Quotes About Death

Burn me," she said finally. "Turn me to ash." And so we did, though the ashes of her body were not what I'd expected. They weren't like ashes from a wood fire, silky and fine as sand. They were like pale pebbles mixed with a gritty gray gravel. Some chunks were so large I could see clearly that they'd once been bones.

All of that was impossible now, regardless of what the letter said. My mom was dead. My mom was dead. My mom was dead. Everything I ever imagined about myself had disappeared into the crack of her last breath.

She'd been dead an hour. Her limbs had cooled, but her belly was still an island of warm. I pressed my face into the warmth and howled some more.

It seemed as alive in its dying as a hive of bees was in its life.

We're all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it's dinnertime.

I wasn't with my mom when she died. No one was. She died alone in a hospital room, and for so many years it felt like three-quarters of my insides were frozen solid because of that.

We are all creatures of myth, shadowed by archaic images of life and death.

Marie Snyder's dead, and here you are laughin' about it." "We're all gonna be dead sooner or later," Eddie said. "Maybe it ain't funny, but it ain't no great tragedy neither.

I think I'll pull through. And if I don't…do me a favor and bury me in the forest. That's romantic. Funerals are a maximum pain in the ass.

The polychloride plastic bubbled hotly, releasing evil tendrils of carbonized waste floating into the air like fibrous black snowflakes from hell. Maybe the crackpot fundamentalists could use that. When you burned the cursed records, black demons fled into the air, momentarily visible, like a spirit relinquishing possession of a Haitian. Like a soul or animus departing a human corpus at death.

He began to cross the street, thinking as he did that everyone was really very foolish to be screaming and yelling, to be afraid. After all, what could the dead do? They weren't moving, were not even speaking

know, it's kinda nice to have some people in here who died of natural causes. Every once in a while, an inexplicable murder can brighten your day. But enough is enough, you know what I mean?

What point was there otherwise to the suffering he had gone through? What point to his grandfather's death on the very night before his operation? It was a warning, a cautionary call that life was short, too short to be wasted.

All he knew was that the rage was still there, eating inside him, not with the slow stealth of a cancer, but with the rapid, careless ravening of a weasel gnawing at his entrails, or the constant alimentary torment that drives on the shark to his incessant feeding until only death gives him rest.

You ever see that thing on old tombstones, that Momento mori? That's Latin. You know what it means?" The roommate gave a negative grunt. "It means something like, 'Remember you gotta die.' And that's what this whole thing is like, like one great big reminder that we're all gonna go sooner or later, so we better be damn good to each other while we're here.

Slumber parties are inevitable, like death and income taxes. The only way to avoid them is not to have a teenage daughter.

the body is a clock — bones tick and tock years gather in flesh an alarm set for death

[M]y theory... there was a crack in Pansay's head and a little bit of the Dark World came through and pressed him to death.

Walking down the third aisle of the stack beneath tin-shaded lightbulbs, smelling the familiar library scents of must and dust and cinnamony, aging paper, he thought: When I die, I guess I'll go with a library card in one hand and an OVERDUE stamp in the other. Well, maybe there's worse ways.

There is a solitude of space, A solitude of sea, A solitude of death, but these Society shall be, Compared with that profounder site, That polar privacy, A Soul admitted to Itself: Finite Infinity.

My situation is a solemn one. Life is offered to me on condition of eating beefsteaks. But death is better than cannibalism. My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed not by mourning coaches, but by oxen, sheep, flocks of poultry, and a small traveling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarfs in honor of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures. It will be, with the exception of Noah's ark, the most remarkable thing of the kind seen.

But he, sad-eyed and ashy-cheeked, When slips the pen from grasping, Sees, as he struggles, gasping, With fame the far horizon streaked Behind Death's raven gory-beaked.

There was a senator, I think it was after my pancreatic cancer, who announced with great glee that I was going to be dead within six months. That senator, whose name I have forgotten, is now himself dead, and I am very much alive.

There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death.