Quotes & Sayings About Death Too Early

Earth can be bad for your health too. On land, grizzly bears want to maul you; in the oceans, sharks want to eat you. Snowdrifts can freeze you, deserts dehydrate you, earthquakes bury you, volcanoes incinerate you. Viruses can infect you, parasites suck your vital fluids, cancers take over your body, congenital diseases force an early death. And even if you have the good luck to be healthy, a swarm of locusts could devour your crops, a tsunami could wash away your family, or a hurricane could blow apart your town.
So the universe wants to kill us all. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I romanced internally about early death till it was too late to die early ... — Harriet Martineau

Too many people die early, either tragically or natural death, because they did not treat their lives with any sense of value. — Sunday Adelaja

Verily, too early died that Hebrew whom the preachers of slow death honour: and to many hath it proved a calamity that he died too early. As yet had he known only tears, and the melancholy of the Hebrews, together with the hatred of the good and just - the Hebrew Jesus: then was he seized with the longing for death. Had he but remained in the wilderness, and far from the good and just! Then, perhaps, would he have learned to live, and love the earth - and laughter also! Believe it, my brethren! He died too early; he himself would have disavowed his doctrine had he attained to my age! Noble enough was he to disavow! — Friedrich Nietzsche

All my life I have arrived early only to find myself standing self-consciously on a corner, outside a door, in an empty room, but the closer I get to death the earlier I arrive, the longer I am content to wait, perhaps to give myself the false sensation that there is too much time rather than not enough. — Nicole Krauss

This was perhaps the evolutionary usefulness of the elderly, Bao had concluded: to give the young some kind of psychic shield from reality, putting them under a description which allowed them to ignore the fact that age and death would come to them too, and could come early and out of sequence. — Kim Stanley Robinson

that there is no reason he should grieve. He will perhaps say it was too early for me to leave for the forest. But even if affection should prevent me from leaving my family just now of my own accord, in due course death would tear us apart, and in that we would have no say. Birds settle on a tree for a while, and then go their separate ways again. The meeting of all living beings must likewise inevitably end in their parting. This world passes away and disappoints the hopes of everlasting attachment. It is therefore unwise to have a sense of ownership for people who are united with us as in a dream - for a short while only and not in fact.3 — Huston Smith

It cannot be too strongly asserted that the insistence on blind, unreasoning faith is due mainly to the maintenance of a subject-matter upon which there was no knowledge, namely the 'other world'; and that this basis was assumed because of early man's preoccupation with death. It is, unfortunately, quite possible to believe a thing which is contradicted by facts, especially if the facts are not generally known; but if the whole position on which we rested our religions had been visibly opposed by what we did know, even the unthinking masses would, in time, have noticed it. — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Capablanca was snatched too early from the chess world. With his death we have lost a great chess genius, the like of whom we will never see again. — Alexander Alekhine

The tragedy of Tupac is that his untimely passing is representative of too many young black men in this country....If we had lost Oprah Winfrey at 25, we would have lost a relatively unknown, local market TV anchorwoman. If we had lost Malcolm X at 25, we would have lost a hustler named Detroit Red. And if I had left the world at 25, we would have lost a big-band trumpet player and aspiring composer--just a sliver of my eventual life potential. — Quincy Jones

A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man. — E. M. Forster

Only it was complicated, she wasn't thinking only of herself but me too, since we'd both been through so many of the same things, she and I, and we were an awful lot alike - too much. And because we'd both been hurt so badly, so early on, in violent and irremediable ways that most people didn't, and couldn't, understand, wasn't it a bit ... precarious? A matter of self-preservation? Two rickety and death-driven persons who would need to lean on each other quite so much? not to say she wasn't doing well at the moment, because she was, but all that could change in a flash with either of us, couldn't it? the reversal, the sharp downward slide, and wasn't that the danger? since our flaws and weaknesses were so much the same, and one of us could bring the other down way too quick? and though this was left to float in the air a bit, I realized instantly, and with some considerable astonishment, what she was getting at. — Donna Tartt

And in it all, the sensation of shaking my fists at the sky, shaking my fists high up to the sky, because that is what we do when someone dies too early, too beautiful, too undervalued by the world, or sometimes just at all
we shake our fists at the big, beautiful, indifferent sky, and the anger is righteous and strong and helpless and huge. I shook and I shook, and I put all of it into the dress. — Aimee Bender

It had been a winter of deadening seriousness, when all the illusions and bright dreams of my early twenties had withered and died. I did not yet have the interior resources to dream new dreams; I was far too busy mourning the death of the old ones and wondering how I was to survive without them. I was sure I could replace them somehow , but was not sure I could restore their brassy luster or dazzling impress . — Pat Conroy

As always, my alarm went off too early, yanking me back into a world I wasn't quite prepared to deal with. I looked automatically toward the window as I sat up. Only three bloody crescents marked the spots where bluebirds had managed to slam themselves to death against the glass. — Seanan McGuire

Time goes by so fast. Nothin' can outrun it. Death commences too early
almost before you're half-acquainted with life
you meet the other. — Tennessee Williams

