"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

""When the time comes to die, make sure that all you have to do is die!"

~Jim Elliot"
— Elisabeth Elliot (The Journals of Jim Elliot)

"WE JUST DID AN AWESOME JOB OF NOT DYING"
— John Green (Let It Snow: Three Holiday Stories)

"…[I]f they hadn’t both been pretending, but had had what is called a heart-to-heart talk, that is, simply told each other just what they were thinking and feeling, then they would just have looked into each other’s eyes, and Constantine would only have said: ‘You’re dying, dying, dying!’ – while Nicholas would simply have replied: ‘I know I’m dying, but I’m afraid, afraid, afraid!’ That’s all they would have said if they’d been talking straight from the heart. But it was impossible to live that way, so Levin tried to do what he’d been trying to do all his life without being able to, what a great many people could do so well, as he observed, and without which life was impossible: he tried to say something different from what he thought, and he always felt it came out false, that his brother caught him out and was irritated by it."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel)

"I thought about all of the tings that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"Haven't you learned anything, not even with the approach of death? Stop thinking all the time that you're in the way, that you're bothering the person next to you. If people don't like it, they can complain. And if they don't have the courage to complain, that's their problem"
— Paulo Coelho (Veronika Decides to Die: A Novel of Redemption)

"I don't mind dying - it's the business of staying dead that scares the shit out of me."
— R. Geis

"You are a beautiful person, Doctor. Clearheaded. Strong. But you seem always to be dragging your heart along the ground. From now on, little by little, you must prepare yourself to face death. If you devote all of your future energy to living, you will not be able to die well. You must begin to shift gears, a little at a time. Living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value."--Nimit in "Thailand"
— Haruki Murakami

"Live or die but don't poison everything."
— Saul Bellow

"It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, music, the physics of falling leaves, vanilla and jasmine, poppies, smiling, anthills, the color of the sky, coffee and cashmere, literature, sparks and subway trains... If only one could leave this life slowly!"
— Roman Payne (Hope and Despair)

"In life, more than in anything else, it isn’t easy to end up alive."
— Roman Payne

"The best way to die is when your living"
— Alice Hoffman

"i love walking in the rain because no one knows im dying"
— Christopher Myers

"I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of the cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it."
— Sonya Hartnett (Surrender)

"My God. What's happened?"
— Diana Spencer Princess of Wales

"There are no more other worlds to conquer!"
— Alexander the Great

"When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix."
— Richard Dawkins

"The day after Paul Newman was dead, he was twice as dead."
— Maurice Sendak

"It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once."
— Umberto Eco (The Island of the Day Before)

"Is it the Fourth?"
— Thomas Jefferson

"Let's cool it brothers . . .

(Spoken to his assassins, 3 men who shot him 16 times.)"
— Malcolm X Black leader

"Go on, get out - last words are for fools who haven't said enough.

(To his housekeeper, who urged him to tell her his last words so she could write them down for posterity.)"
— Karl Marx

"Now comes the mystery."
— Henry Ward Beecher

"It’s not that we have to quit
this life one day, but it’s how
many things we have to quit
all at once: music, laughter,
the physics of falling leaves,
automobiles, holding hands,
the scent of rain, the concept
of subway trains... if only one
could leave this life slowly!"
— Roman Payne (Rooftop Soliloquy)

"Oh, do not cry - be good children and we will all meet in heaven."
— Andrew Jackson

"Did I play my role well? If so, then applause, because the comedy is finished!"
— Roman Emperor Augustus

"Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.
"
— -John Donne

"I don't know what I may seem to the world. But as to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
— Isaac Newton

"Die, my dear doctor? That is the last thing I shall do."
— Palmeston

"I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have"
— Leonardo da Vinci

"It is very beautiful over there. (last words)"
— Thomas Edison

"live to the fullest or die;
and die you will anyway, so start living!"
— Dr. Christopher S. Hyatt

"Other people are likely not to be aware that those who pursue philosophy aright study nothing but dying and being dead. Now if this is true, it would be absurd to be eager for nothing but this all their lives, and then to be troubled when that came for which they had all along been eagerly practicing."
— Plato (Phaedo)

""Yeah? Feels like we just traded one set of rumors for another. We still have no idea where he is, what his plans are, or even what he looks like."
"Patience, dear girl, patience."
"Easy for you to say. You're immortal.""
— D.D. Barant

"Writing about the indignities of old age: the daunting stairway to the restaurant restroom, the benefits of a wheelchair in airports and its disadvantages at cocktail parties, giving the user what he described as a child's-eye view of the party and a crotch-level view of the guests.
"Dying is a matter of slapstick and pratfalls. The aging process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over and runs off laughing. No one should grow old who isn't ready to appear ridiculous.""
— John Mortimer (The Summer Of A Dormouse)

"I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death."
— Thomas Nagel

"You have to learn how to die if you wanna be alive."
— Jeff Tweedy

"Dying is as easy as getting born; it just happens."
— martin gottlieb cohen

"The question of how to spend my life, of what my life is for, is a question posed only to me, and I can no more delegate the responsibility for answering it than I can delegate the task of dying."
— Anthony T. Kronman (Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life)

"Here, when I say I never want to be without you,
somewhere else I am saying
I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet,

in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever"
— Bob Hicok