dying. Slowly, fighting every inch of the way with a grim tenacity, but indubitably dying. Her vital ardour had sunk below the mark from which it could rise again, and was now ebbing as water runs from a little crack in a pitcher.
John Buchan
#26. And to die with the Warrior's Prayer on his lips. For, 'Yes', he had sighed on his dying breath, and all knew that was the ultimate prayer one could offer to life. Acceptance.
Robin Hobb
#27. My father, my father, and dost thou not hear
The words that the Erl-King now breathes in mine ear?
'Be calm, dearest child, 'tis thy fancy deceives;
Tis the sad wind that sighs through the withering leaves.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#29. The reason dying is so easy is because death has no meaning ... And the reason death has no meaning is because life has no meaning. All the same, have fun!
Pierre Anthon
Janne Teller
#30. Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over ... Death is not anything ... death is not ... It's the absence of presence, nothing more ... the endless time of never coming back ... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes not sound ...
Tom Stoppard
#31. That's the secret. If you always make sure you're exactly the person you hoped to be, if you always make sure you know only the very best people, then you won't care if you die tomorrow.
Carol Rifka Brunt
#32. 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
#33. A dead body is much more fascinating than a live one, and I have learned that most corpses tell better stories.
Alan Bradley
#34. 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
#35. The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but that we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.
Annie Dillard
#36. It behooves me to remember as I advance in age that death is an inevitable part of the life cycle rather than a medical failure.
Lisa J. Shultz
#37. I kept a picture of me kissing my dad's corpse on the forehead in my wallet for years. I'd break it out any time someone showed me a baby picture, just so they would know how it ends.
Doug Stanhope
#38. I've seen a man die and a bird die and there was no difference.
Marty Rubin
#39. Every tiny part of us cries out against the idea of dying, and hopes to live forever.
Ugo Betti
#40. Goodbyes are not easy, but I'm ready to move on. I'm not reluctant, Emma, not holding back. I don't have answers to the questions, but I have some good questions. I have loved life, but I believe that life is to be loved, it is a gift.
Madeleine L'Engle
#41. The scariest thing about death is not dying, it's the uncertainty of what happens after
Peyton J Glenn
#42. You can lose people without them dying, and I have, from moving, from traveling. The emotion is real, it just doesn't actually have to do with death. I'm singing about what I know, and it's a song about longing for somebody who's disappeared in your life.
Jon Crosby
#43. Looking at Milkman in those nighttime talks, they yearned for something. Some word from him that would rekindle the dream and stop the death they were dying.
Toni Morrison
#45. If I Must Go
If I must go to heaven's end
Climbing the ages like a stair,
Be near me and forever bend
With the same eyes above me there;
Time will fly past us like leaves flying,
We shall not heed, for we shall be
Beyond living, beyond dying,
Knowing and known unchangeably.
Sara Teasdale
#46. Sensei says funerals are not really for the dead. They are for those left behind. "The dead are long gone by the time a funeral is held," he told us. "Who would wait when the doors of Heaven are open? Only the living would be foolish enough to still hang around on earth.
Sandy Fussell
#47. We're all whirling merrily through the void on a dying planet, and gay people are just doing their usual number, being shamelessly trendy as always. Right out in front on the cutting edge of death.
Lawrence Block
#48. Part of dealing with the sense of being cut off - for both the one dying and the one bereaved - is acknowledging that though a vital part of life has changed dramatically, all relationships (with friends, even with you, perhaps) have not.
Sandra L. Bertman
#49. My God, if I had a heart, I would write my hate on ice, and wait for the sun to show.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#50. Death does not frighten me, but dying obscurely and above all uselessly does.
Isabelle Eberhardt
#52. You live on - in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here ... Death ends life, not a relationship.
Mitch Albom
#53. Life found itself alive and somehow knew its opposite was death. We are ever being born, or dying, and the thrill of choosing is ours. Only once, must we be born without our own consent. Only once, must we die without our own permission
Calvin Miller
#54. I love cheetahs. Every moment of every day is spent in fear of dying a terrible death yet they always carry themselves elegantly, remain loyal to their family, and never complain about anything.
Gregor Collins
#55. The dying man doesn't struggle much and he isn't much afraid. As his alkalies give out he succumbs to a blest stupidity. His mindfogs. His will power vanishes. He submits decently. He scarcely gives a damn.
H.L. Mencken
#56. Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and going. From the word go.
Samuel Beckett
#57. He was going to die soon, you knew when you saw those eyes. There was no sign of life in his flesh, just the barest traces of what had once been a life. His body was like a dilapidated old house from which all furniture and fixtures have been removed and which awaited now only its final demolition.
Haruki Murakami
#58. It can't be that life is so senseless and horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and senseless, why must I die and die in agony? There is something wrong!
Leo Tolstoy
#59. Death. It's around more than people realize. Because no one wants to talk about it or hear about it. It's too sad. Too painful. Too hard. The list of reasons is endless.
Jessica Sorensen
#60. I'm dying twice as fast
as any other American
between eighteen and thirty-five
This disturbs me,
but I try not to show it in public.
Essex Hemphill
#61. Death is most terrifying to those who have yet to live.
Dan Pearce
#62. I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear
Roger Ebert
#63. I looked at her, exhausted in the hospital bed, and she looked at you, and you looked at me looking at her with eyes that had never known anything else, and for a moment there I swear we saw each other with a clarity that nothing can alter, not time, not heartbreak, not death.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#64. Why exactly are we so frightened of death that we avoid looking at it altogether? Somewhere, deep down, we know we cannot avoid facing death forever. We know, in Milarepa's words: "This thing called 'corpse' we dread so much is living with us here and now."
