Death Life Quotes

Don't be afraid, Queen, the blood has long run down into the earth. And on the spot where it was spilled, grapevines are growing today. ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

I can't stand to see a living thing in pain, least of all Evander. The nuns who raised me said I'd been that way since birth. Trying to put the wings back on a trampled butterfly. Tending the weakest plants in their garden. That's what made me so well suited for walking in the Deadlands, they said. My love of life. ~ Sarah Glenn Marsh

Love and Death? What has great music or poetry ever been about, but those twin forces that undo a man? ~ Douglas Wynne

Live to ask. Die to answer. ~ Raheel Farooq

die daily.
hourly, if you've
got the energy. ~ Sherwin Tjia

Uselessness
Let mine not be the saddest fate of all,
To live beyond my greater self; to see
My faculties decaying, as the tree
Stands stark and helpless while its green leaves fall
Let me hear rather the imperious call,
Which all men dread, in my glad morning time,
And follow death ere I have reached my prime,
Or drunk the strengthening cordial of life's gall.
The lightning's stroke or the fierce tempest blast
Which fells the green tree to the earth to-day
Is kinder than the calm that lets it last,
Unhappy witness of its own decay.
May no man ever look on me and say,
'She lives, but all her usefulness is past. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Life is a temporary condition, Henry. And it's uncertain. That's why you have to seize chances when you find them. Pursue what you want. Take risks. Live, love...all of it. Every last one of us is going to die, but if we don't live as we truly want, if we're not with the one we want to be with, we're dead already. ~ Martha Brockenbrough

You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose ... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Tis time to die, when 'tis a shame to live. ~ Thomas Middleton

We are all in a race for dear life: that is to say, we are fugitives from death. ~ Theodor Reik

It was the first time that he'd cried in a very long time. All of his emotions poured out now, in a great rush of release: it was sadness tinged with bitterness, but mostly an intensely deep feeling of loss. ~ EXO Books

There are far more reasons for death than there are for life. ~ Sergei Lukyanenko

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows. ~ Socrates

(T)he cadet was too young to believe in death after life. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

The greatest loss is the lost of life. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death. ~ Julian Barnes

Once we acquired the power to destroy ourselves, the very notion of human life had been altered; even the air we breathed was contaminated with the stench of death. Sachs was hardly the first person to come up with this idea, but considering what happened to him nine days ago, there's a certain eeriness to the obsession, as if it were a kind of deadly pun, a mixed-up word that took root inside him and proliferated beyond his control. ~ Paul Auster

One naive pro-natalist assumption is that because death is a bad thing, procreation, which can be considered the antonym of death is a god thing, but the naive defect in that assumption is that it ignores the obvious fact that procreation is an essential (and the ultimate cause) of death ~ Jiwoon Hwang

As it turns out, that persistence is a requirement. Thus, he would tell me, you need the dark to show the light, so you shouldn't curse darkness. You needed death to define life. ~ Terry Goodkind

Thus, flexibility, as displayed by water, is a sign of life. Rigidity, its opposite, is an indicator of death. ~ Anthony Lawlor

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death
ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. ~ James Baldwin

We know that hockey is where we live, where we can best meet and overcome pain and wrong and death. Life is just a place where we spend time between games. ~ Fred Shero

A man who won't die for something is not fit to live. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too old. ~ George Orwell

What distresses us is not loosing life, but losing what gives it meaning. ~ Raymond Radiguet

When old folks laugh,
they consider the promise
of dear painless death, and generously
forgive life for happening
to them. ~ Maya Angelou

Encased in an elaborate illusion of unlimited power and progress, each of us subscribes, at least until one's midlife crisis, to the belief that existence consists of an eternal, upward spiral of achievement, dependent on will alone.
This comforting illusion may be shattered by some urgent irreversible experience ... None more potently confronts us with finiteness and contingency than the imminence of our own death. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

I think a lot about death more than life, because we're going towards death. ~ Ritchie Blackmore

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

He stood between death and life as between night and morning, and thought with a soaring rapture, 'I am not afraid. ~ Mary Renault

That was how people got through life, he supposed: by acknowledging death and telling it, Not today. ~ Molly Ringle

There are some moments in life we all have to face, even though we don't want to. ~ Lisa De Jong

