Quotes About Death

We're dead far longer than we're alive. Why not celebrate? Why not tell ourselves a story about what comes next?

When my father died, I waited for a haunting. I prayed for one. But he never came; I think he would have if he could.

She wondered if he was about to deliver another lecture about remembering death. As if a mother ever had to be reminded of that. Maybe it was just men who needed to acknowledge how fragile, how temporary, how unsafe life was.

King Constantine IX of Regia had been killed three times and was bored with it. He wanted a bath.

Thus, death begets death; evil begets evil.

At the end of their grim race, death might be the only prize.

It would be a shame if you were killed. I should be very sorry. I know I wouldn't like it to happen to me.

Morality has its equations too - they graph the curve of compassion between the quick and the dead.

Boy, said Anastasia, you know what I wish? I wish that everybody who loved each other would die at exactly the same time. Then nobody would ever have to miss anyone. Well, said her father slowly, it just doesn't work that way. It just doesn't seem to work that way very often.

He remembered that in the art books he had leafed through at Leader's, many paintings depicted death. A severed head on a platter. A battle, and the ground strewn with bodies. Swords and spears and fire; and nails being pounded into the tender flesh of a man's hands. Painters had preserved such pain through beauty.

Miles exhaled carefully, faint with rage and reminded grief. He does not know, he told himself. He cannot know... Ivan, one of these days somebody is going to pull out a weapon and plug you, and you're going to die in bewilderment, crying, What did I say? What did I say? What did I say? asked Ivan indignantly.

the trouble with oaths of the form, death before dishonor , is that eventually, given enough time and abrasion, they separate the world into two sorts of people: the dead, and the forsworn.

All the worry people expend over not existing after they die, yet nary a one ever seems to spare a moment to worry about not having existed before they were conceived. Or at all. After all, one sperm over and we would have been our sisters, and we'd never have been missed.

It's a . . . transcendental act. Making life. . . . 'By this act, I bring one death into the world.' One birth, one death, and all the pain and acts of will between. . . . Our children change us . . . whether they live or not.

Never underestimate the human capacity for wishful thinking and willful blindness,' said Miles. Such as a whole society of people who became so wrapped up in avoiding death, they forgot to be alive?

Perfect preservation isn't life, it's death.

Don't be afraid," she said. "The dead cannot hurt you. They give you no pain, except that of seeing your own death in their faces. And one can face that, I find." Yes, he thought, the good face pain. But the great—they embrace it.

The gods do not save us from death.  They only catch us when we fall from life.

You have more years ahead of you now than Pejar, half your age, whom we buried outside these walls these two days past. Stand before his grave and use your gift of breath to complain of your limited time. If you dare.

Dying's easy. Illyan's drawn features grew distant. How much did he remember of his agonized pleading to Miles for an easy death, so few weeks ago? Living's hard. Let the son of a bitch stand his court-martial. Every last eternal minute of it.

A doctrinal point Pen had constantly to explain to people trying to pray for good weather or no earthquakes, who never listened, he'd finally decided, because they didn't want it to be so.  The gods did not control the weather.  Or the world.  Or souls. But death, oh, they own that.

Death is not a performance to rate ourselves upon, or berate ourselves upon either.

Tej glanced toward the balcony. Toward him. Toward the balcony. Toward him. Why is this a hard choice? From the hallway, a teeth-gritting mechanical whine began, as of someone cutting through an airseal door. "You can't tell me you'd rather jump off a twenty-story building and smash in your skull than marry me," Ivan went on desperately. "I am not a fate worse than death, dammit! Or at least not worse than that death, good God!

Cordelia was not at all sure she wanted Piotr present, but until the old man did them all the convenience of dropping dead, she was stuck with him.