This stupidity of sounding a siren and speeding through traffic with a coffin must be an African speciality.

When the last autumn of Dickens’s life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades...

¡Aprenderás a masticar los cataclismos, pequeño, y te los tragarás!

Old age is not meant to be survived alone,” Man Rapadou said, her voice trailing with her own hidden thoughts. “Death should come gently, slowly, like a man’s hand approaching your body. There can be...

And so, she turned her back on the abyss for another day.

It’s easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die.

[Children] just cannot be sad too long, it is not in them, as children mourn in little bits here and there like patchwork in their lives.

The connections we make in the course of a life–maybe that’s what heaven is.

Here is the story of how I died. I wish it were a glamorous story; sadly, there was little glamour in my death. The end for everyone is much the same, sad, lonely, and cold....

Because she is in God’s hands.’ But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the...

Papa was a man with silver eyes, not dead ones. Papa was an accordion! But his bellows were all empty. Nothing went in and nothing came out.

I sat next to a salmon on the sofa. After ten minutes of bear-like conversation, it was dead. Oh well, at least surrealism is still alive.

I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what couldI tell her about those things that she didn’t already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating...

Nobody showed up to my wedding, even though I sent out 50 invitations. The problem was 49 of the people were dead when I sent them out, and the 50th person died shortly after I...

On June 23, 1942, there was a group of French Jews in a German prison, on Polish soil. The first person I took was close to the door, his mind racing, then reduced to pacing,...

I make a joke of it, but… but I’m afraid of death.” He straightened up and turned to look into Joseph’s eyes. Joseph saw the fear there and was shocked by the intensity of it....

Our favorite games were killing.Our favorite books were death.It had been beaten into us:God is love.Not the parched face and gnarledcapes across a stick body; jitteringin the nude sky, we couldn’t seetrying to touch usfor...

Before I die, I want to change my name to “Here,” so that my tombstone could simply read, “Here lies.” And then people who knew me could walk by, shake their head, and say, “Ain’t...

Ever two seconds, somewhere in the world, a child dies of starvation. That means every two seconds there is a story where the main character dies. That’s a lot of horrible stories. So if my...

You have come a long way, and you do not know it. You have a long way to do, and you do know what that means.

My idea of walking into the jaws of death is marrying some woman who has lost three husbands.

I cried so hard after I put my cat to sleep. I guess I shouldn’t have cried so hard, because with all my sobbing, I ended up waking it up.

…the dead have a way of becoming saints in the eyes of their survivors…

What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death.

Their’s not to make reply,Their’s not to reason why,Their’s but to do and die.

I saw the corpse, and I called the cops. But not before I called a 1-800 phone sex number with the dead guy’s phone and credit card.

Darkness is but a door, scary not because it opens, but out of fear that it will never close

My name is Mr. Murderedscott. But if you want to know what happened to Scott, I didn’t kill him.

*Paying one’s last respects* is about the payer, not the paid. (Who attends the funeral — and who doesn’t — is the deceased’s last worry.)

My grandpa looks good in booty shorts. It’s too damn bad he’s dead and can’t twerk it for the small crowd that’s gathered in the cemetery.

Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn’t much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.

My plan to live from 65 to forever is to simply keep showing up. I also don’t want to retire at the same age as a road’s speed limit—unless that speed limit is 35. Live...

Invariably, knowledge dictates life, liberty, and death, but those who have historically occupied the seats of power not only dictate what is defined as knowledge but also dictate what’s included, what’s excluded, and how it...

Son, I’m dying,” where I visualize the day my estranged dad calls me out of the blue to tell me he is dying, and in as many ways as possible I’ll offer up various responses...

She smiled at him like a freshman invited to the senior prom. It made my blood boil.

Fads are the kiss of death. When the fad goes away, you go with it.

‘Eighth one this week,’ he said.

I could picture how Caprice was before we lost her. Dark hair, beautiful smile, intelligent hazel eyes, quick wit.Now gone.Just gone.Like a chessboard where suddenly one of the knights disappeared. A blank spot on the...

With every year that I grow older, I also draw closer to (my loved ones) to the day when we will once again be together. So I march through the deepening shadows, serene and unafraid,...

This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don’t like at all and would like to avoid. It’s not as if the whole thing has not...

Chronology of any event worked best in obituaries. It had no place in the world of sentiment, where memories, ideas and assumptions co-existed side by side.

Death walks faster than the wind and never returns what he has taken.

It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; it is no longer man who, having lost all restraint, shares his bed with a corpse. Whoever waits for his neighbor to die in...

The Thought of Death. It gives me a melancholy happiness to live in the midst of this confusion of streets, of necessities, of voices: how much enjoyment, impatience and desire, how much thirsty life and...

I’m not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun… let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus… Aphrodite...

Sorry. Don’t need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.

There is uncertainty in hope, but even with its tenuous nature, it summons our strength and pulls us through fear and grief— and even death.

It’s not wise for me to extend a congratulatory handshake while your hands are busy clapping for me. I’ll wait for your applause to die down—or for my mother-in-law to die before we shake in...

Passando fra gli insorti che si scostavano con religioso rispetto, [papà Mabeuf] continuò dritto verso Enjolras che indietreggiava impietrito, gli strappò la bandiera, e senza che nessuno osasse trattenerlo né aiutarlo, quel vecchio ottuagenario col...

Every blade in the field – Every leaf in the forest – lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up.