Quotes & Sayings About Death Too Soon

Death will come when thou art dead, soon, too soon. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Isn't it always unfair - death always a kind of outrage? A life ended too soon with jagged and torn edges, a sentence incomplete. — Rebecca Stott

Is life a boon?
If so, it must befall
That Death, whene'er he call,
Must call too soon.
Though fourscore years he give,
Yet one would pray to live
Another moon!
What kind of plaint have I,
Who perish in July?
I might have had to die,
Perchance, in June!

Is life a thorn?
Then count it not a whit!
Man is well done with it;
Soon as he's born
He should all means essay
To put the plague away;
And I, war-worn,
Poor captured fugitive,
My life most gladly give -
I might have had to live,
Another morn! — W.S. Gilbert

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead? — Irvin D. Yalom

Today and tomorrow you will be in your prime; but soon you will die,
in battle or in bed; either fire or water,
the fearsome elements, will embrace you,
or you will succumb to the sword's flashing edge,
or the arrow's flight, or terrible old age;
then your eyes, once bright, will be clouded over;
all too soon, O warrior, death will destroy you.
Hrothgar to Beowulf — Anonymous

The fear of death is that you are dying too soon. Nobody wants to, but at the point that you die you can pray that you are no longer the same person. I pray that when I am about to die I will not be the same person that I am now. — Audre Lorde

There are a few people who are able to know of their death and use the time wisely. But when you start planning for the end, most people instinctually stop living for tomorrow. Living for the day is beautiful-too many of us don't do it enough-but to live fully, we must live for today and tomorrow. Think about it, if you knew you were going to die in six months, would you start a project you knew that you couldn't finish? Would you go to school to learn to be a doctor? Would you have a child, knowing you would leave it alone too soon? People miss out on so muchif they stop living for tomorrow. - Holiday Brandon — C.C. Hunter

We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do. — Hermann Hesse

And as all of us know, it does not matter if the ending has been predetermined, or the demise inevitable, or otherwise on time, or even long overdue. For those who love or even simply fondly know a life; for those who have touched one existence with their own, helping to mould it as it does the same to them, goodbye will always and forever come much, much, much too soon. — Emma Rose Kraus

Sister, forbear, or I shall hate thee soon, And the dead man will hate thee too, with cause. Say I am mad and give my madness rein To wreck itself; the worst that can befall Is but to die an honorable death. ISMENE — Sophocles

I thought then that we would all die in the darkness and solitude. I thought that an executioner would come for us silently one night. I thought I might wake briefly with the weight of a pillow on my face. I thought that I would never see sunshine again. I was a young woman then, and I thought that sorrow as deep as mine could only lead to death. I was grieving for my father and frightened by the absence of my brothers, and I thought that soon I would die too. I — Philippa Gregory

I thought, too, about time. How fleet it is, and how certain, and like death how indifferent to our commentary upon it. Once not long before we had been boys and girls, and soon we would be middle-aged, thickening with rueful pleasure toward the thinness of old age. — Charles Finch

There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die. — Charles Bukowski

Ah, Lalage! while life is ours,
Hoard not thy beauty rose and white,
But pluck the pretty fleeing flowers
That deck our little path of light:
For all too soon we twain shall tread
The bitter pastures of the dead:
Estranged, sad spectres of the night. — Ernest Dowson

I saw her tonight. I didn't mean to and I wasn't prepared for it.

I came across her sweet smiling face and I had no choice but to be confronted with all the emotions and memories I associated with her.

It brought me back to this past summer when she passed from this world into the next and how I watched the minutes in the day pass and felt the sorrow of the approaching sunset knowing that darkness would soon follow.

There is something profound about the first night after someone you love dies.

Seeing her again and mourning the loss of her anew reminded me that we keep too much to ourselves and we let people go without them ever knowing how much they touched us, intrigued us, taught us, or moved us.