Human stories are practically always about one thing, really, aren't they? Death. The inevitability of death ...
... (quoting an obituary) 'There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that ever happens to man is natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident, and even if he knows it he would sense to it an unjustifiable violation.' Well, you may agree with the words or not, but those are the key spring of The Lord Of The Rings ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Everything worthwhile ends. We are in the perpetual process now: creation, maturation, cessation. ~ John Logan

People who are afraid of death are usually afraid of life.
Anon. ~ Douglas Gellatly

The goal of all life is death. ~ Sigmund Freud

When it over, I want to say:all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular,and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
from When the death comes ~ Mary Oliver

This is how it must go. There will be catastrophes. Disastrous setbacks and slaughters. But life is going someplace. It wants to know itself; it wants the power of choice. It wants solutions to problems that nothing alive yet knows how to solve, and it's willing to use even death to find them. ~ Richard Powers

Time is at once the most valuable and the most perishable of all our possessions. ~ John Randolph

If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood? ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

The aim of all life is death. Life is the apprenticeship that we serve preparing for death. Life is the fleeting spark of divinity that precedes a deathless eternity. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We have once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create. ~ Stephen King

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

The second we are born, we start dying. So this is not life, this is death. ~ Amelia Mysko

I don't really enjoy experiencing pain. No one does. But we will become less human if we learn to detach ourselves from one another to the point that when we experience death of a beautiful being (our mothers, our fathers, our sisters, our brothers, our soul mates, our friends etc.) that it will not bother us that we will not feel. But see that's suppression. It will bother us somewhere deep inside. So, love someone. Hold them tight. Don't fear the loss. Fear the part of being too afraid to love someone. Love Everyone. It's inevitable: we all die. Thats the ugly part of life. But Love and being alive is so beautiful and so strong that the love, the memories stay even in death. Life is love, life is being alive to feel pain. The love the beautiful love always remains. Love. Life. Joy. Peace ~ Jill Telford

At the point where he, today's Ivan Ilyich, began to emerge, all the pleasures that had seemed so real melted away now before his eyes and turned into something trivial and often disgusting.
And the further he was from childhood, the nearer he got to the present day, the more trivial and dubious his pleasures appeared. It started with law school. That had retained a little something that was really good: there was fun, there was friendship, there was hope. But in the last years the good times had become more exceptional. Then, at the beginning of his service with the governor, some good times came again: memories of making love to a woman. Then it became all confused, and the good times were not so many. After that there were fewer still; the further he went the fewer there were.
Marriage. . .an accident and such a disappointment, and his wife's bad breath, and all that sensuality and hypocrisy! And the deadlines of his working life, and those money worries, going on for a year, two years, ten, twenty - always the same old story. And the longer it went on the deadlier it became.
'It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me...And now it's all over. Nothing left but to die! ~ Leo Tolstoy

In the midst of life, we are in death. ~ Fred Chappell

It's important to do things that scare you to death! ~ Reese Witherspoon

[Buddhism and Christianity] are in one sense parallel and equal; as a mound and a hollow, as a valley and a hill. There is a sense in which that sublime despair is the only alternative to that divine audacity. It is even true that the truly spiritual and intellectual man sees it as sort of dilemma; a very hard and terrible choice. There is little else on earth that can compare with these for completeness. And he who does not climb the mountain of Christ does indeed fall into the abyss of Buddha. ~ G.K. Chesterton

We poets have no need for drugs to attain the borderline between life and death. ~ Louis Malle

For those who seek to understand it, death is a highly creative force. The highest spiritual values of life can originate from the thought and study of death. ~ Elisabeth Kubler Ross

I once feared death. It is said that death begins with the absence of life. And life begins when death is no longer feared. I have stared death in the eye and survived. ~ Cheryl Kaye Tardif

