Quotes About Death

In her heart, the dark red of her wedding dress was the deep bloodied shade of mourning, heavy with lilies of the grave, and her hair was spiked with bleached bones. It must be Everna putting these thoughts in her head. She liked to talk about death, and seemed to find it more romantic than love.

He is virgin. He must remain so. Until the night before his death.

Was this death, this unending plunge? Was there nothing more to it than this?

Those were the remains of those who had been incarcerated before death, who had been deposited in riches by attentive machines, only to claw their way from their shrouds, struggle and plummet to extinction. The machines clearly were not designed to deal with that eventuality, and as people who built them never entered the vault, no-one ever discovered these accidents or were able to devise a method of preventing them.

You're important, Daniel, you're Shemyaza's vizier. They want you in their clutches, but they won't risk your death.

He saw cruelty in her face and a tenderness too great to be born. He saw the balance of life and death swinging within her expression, the fate of love on her brow.

Death is a trickster whose sleeves we thought we had shaken free of fatal cards, and yet now he comes to trespass on our courts.

It is like a tiny flame that cannot be stoked, for then it would be noticeable, but at least it keeps the death of belief at bay.

Since the death of Saska's elder sister, Dimara Corey, the previous winter, Niska had taken on her aunt's position as Merante, or High Priestess of the Sisterhood of the Dragon. She was young for the title, but of all the women involved, the most mystical.

Had some ancient race preyed upon humanity in some way, so that certain conditions of death now echoed those old legends?

He felt the sounds of life would not reach this far down, but the sounds of death would.

Cities, you see, are like humankind. They are born, become great and fulfil their potential, or else, in the case of failures, remain as straggling haphazard creations throughout their life span. Then, they die. They are dynamic things, the cities. If they did not live, their people would perish; the relationship between human and city soul is crucial to the well-being of both.

If a body should fall from that window, its flight would be impeded by the stone arms of caryatids and gargoyles, or else impaled. I could see him thinking of his own death, and he was achingly lovely as he did so: the archetype of all the boys ever loved by kings. His hair, unbound, flowed down him like a veil; the colour of dark honey. His eye, in profile, was slightly slanted, its cat-like shape accentuated by a kiss of kohl.

Are you saying that he deserves to die?' I asked, chilled. 'We all deserve to die,' he answered.

Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies?...At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook.

The dead don't come back. Not to this world. This world is too cruel for anyone to want to come back.

I was sleeping on the bodies of killed German soldiers. The Germans were very orderly people. When they found they didn't have time to bury these bodies, they laid them next to each other in a very neat and orderly way. I saw straight rows, like pieces of cordwood. Exact.

Fear of death is often a justifiable fear of the unknown; of circumstances beyond our personal control which we cannot know and for which we cannot prepare.

I want to be able to recognise death, to hear her coming, to see her, to touch her, smell her and taste her; to undergo the assault on all of my senses and, in my last moments, to understand her as completely as is humanly possible.

Since there is no way we can ultimately prevent it, perhaps our time would be better spent focusing on improving and savouring the period between our birth and our death: our life.

All in all, the dead are a whole lot less trouble than the living

Since most of us are products of a culture and era where nobody likes to discuss death in case it encourages her to visit,

As the writer and scientist Isaac Asimov put it: 'Life is pleasant, death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Granny had finished with dying, had died and was now dead – all very clear and distinct concepts in their minds. They were at ease with the finality. They know that the best memorial is a boxful of happy memories inside your head, and they know what a good death looks like.