At morning assembly we were read the words of Cyprian of Carthage: 'Let us on both sides of death always pray for one another.' Then we bowed our heads and beseeched God to protect our troops, and to send us peace and plentiful rain, and to grant us an ample harvest. But God remained pretty meager with his miracles: the dead stayed dead, the war went on, the rain either came too early and too strong or not at all, and the harvest depended in whether or not we'd had eelworm and blight. — Alexandra Fuller

Since we'd both been through so many of the same things, she and I, and we were an awful lot alike - too much. And because we'd both been hurt so badly, so early on, in violent and irremediable ways that most people didn't, and couldn't, understand, wasn't it a bit ... precarious? A matter of self-preservation? Two rickety and death-driven persons who would need to lean on each other quite so much? not to say she wasn't doing well at the moment, because she was, but all that could change in a flash with either of us, couldn't it? the reversal, the sharp downward slide, and wasn't that the danger? since our flaws and weaknesses were so much the same, and one of us could bring the other down way too quick? — Donna Tartt

To tell the truth, I don't really understand the causes behind my runner's blues. Or why now it's beginning to fade. It's too early to explain it well. Maybe the only thing I can definitely say about it is this: That's life. Maybe the only thing we can do is accept it, without really knowing what's going on. Like taxes, the tide rising and falling, John Lennon's death, and miscalls by referees at the World Cup. — Haruki Murakami

I'm one of the slowest drivers on the road. I mosey along. If you're doing anything too fast, including living life too fast, that creates sudden death. If I have to be somewhere on time, I make sure I leave early enough. — Anthony Hopkins

But people you love always die too early, don't they, no matter what age they live to? — Nicolas Barreau

We will talk of this again, when the grass has first withered on her grave. Then you'll hear him spouting about "the child too early torn from her father's heart;" then you'll see him steep himself in a syrup of sentiment and self-admiration and self-pity. Just you wait! — Henrik Ibsen

If he could sleep, she thought, sleep through the unhappy months, the heart's hunger, the months of death and cold and not having what you most want, and wake with time gone past and blurred and a new year coming. But perhaps it is too early in the year, she thought after that, and besides, he is not a bear. — Naomi Mitchison

Had Kurt Cobain not committed suicide in 1994, would his genius have survived the continuous incisions of a media that was only too proud of its ability to chisel away at his fragile psyche in the years before he decided that he'd had enough off their invasions? And, had Jimi Hendrix not passed way in 1970, would he, too have eventually fallen into decline, first equalled, then eclipsed by the brilliant wave of new guitarists: Robin Trower, Ritchie Blackmore, Mick Ronson, who emerged during the early 1970s? In death, Hendrix led by example: in life he could have been left for the dead. — Dave Thompson

As we turn now, none too soon, to consider the themes of kingdom and cross, we note that for all the evangelists, as for Paul, there is no sense of the kingdom not after all having appeared. Yes, it has been redefined. Yes, there is still more to do, as long as evil continues to stalk the earth. But the early Christians all believed that with Jesus's death and resurrection the kingdom had indeed come in power, even if it didn't look at all like they imagined it would. The hope had been realized, even though it had been quite drastically redefined in the process. A — N. T. Wright

The tragedy of journalism lies in its impermanence; the very topicality which gives it brilliance condemns it to an early death. Too often it is a process of flinging bright balloons in the path of the hurricane, a casting of priceless petals upon the rushing surface of a stream. — Vera Brittain

For we must not dwell on Death, as it is a mystery and it is something Unknown we leave to the Lord and his disposing for if we knew everything we would be too full of perfectly known things, and thus never rested nor content but driven with busyness and stuffed full. When I rode out in the early mornings in summertimes everything appeared to me, one after the other, in its own selfe without having to be known about beforehand, before you even get to it. In the order of the world is a deep pattern. You can't know if beforehand. If you did you would remain forever unsurprised and dwarfed and hardened. In the early mornings one after another we broke up the planes of water in the pools of Beaverdam with slow steps, horse and rider, and the trees appeared in their reflections like underwater spirits of themselves. Before these things a person is silent. — Paulette Jiles

I've been very influenced by folklore, fairy tales, and folk ballads, so I love all the classic works based on these things
like George Macdonald's 19th century fairy stories, the fairy poetry of W.B. Yeats, and Sylvia Townsend Warner's splendid book The Kingdoms of Elfin. (I think that particular book of hers wasn't published until the 1970s, not long before her death, but she was an English writer popular in the middle decades of the 20th century.)
I'm also a big Pre-Raphaelite fan, so I love William Morris' early fantasy novels.
Oh, and "Lud-in-the-Mist" by Hope Mirrlees (Neil Gaiman is a big fan of that one too), and I could go on and on but I won't! — Terri Windling

She had not died there. A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which society would measure the quick motions of man. — E. M. Forster

I died last night. Seventy years too young. — Colin Thompson

Sometimes, the Lord just takes blessed people because they've filled their purpose early. Everyone plays their own song. They sing their story to the world and leave behind a melody of memories. Sometimes ... their song is cut short and ends too early. But that doesn't mean their music was any less sweet or that they left any less of an impression. — Linda Kage