Look, now, in the distance, a person, closer, it's two people, hand in hand, ankle deep in the froth. Sunrise in hair, blonde, green bikini, tall, shining. They kiss. Handsy things happening underneath hist trunks, her tongue.
Who wouldn't envy such youth, who wouldn't grieve what has been lost in watching. They come up the dune, she pushing him backward, up.
Study them from the balcony, holding your breath while the couple stops in a smooth bowl of sand, protected by the dunes. She pushes down his trunks, he takes off her bathing suit, top and bottom. Oh yes, you would return to your wife on hands and knees, crawl the distance of the eastern seaboard to feel her fingers once more in your hair.
You are unworthy of her. Yes. No.
Even as you think of flight, you're transfixed by the lovers, wouldn't dare move for fear of making them flap like birds into the blistered sky.
They step into each other, and it's hard to tell where one begins and one ends. Hands in hair and warmth on warmth, into the sand her red knees raised, his body moving.
It is time. Something odd happening though you are not ready for it. There is an overlap. You have seen this before, felt her breath on your nape, the heat of her beneath, and the cold damp of day on your back, the helpless overwhelm, a sense of crossing. The sex reaching it's culmination.
Come. Lip bitten to blood and finish with a roar and birds shoot up and crumbles in the pink folds of an ear. Serrat ~ Lauren Groff

Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard. ~ Tom Robbins

Death is our constant companion, and it is death that gives each person's life its true meaning. ~ Paulo Coelho

Be free from vanity and pride. Be free from belief, disbelief, convictions, and parties. Be free from habit. Be free from ambition and greed. Be free from family and surroundings. Be free from fanaticism. Be free from fate; be master of your own life. Be free from death; life depends on the will of others, but death on our own will. ~ Sarah Bakewell

Life and death issues are a universal concern. A person can learn about life by investigating the psychological and social aspects related to dying. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Even post true death memories carried on the waves of universal energy will defy the faux perception of finality. ~ Truth Devour

Humans are about to grasp basic substances of all creations.
When that moment comes, life or death are no longer matters. ~ Toba Beta

That every man after the life in the world lives to eternity, is evident from this, that man is then spiritual, and no longer natural, and that the spiritual man, separated from the natural, remains such as he is to eternity, for man's state cannot be changed after death. ~ Emanuel Swedenborg

Which soul shall escape the power of the grave?. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Under the pathologist's microscope, life and death fight in an illuminated circle in a sort of cellular bullfight. The pathologist's job is to find the bull among the matador cells ~ Yann Martel

Men's lives have meaning, not their deaths. ~ George R R Martin

For death is life. It is only living that is lifeless. ~ Mervyn Peake

Most people don't want to die, but they don't want to live either. I am speaking about men now as much as women. They look for a third way, but there is no third way. ~ Jonathan Rosen

If the storytellers told it true, all stories would end in death. ~ George Pelecanos

If I had a choice, I wouldn't be here ... I wouldn't be anywhere. ~ Faraaz Kazi

Forerun thy peers, thy time, and let
Thy feet, millenniums hence, be set
In midst of knowledge, dream'd not yet. ~ Alfred Tennyson

There is no ascent to the heights without prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death. ~ Karen Armstrong

Just a few more minutes here, I suggest: life hates to leave, worried what it might miss. But Vernon, closer, is shaking his head. This is all. ~ Sonya Hartnett

There is a very, narrow, thinness of line between the living and the dead; actually, it's just a lack of a heartbeat away. ~ Wes Adamson

Personal effects: how irrelevant they are, how sad, how lost, how vagrant, without the force that gives them purpose. ~ Sarah Hall

Birth and death frame a life, give it shape. Without that border it just becomes a kind of sprawling mess, a thing with no edge, no definition, no centre. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Life is measured by - the ones left behind? Or his Faith? By Love? or by the people aside you? Or it has no meaning at all? ~ Aman Jassal

But we artists have to be selfish you know, after all, with each painting, we die a little. ~ Irving Stone

To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It is easy to say no, even if saying no means death. ~ Jean Anouilh

I do not understand how you know you only have one life if you have never died, because if you have never died, then you cannot possibly know if you would go on living a second life, or go on living no more lives. ~ Cassandra Kemper

... Not that it was unjust; not that the scales were forced out of balance. Where there had been good, it showed as clearly. Kindnesses, accomplishments, all those were present, too. ~ Richard Matheson

My first life fled without a fight and left nothing behind, so I doubt it was a loss worth mourning. A man I don't remember mixed genes with a woman I can't recall, and I was called to the stage. I stumbled through the curtain, squinting into the blinding light of the birth canal, and after a brief and banal performance, I died.
This is the arc of the average life - unexamined, unremarked, unremarkable - and it should have ended there. In simpler times, life was a one-act play, and when it was over we took our bows and caught our roses and enjoyed any applause we earned, then the spotlight faded and we shuffled backstage to nibble crackers in the greenroom of eternity. ~ Isaac Marion

