Dying Quotes

“Oh God, Alaska, I love you. I love you," and the Colonel whispered, "I'm so sorry, Pudge. I know you did," and I said, "No. Not past tense." She wasn't even a person anymore, just flesh rotting, but I loved her present tense.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“Silence is a lie that screams at the light.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“when we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.”
― Sogyal Rinpoche

“Part of this experience involves your being able to say to a person who is dying, "You are loved. You are beautiful. You are like a newborn babe, going into another realm. Release now anyone, and everything, that is a burden to you. Release everything and know that you have lived your life to the fullest. There is no judgment on you. Go in peace, put a smile on your face, and release any judgments you hold. Relax, and allow your life to have meaning as you embark on the next phase of your identity.”
― Barbara Marciniak, Earth: Pleiadian Keys to the Living Library

“And all the winds go sighing,
For sweet things dying”
― Christina Georgina Rossetti

“I don't have to kill myself, living my life is just the same.”
― Aaron Scheerer

“And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.”
― Mark Doty

“With a sigh, he grabbed hold of his chair and lifted himself out of it, then wrote on the blackboard: How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? - A.Y.
'I'm going to leave that up for the rest of the semester,' he said.
'Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I don't want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to understand how people have answered that question and the questions each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Silver’s sweet and gold’s our mother, but once you’re dead they’re worth less than that last shit you take as you lie dying.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“Dying isn’t like living; it requires no effort at all.”
― Ann Aguirre, Aftermath

“It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.”
― Gail Caldwell, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

“The day after Paul Newman was dead, he was twice as dead.”
― Maurice Sendak

“Supermarkets this large and clean and modern are a revelation to me. I spent my life in small steamy delicatessens with slanted display cabinets full of trays that hold soft wet lumpy matter in pale colours. High enough cabinets so you had to stand on tiptoes to give your order. Shouts, accents. In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere. Men shout as they die to be noticed, remembered for a second or two. To die in an apartment instead of a house can depress the soul, I would imagine, for several lives to come. In a town there are houses, plants in bay windows. People notice dying better. The dead have faces, automobiles. If you don't know a name you know a street name, a dog's name. 'He drove an orange Mazda.' You know a couple of useless things about a person that become major facts of identification and cosmic placement when he dies suddenly, after a short illness, in his own bed, with a comforter and matching pillows, on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, feverish, a little congested in the sinuses and chest, thinking about his dry cleaning.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“Yeah.You got me through”
― Alyxandra Harvey, My Love Lies Bleeding

“Dreams link us to those who have already left this life.”
― Doug Dillon

“Everything is about them, not the dying boys and girls in the arena.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“The question of how to spend my life, of what my life is for, is a question posed only to me, and I can no more delegate the responsibility for answering it than I can delegate the task of dying.”
― Anthony T. Kronman, Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life

“Death is the great equalizer of human beings. Death is the boundary that we need to measure the precious texture of our lives. All people owe a death. There is no use vexing about inevitable degeneration and death because far greater people than me succumbed to death’s endless sleep without living as many years as me.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Prate not to me of suicide, Faint heart in battle, not for pride I say Endure, but that such end denied Makes welcomer yet the death that's to be died.”
― Stevie Smith, Modern Classics Selected Poems Of Stevie Smith

“If we have lost the knack of living, I thought, it is a safe bet to presume we have forfeited the magic of dying.”
― Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond

“I would not be dying if it were not for her. I would have stayed home, as I have always stayed home, and I would have been safe, and I would have done the one thing I have always wanted to do, which is to grow up.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“No matter what the bards may say, there’s no romance in dying for a man.”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“Mitch, I don't allow myself any more self-pity than that. A little each morning, a few tears, and that's all."
I thought about all the people I knew who spent many of their waking hours feeling sorry for themselves. How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity. Just a few minutes, then on with the day. And if Morrie could do it, with such a horrible disease . . .”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie

“the word "dying" was not synonymous with "useless.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie

“In a strange way, I envied the quality of Morrie's time even as I lamented its diminishing supply. Why did we bother with all the distractions we did? .. give up days and weeks of our lives, addicted to someone else's drama.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie

“Grief is paradoxical: you know you must let go, and yet letting go cannot happen all at once. The literature of mourning enacts that dilemma; its solace lies in the ritual of remembering the dead and then saying, There is no solace, and also, This has been going on a long time.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye

“We all die. We have only the choice, if we are privileged, of whether death comes with a whimper or a bang; of what worlds we taste before we go.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Achala, worrying and scheming about your next life, before you have even completed this one, is not a good practice." Rinpoche”
― Daniel Prokop, Taking It With You: Everybody knows you can't take anything with you when you die... almost everybody.

“He nodded toward the window with the sunshine streaming in. "You see that? You can go out there, outside, anytime. You can run up and down the block and go crazy. I can't do that. I can't go out. I can't run. I can't be out there without fear of getting sick. But you know what? I appreciate that window more than you do.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie