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Life-and-death Quotes

It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with d...

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Picture of Virginia Woolf
Virginia WoolfThe Death of the Moth and Other Essays

Whatever his secret was, I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is but a manner of ...

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Picture of Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir NabokovThe Real Life of Sebastian Knight

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, ...

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My fugitive years are all hasting away,And I must ere long lie as lowly as they,With a turf on my br...

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Thick is the darkness-- Sunward, O, sunward!Rough is the highway-- Onward, still onward!Dawn harbors...

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I’m going to kill myself. I should go to Paris and jump off the Eiffel Tower. I’ll be dead. you know...

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The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity - it's envy. Life is so beauti...

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The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity - it's envy. Life is so beauti...

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There are many ways in which life's little candle can be snuffed out. A cold wind pursues us all.

Picture of Yann Martel
Yann MartelThe High Mountains of Portugal

So it is said, for him who understands Heavenly joy, life is the working of Heaven; death is the tra...

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Z
ZhuangziThe Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

Do not use life to give life to death. Do not use death to bring death to life.

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ZhuangziThe Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

The True Man of ancient times knew nothing of loving life, knew nothing of hating death. He emerged ...

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Z
ZhuangziThe Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

It comes out from no source, it goes back in through no aperture. It has reality yet no place where ...

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Z
ZhuangziThe Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

Lie you easy, dream you light,And sleep you fast for aye;And luckier may you find the nightThan ever...

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Everywhere we shine death and life burn into something new…

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AberjhaniElemental: The Power of Illuminated Love

You were born a child of light’s wonderful secret— you return to the beauty you have always been.

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AberjhaniVisions of a Skylark Dressed in Black

I watch and listen, helpless to help. There is no point in saying ‘This, too, shall pass.’ For a tim...

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For the crown of our life as it closesIs darkness, the fruit there of dust;No thorns go as deep as t...

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The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, th...

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Picture of Anthony Powell
Anthony PowellThe Valley of Bones

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die o...

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The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

He realised, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: ...

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As yet we know nothing of what goes to create or evoke the active spark of life.

Picture of Bram Stoker
Bram StokerThe Jewel of Seven Stars

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of...

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I who know many present things by my art," replied the Hermit with a smile, "have yet little knowled...

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Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing.

peace of mind and heartarriveswhen we accept what is:having beenborn into thisstrange lifewe must ac...

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Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land; When you can no more hold me by...

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Up the coast a few miles north, in a lava reef under the cliffs, there are a lot of rock pools. You ...

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We live and we die and anything else is just delusion. it's just passive chick bullshit about feelin...

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[W]hat makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven.

Death is never an ending, death is a change;Death is beautiful, for death is strange;Death is one dr...

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in that cold autistic dark.

In the grueling light that passed for day...

There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.

The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote ...

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Odd: I wish I could believe in reincarnation.Chief Porter: Not me. Once down the track is enough of ...

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Joe knew what the nod meant-this was why they became outlaws. To live moments the insurance salesman...

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And as much as I wanted to, I knew I couldn't turn around, that to look at her directly was to viola...

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And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space b...

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Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to most people?

Three days after the liberation of Buchenwald, I became very ill; some sort of poisoning. I was tran...

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UselessnessLet mine not be the saddest fate of all, To live beyond my greater self; to see My facu...

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And this I know: all these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a st...

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Why can’t you remember your Shakespeare and forget the third-raters. You’ll find what you’re trying ...

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Picture of Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'NeillLong Day's Journey Into Night

Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed ...

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Picture of Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García MárquezLove in the Time of Cholera

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and mo...

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Take what life can give you, Ana, and do not trouble about the offerings which are laid in the tombs...

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I’ve never once thought about how I was going to die,” she said. “I can’t think about it. I don’t ev...

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...and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.Until that time, I had underst...

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And the worst part is before it gets any better we're heading for a cliff. And in the free fall I wi...

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On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us t...

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Between the dark, heavily laden treetops of the spreading chestnut trees could be seen the dark blue...

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Either a man goes and hangs himself, and then he hangs sure enough, and he'll have his reasons for i...

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Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man's cottage door and at the palaces of kings.

Too weird to live, too rare to die!

Picture of Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. ThompsonFear and Loathing in Las Vegas

We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out.

Picture of Iris Murdoch
Iris MurdochAn Unofficial Rose

But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it.

Human stories are practically always about one thing, really, aren't they? Death. The inevitability ...

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Indeed the mind of Ilúvatar concerning you is not known to the Valar, and he has not revealed all th...

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The earth will always be the same - only cities and history will change, even nations will change, g...

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Picture of Jack Kerouac
Jack KerouacWindblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so ...

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Picture of James Boswell
James BoswellThe Life of Samuel Johnson

Perhaps that is why we love life so much, Anjin-san. You see, we have to. Death is part of our air a...

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The only thing that’s been a worse flop than the organization of nonviolence has been the organizati...

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You can't make a date in death's dateless night.

When I look back all is flux, without beginning and flowing towards no end, or none that I shall exp...

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I was worse off than even Alison was; she hated life, I hated mysef. I had created nothing, I belong...

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Here upon earth there is life, and then death,Dawn, and later nightfall,Fire, and the quenching of e...

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I thought at first that she was just dead. Just darkness...I thought about the slow process of becom...

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I needed, I decided, to really know her, because I needed more to remember. Before I could begin the...

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If the inevitably of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what...

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Picture of John Green (author)
John Green (author)The Fault in Our Stars

I just want to be enough for you, but I never can be. This can never be enough for you. But this is ...

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Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, a...

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The only really frightening thing about Cinnamon Hill belongs in the realm of the living and serves ...

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What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's...

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Picture of Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran FoerExtremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem presented i...

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The worker picked up Pakhom’s spade, dug a grave, and buried him - six feet from head to heel, exact...

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Picture of Leo Tolstoy
Leo TolstoyHow Much Land Does a Man Need? and Other Stories

Dear friend, I have searched all nightthrough each burnt paper,but I fear I will never findthe formu...

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I don't think you should die until you're ready. Until you've wrung out every last bit of living you...

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It was a star," Mrs. Whatsit said sadly. "A star giving up its life in battle with the Thing. It won...

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Swiftly the remembrance of all things is buried in the gulf of eternity.

Every war is the war for whoever's lived through it.

But she went to tell the bees. She felt like an idiot doing it, but she'd promised. She remembered t...

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And the truth is only that we grow and die and wither even as this grass here.

And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, ...

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We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life.

Picture of Michel de Montaigne
Michel de MontaigneThe Essays: A Selection

There were ten tongues within one head, and one went out to fetch some bread, to feed the living and...

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... and we held our breath, just for a moment, to see if the world had ended, but it hadn't, so we y...

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I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darknness.

It is painful for the plant which is myself to live in the atmosphere and light of this world. Somew...

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In our lives we know joy, anger, sorrow, and a hundred other emotions, but these emotions altogether...

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Yes; poor Bunbury is a dreadful invalid.Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time tha...

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Picture of Oscar Wilde
Oscar WildeThe Importance of Being Earnest

When I was young” … “Before I was twenty, I mean, I used to think that life was a thing that kept ga...

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Yes! all is past—swift time has fled away,Yet its swell pauses on my sickening mind;How long will ho...

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That's what it means to die, to not be able to stop looking at whatever's in front of you. Some darn...

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No waiting the beyond, no peering toward it,but longing to degrade not even death;we shall learn ear...

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All those religions--they contradict each other on every point but every one of them is filled with ...

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We're as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere.

Nature has granted man no better gift than the shortness of life. The senses grow dull, the limbs ar...

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