Quotes About Death From Literature

#1. Death, my son, is a good thing for all men; it is the night for this worried day that we call life. It is in the sleep of death that finds rest for eternity the sickness, pain, desperation, and the fears that agitate, without end, we unhappy living souls.

Jacques-Henri Bernardin De Saint-Pierre

#2. History belongs to the victors, legends to the people, fantasy to literature. Only death is certain.

Peter Esterhazy

#3. All those who leave immigrate to better lives, but I wanted to better my death. Maybe it is the ending that matter, not the life, I thought. Maybe we, like elephants, walk towards our chosen burials.

Rawi Hage

#4. In the dream, Tana's mother loved her more than anyone or anything. More than death.

Holly Black

#5. Our mind is our soul and we do not have any other soul. The concept of soul has been invented by ourselves to ease our fear of death.

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#6. this grimy fragment of another world, the forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings....the merry dance of death and trade goes on

Joseph Conrad

#7. Forget it. Never explain; never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can't.

Christopher Hitchens

#8. I don't fear death
I fear dying before I've read Dickens end to end.

Amy Smith

#9. I'm not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun ... let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus ... Aphrodite to the extent of the will of each one.

Roman Payne

#10. Lady Ligeia," he began again, "is a woman in the literature who returns from the dead, taking over another woman's body to be with her true love."
"Oh, yes. Lovely" Isobel blanched. "I guess the other chick didn't mind at all?

Kelly Creagh

#11. Esther loses her virginity, hemorrhages during the process, and almost bleeds to death - like Catherine in A Farewell to Arms - and I do wonder why women are always hemorrhaging in American literature.

Matthew Quick

#12. Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.

John Green

#13. When the star dies,
Its eye closes; tired of watching,
It flies back to its first bright dream.

Dejan Stojanovic

#14. The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.

Adam Johnson

#15. We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Franz Kafka

#16. Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.

Don DeLillo

#17. They are both spectacular,
Life and death.

Dejan Stojanovic

#18. In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

Dan Simmons

#19. Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.

Thomas McGuane

#20. That's what literature is. It's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them!

Connie Willis

#21. Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.

Seneca The Younger

#22. In greatness, life and death merge.

Dejan Stojanovic

#23. And that was the point of children, thought Caroline Meddey: to bind us to the earth and to the present, to distract us from death.

Amanda Coplin

#24. ... Her desire was close to that of the person who drowns himself; he does not necessarily covet death so much as what comes after the drowning - something different from what he had before, at least a different world.

Yukio Mishima

#25. Neither exhortations to virtue nor the argument of approaching death should divert us from literature; for in a good mind it excites the love of virtue, and dissipates, or at least diminishes, the fear of death.

Francesco Petrarca

#26. This is the difference between U.S. Latina/o letters and Latina/o Letters from Latin America: In the United States, writing is a business. In Latin America, writing is life and death.

Daniel Pena

#27. Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.

Lawrence Clark Powell

#28. Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it's seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don't share that pessimism because I think it is one of the great inventions of the human spirit.

Richard Flanagan

#29. Life without literary studies is death.

Seneca The Younger

#30. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

Cormac McCarthy

#31. When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]

Jorge Luis Borges

#32. Every thought about death takes a moment of life away.

Dejan Stojanovic

#33. When death becomes an escape, when it becomes attractive, the purpose of life is fulfilled. To teach one it's futility, it's worthlessness, that is the purpose of life. Incongruously, its value lies in having imparted that lesson.
Bhanggi

Faiqa Mansab

#34. There is nothing like literature: I lose a cow, I write about her death, and my writing pays me enough to buy another cow.

Jules Renard

#35. We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.

William James

#36. In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

Terry Pratchett

#37. Certainty. Life's last and kindest gift.

Milan Kundera

#38. Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.

Charles Frahman

#39. I'm from Europe, and I was very aware that there are a lot of literature snobs - especially in Europe. As soon as something becomes a success, it has to be bad, and then they'll do everything they can to stab it to death.

Anne Fortier

#40. About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.

Virginia Woolf

#41. I sat up in the strange bed fearing it had been a dream, afraid I would never see her again. Not because I wanted anything from her, only her presence. The disappearance of the presence of beauty is the most despairing of events on this time-wheel of ours that rolls onward towards death.

Roman Payne

#42. I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.

Anthony Marra

#43. Kill me, or you are a murderer.

Franz Kafka

#44. If birth is a manifestation of life, death is another.

Dejan Stojanovic

#45. So much of the literature we had to read for high school English class was filled with victimized, tragic, symbolic women who spurred the plot forward with their inevitable shunning/death/shunning-followed-by-pregnancy-followed-by-death timelines.

Libba Bray

#46. Death is something we shy away from, except in literature or television, when we tend to stare right at it.

Cath Crowley

#47. Life into death
Life's other shape,
No rupture,
Only crossing.

Dejan Stojanovic

#48. Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story - or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall - is, Is it dead or alive?

Mavis Gallant

#49. No matter what is happening in life or in the world - war, natural disaster, poor health, pain, the death of loved ones - if existence is filled with art, music and literature, life will be fulfilling, a joy.

Karen DeCrow

#50. The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#51. Sleep is death enjoyed.

Friedrich Hebbel

#52. In my view the time for rousing revolutionary literature has passed, because the revolution has already revolutionised itself to death and has left behind only bitterness and a sort of weariness, listlessness and even nausea.

Gao Xingjian