LIFE IS LIKE A FRESH DAY, DEATH IS THE NIGHT WHEN THE DAY ENDS. ~ Hansrajvir

Dad's death didn't hollow me out the way Helen's had. After all, everyone had assumed Dad was a goner back when he got kicked in the head as a child. Instead, he had cheated death and, despite his gimp and speech impediment, lived a long life doing pretty much what he wanted. He hadn't drawn the best of cards, but he'd played his hand darned well, so what was there to grieve over? ~ Jeannette Walls

the death of a great man demands the birth of a great son ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

In my solitude I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

Life's a queue of small irritations with the Last Door at the end. ~ Joe Abercrombie

It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home
only the millions of last moments ... nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments. ~ Thomas Pynchon

No waiting the beyond, no peering toward it,
but longing to degrade not even death;
we shall learn earthliness, and serve its ends,
to feel its hands about us like a friend's. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

There are no footprints on the sea and no road-signs, not a single guard-stone or post, and no bends, only paths of light and dark from which to choose, the choice is always a difficult navigation and the storm's wingspan immeasurable as the depths and the horizon, but the sea holds you in its mighty hand your life is a sea-blue tale of love and death. ~ Ase-Marie Nesse

Each stage of your life
is like petals of a flower...
unfolding and opening until it comes to full bloom...You will blossom and then you die...But know that this is not your ending. ~ Summerlyn Guthrie

The living must look after one another, he thought. The worst possible outcome is to die without having lived. ~ Hakan Nesser

There is a very popular opinion that choosing life is inherently superior to choosing death. This belief that life is
inherently preferable to death is one of the most widespread superstitions. This bias constitutes one of the most obstinate mythologies of the human species. ~ Mitchell Heisman

What kind of miracle ripped out your heart, and left you breathing? ~ A.B. Shepherd

This was their way of honoring the dead. The story over, the demands of their own hard, rough lives began to re-assert themselves in their hearts, in their nerves, their blood and appetites. Would that the dead were not dead! But there is grass that must be eaten, pellets that must be chewed, hraka that must be passed, holes that must be dug, sleep that must be slept. Odysseus brings not one man to shore with him. Yet he sleeps sound beside Calypso and when he wakes thinks only of Penelope. ~ Richard Adams

Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while. ~ Tom Perrotta

We're living tragedies, just passing time 'til our funerals. ~ Robyn Schneider

The departed souls shall never return. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Scarlet watched a leaf fall to the ground, lying dead amoung the other leaves on the forest floor. "A brief life seems pointless."
Tristan thought for a moment. "Isn't that what life is, though? A brief opportunity to exist? A short gift? ~ Chelsea Fine

Now every mortal has pain
and sweat is constant,
but if there is anything dearer than being alive,
it's dark to me.
We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing
(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth
we call it life. We know no other.
The underworld's a blank
and all the rest just fantasy. ~ Anne Carson

Life is the death of all of us.' - Tristan ~ Rowan Speedwell

When he took my hand he taught me something about the value of touch, the communicative power of the human hand. I didn't know, as I lay there, that I would think of him many times in the years ahead. When my son lay on a hospital bed, age four, with the raging fever of meningitis, I reached through the bodies of the attending doctors and held his slack, heated hand in both of mine. When my youngest child disappeared beneath the waves of the Mediterranean Sea and I had to leap in, haul her out, turn her upside-down so that the water drained from her lungs. Then all she and I could do was sit on the sand, wrapped in towels, contemplating what had almost happened, her small fingers wrapped in mine. ~ Maggie O'Farrell

I look down past the stars to a terrifying darkness. I seem to recognize the place, but it's impossible. "Accident," I whisper. I will fall. I seem to desire the fall, and though I fight it with all my will I know in advance I can't win. Standing baffled, quaking with fear, three feet from the edge of a nightmare cliff, I find myself, incredibly, moving towards it. I look down, down, into bottomless blackness, feeling the dark power moving in me like an ocean current, some monster inside me, deep sea wonder, dread night monarch astir in his cave, moving me slowly to my voluntary tumble into death. ~ John Gardner