Sogyal Rinpoche
#65. Like they just wanted to enjoy The Gus Waters Show while it was still in town.
John Green
#66. Deep down a broken heart, all the sadness one can bear is misery.
Auliq Ice
#67. Here is the story of how I died. I wish it were a glamorous story; sadly, there was little glamour in my death. The end for everyone is much the same, sad, lonely, and cold. Only, most people don't wake up again, I did. And I was hungry, so bloody hungry.
L.A. Kennedy
#68. 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
#69. Dying was a part of living. You had to keep tuning in to that if you expected to be a whole person. And if the fact of your own death was hard to understand, at least it wasn't impossible to accept.
Stephen King
#70. I knelt in front of life, folded my hands and prayed for some more time; there couldn't be any. My heart bled and so did my tearful eyes.
Time, they say, flies, but I saw it slowly passing by taking each of my tardy breaths with it as it walked out of my life ...
Sanhita Baruah
#71. Small said, "But what about when we are dead and gone, will you love me then, does love go on?"
... Large (replied) "Look at the stars, how they shine and glow, some of the stars died a long time ago. Still they shine in the evening skies, for you see ... love like starlight never dies ...
Debi Gliori
#72. I guess it was only fitting that to them PUNK was a four letter word. However, to people like Dylan and I-punk was our hearts-our souls. We grew up with a lot of uncertainties. To be a teenager isn't always pretty, and our music reflected that.
Brian Joyce
#73. 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
#74. To fear the foe, since fear oppresseth strength,
Gives, in your weakness, strength unto your foe,
And so your follies fight against yourself.
Fear, and be slain
so worse can come to fight;
And fight and die is death destroying death,
Where fearing dying pays death servile breath.
William Shakespeare
#75. Death was a friend, and sleep was Death's brother.
John Steinbeck
#76. He may take long walks
in the raining dark
almost aimlessly
to a spot of soaked grass
in a neighbor's open field.
He's decided this is the place
for you and him to meet again.
Kristen Henderson
#77. Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.
Siri Hustvedt
#78. The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die.
John Updike
#79. The casket was lined with lovely velvet, which must have felt lovely even to the dead, but the glowing man continued to rip up the casket.
Brad McKinniss
#80. His will to live was waning, and it made him almost transparent, as though rather than dying, he might just disappear one day, leaving behind only a vague scent of regret.
Ian Morgan Cron
#81. The thing with dying was to try to not die and make death take you with surprise.
Gary Paulsen
#82. From our birth we are all dying, but some of us finish sooner than others.
Raymond E. Feist
#83. The quality of death, like that of life, must be of an infinite variety, and if one has already died once, then what was there to look for in dying for good and all, as he was now?
Ray Bradbury
#84. I'll try to be around and about. But if I'm not, then you know that I'm behind your eyelids, and I'll meet you there
Terence McKenna
#85. I feel like a little tug in a great storm. But I'm fastened to a great ship on ahead. It's going into port and can't lose it's way.
Patricia St. John
#86. The world didn't end with a whimper or a bang. Your life finished in complete silence. Gone in a blink. And then there was nothing.
F.K. Preston
#87. Death came with friendly care; The opening bud to heaven conveyed, And bade it blossom there.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#88. The erruption of feelings & emotions that follows a near-death exerience, or any event that causes us to stop & look deeply at the reality of our lives, is ripe with the potential for insight & clarity.
Allan Lokos
#89. The sky looks comfortingly mundane compared to the garish kaleidoscope of the stained glass. It makes Rose yearn to be reliving any one of a thousand ordinary days spent with her ordinary older sister, who has now done this extraordinary thing and died.
Liane Moriarty
#90. We're always one breath away from something, living or dying, sometimes it just can't be helped.
Heather Gudenkauf
#91. Tread softly as you draw near to the bedside of a dying man, for the space around him is holy ground. Speak in hushed tones, with awe and reverence, as you would in a cathedral. Let not the mind engage in trivial thoughts. The awesome majesty of Death can only be met in silence.
Jennifer Worth
#92. And the reason he cannot bear her dying is not the loss of her (which is the future) but that dying puts the two of them (now) into this nakedness together that is unforgivable.
Anne Carson
#93. Nothing, they say is more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than the time of dying
Thomas Paine
#95. There are many levels of life which we cannot see and know, yet which certainly exist. There is a larger world, vast enough to include immortality ... Our spiritual natures belong to this larger world ... If death is apparently an outward fact, immortality is an inner certainty.
Manly Hall
#96. Do what is right and what is good.
Bryeison to Alasdair before going to his death on the battlefield.
Michelle Franklin
#97. In the end, death came uniformly to all, and all extracted as much satisfaction from their dying as this essentially graceless process could afford.
Jack Vance
#98. Sometimes the dying live more fiercely and wisely than the rest of us. (146)
Julia Cameron
#99. One of the biggest lessons I learned from nearly dying of cancer is the importance of loving myself unconditionally. In fact, learning to love and accept myself unconditionally is what healed me and brought me back from the brink of death.
Anita Moorjani
#100. Couples swayed and embraced to the beat as the singer's vocals soared above a group of confused teenagers and twenty-something's.
Brian Joyce