1,046 Quotes About Death-and-dying

How are we supposed to live every day if we know we're going to die?' He looked at me, clearly pained by the dawning of my genetically predestined morbidity. He had been the same way as a kid. A day never went by where he didn't think about this eventual demise. He sighed, leaned back in his chair, unable to conjure a comforting answer. 'You just do'.

We would like to think of death as a release from the pressures of existence, but this is a fatally mistaken thought: it is the ultimate culmination of those pressures.

Veins of ivy scale stones,find footholds butthe caretaker cuts earth short, peels creepers from Cotswold rock and props the deadhead to head so they won’ttopple like drunkson their moss-soft shadows.

I was scared. Not of being dead, that I could not comprehend, to be nothing was impossible to grasp and therefore nothing really to be scared of, but the dying itself I could comprehend, the very instant when you know that now comes what you have always feared, and you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember.

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.

Too evident sorrow does not inspire pity but repugnance, it is the sign of mental instability or of bad manners: it is morbid.

My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long.

We all emerge into this material soup, mix about with the meat and potatoes of life, and then slip away, back to the primordial germination whence we came. Nascence is a strange business: we forget what we were doing only to come forth and continually forget what we were doing perpetually over the course of a lifetime, until it is time to quit this plane through some unseen and ethereal vomitorium, and presumably forget that we had forgotten all over again.

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.