Quotes About Death

The next time I opened my eyes, I was in the morgue. This, all by itself, is enough to really ruin your day. I was lying on the examining table, and Butters, complete with his surgical gown and his tray of autopsy instruments, stood over me. 'I'm not dead!' I sputtered. 'I'm not dead!' - Harry Dresden, Death Masks, Jim Butcher

Apocalypse is a frame of mind. [Nicodemus] said then. A belief. A surrender to inevitability. It is a despair for the future. It is the death of hope.

Wait. You don't understand. I just wanted it to stop. Wanted the hurting to stop. I smoothed a bloodied lock of hair from her eyes and felt very tired as I said, The only people who never hurt are dead. The light died out of her eyes, her breath slowing. She whispered, barely audible, I don't understand. I answered, I don't either. A tear slid from her eye and mixed with the blood. Then she died.

It bothered me that he was right. Without Sir Stuart's intervention, I'd have been dead again already. That's right--you heard me: dead again already. I mean, come on. How screwed up is your life (after- or otherwise) when you find yourself needing phrases like that?

My name is Harry Dresden, I said. Fitz stumbled. Holy shit, he said. Like... that Harry Dresden? The professional wizard? The one and only. He recovered his pace and shook his head. I heard you were dead. Well, yeah, I said, but I'm taking it in stride.

You're dead, son. Cheer is contraindicated.

Life is full of toil, sacrifice, and pain, and from the time we stop growing, we know that we've begun dying. We watch helplessly as year by year, our bodies age and fail, while our survival instincts compel us to keep on going-which means living with the terrifying knowledge that ultimately death is inescapable.

Could a man's heart, his soul, perish and yet leave him walking and talking as if alive?

It took several minutes, and when Butters woke up, Andi and Marci, both naked, both rather pleasant that way, were giving him CPR. They'd kept his body alive in the absence of his soul. Wow, Butters slurred as he opened his eyes. He looked back and forth between the two werewolf girls. Subtract the horrible pain in my chest, and all the mold and mildew, and I'm living the dream. Then he passed out.

The dead don't need justice. That's for those of us who are left looking down at the remains.

Man. Being mostly dead is hard on a guy.

The only people who never hurt are dead.

Tavi spent an eternity in misery, longing for death to bring sweet release from the unrelenting torment. The others gathered at the side of his bunk on the ship, keeping a deathwatch over him. I don't see what all the drama is about, Demos said, his quiet voice filled with habitual disinterst. He's seasick. It will pass.~Captain's Fury

Death isn't when your body stops working. It's when there's no more future. When you can't see past right now, because you stopped believing in tomorrow.

Hey, Bogart. You and the wonder twins back off or the bedsheet gets it. Harry Dresden, Death Masks.

I mean, go figure. You prepare your home for an assault and you don't take zombies into consideration. I'd fallen victim to one of the other classic blunders, along with not getting involved in a land war in Asia and never going in against a Sicilian when death was on the line.

Fire, she whispered. Wind. I see dark things and a dark war. I see my death coming for me, out of the spirit world. And I see you at the middle of it all. You're the beginning, the end of it. You're the one who can make the path go different ways. That's your vision? Iowa has less corn.

And if I was to die, I was not going to go out in a gibbering heap of terror.

Whatever had killed him, it hadn't been human. His face was gone, simply torn away. Something had ripped his lips off. I could see his bloodstained teeth. His nose had been torn all the way up one side, and part of it dangled toward the floor. His head was misshapen, as though some enormous pressure had been put upon his temples, warping his skull in.

Of course cats [can see ghosts]. As far as I can tell, all cats. But they aren't terribly impressed with the fact that we're dead and still present.

Death is as light as a feather, duty heavier than a spire.

We all must die, Dresden. There is no shame in dying for something worthwhile.

Your death doesn't belong to me. We flipped a coin. I lost.

He died in his sleep one night. An aneurysm, the doctors said. I found him, cold, smiling. Maybe he'd been dreaming of Mother when he went. And as I looked at him, I suddenly felt, for the very first time in my life, utterly, entirely alone. That something was gone that would never return, that a little hole had been hollowed out inside of me that wasn't ever going to be filled again.