I'm a firm believer in actions doing the telling, but people need to hear it as well. — Donna Lynn Hope

She said, "Well, that's right, she's going to heaven very soon. And now it's time for us to say good-bye to her and tell her how much we love her."
Mary martha nodded and looked at the needlepoint in her hands.
"Will her brain still be hurt, in heaven?" she asked.
[Rebecca] ... said, "Do you remember that time at the beach, when you went into the water with Gran-Gran and the waves were too big and she lifted you up over them? And you two were laughing so much and you said she was the coolest grandmother in the world?"
Mary Martha smiled. "Yes"
"That is how she will be in heaven," Rebecca said. — Tim Farrington

The sudden death of the leading man will cause change, making another man leader. Soon, but too late, the young man will attain high office. By land and sea, he will be feared. — Nostradamus

Unlike in our society, where we hide it, death surrounded medieval people. They had few hospitals, and so churches, poorhouses, and homes handled the dying and dead. Death was not a distant prospect at the end of a long, healthy life. It was integrated into ordinary experience. Medieval life was transitory, a journey through this world that often ended too soon and too abruptly. Death was often violent and unexpected. Extended death, through illness and in one's own bed, was actually a blessing. Death was part of everyday life; medieval people considered their deaths regularly. Indeed, as one medieval historian puts it, "One of the chief obsessions of medieval Christians was the need to make a 'good death.'"38 — Diana Butler Bass

In the lingering moments before you die your body releases DMT. The same drug that makes you dream. The same drug found in every living animal. It's not an evolutionary trick to make you survive. Your body is choosing to release this drug now because it believes your fate is too grim for you to comprehend. So you dream. You dream that everything will be fine. You dream that nothing happened at all. It's in this moment that your body sits across from you. It tells you 'looks like we're not gonna make it this time.' You sit around a fire and recollect the past before soon parting ways back to the atomic ether. Your body does this because it loves you. You have never met anyone like your body. Your body has been with you everyday, good and bad. It's even kept a journal of your life carved in scars. Your eyelashes always wiped the tears from your eyes. — Anonymous

You will catch your death, Wife." Joseph opened his cape and enveloped her in its folds, which - happily for her - necessitated that he hug her to his chest. "I will be back as soon as possible." "We have much to do in your absence." "I've never seen this house so thoroughly decorated for the holidays. I can't believe there's another thing to be done." Louisa felt his chin come to rest on her temple. "We have a great deal of baking to do if we're to send baskets to the tenants and neighbors. I must write to the agencies to find us another governess, and you've set me the task of finding a charity worthy of your coin. Then too, I am behind on my correspondence, and if all else fails, I have your library to explore. I will stay busy." "While I will freeze my backside off, haring about the realm without you. — Grace Burrowes

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more /the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort /to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires /and expires, too soon, too soon /before life itself — Joseph Conrad

The pity is not that there is a myth of Sylvia Plath but that the myth is not simply that of an enormously gifted poet whose death came carelessly, by mistake, and too soon. — Al Alvarez

Why should I say 'Tis too soon to seek for heaven and think of death'? A flower may fade before 'Tis noon and I this day may lose my breath. — J. Street

Time stops when someone dies. Of course it stops for them, maybe, but for the mourners time runs amok. Death comes too soon. It forgets the tides, the days growing longer and shorter, the moon. It rips up the calendar. You aren't at your desk or on the subway or fixing dinner for the children. You're reading People in a surgery waiting room, or shivering outside on a balcony smoking all night long. you stare into space, sitting in your childhood bedroom with the lobe on the desk... The bad part is that when you return to your ordinary life all the routines, the marks of the day, seem like senseless lies. all is suspect, a trick to lull us, rock us back into the placid relentlessness of time. — Lucia Berlin

Rest enough for the individual man, too much and too soon, and we call it death. But for man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet and all its winds and ways, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him, and, at last, out across immensities to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deep space, and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning. — H.G.Wells

He thought the fear of death was perhaps the root of all art, perhaps also of all things of the mind. We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, as transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do. — Hermann Hesse

More panic. More emergencies and disasters. Soon, emergencies fell into a sort of natural ranking: drop-everything emergencies, do-what-you-can emergencies, and you'll just-have-to-wait emergencies. Disasters, too, had their own ratings: unavoidable, did-the-best-we-could, my fault/your fault. Then there were godlike moments when a decision had to be made as to who most deserved to die. By the afternoon of her second day, Dtui wondered whether her heart had shrunk. She felt less. People had become less human. Death had become less of a tragedy. Her patients weren't blacksmiths or housewives, they were percentages. "With this little skill and this little pharmaceutical backup, this patient - let's call her number seven - has a forty percent chance of survival." It amazed and saddened her that, in order to do her job properly, she had to stop caring. — Colin Cotterill

Death had size an color and shape, texture and grace. There was something concrete to it. In that room, Death had come and gone, swept by, and left behind a mirage of life
it was possible, he realized, to find life in Death.
You are going to see what it is like, someday soon, being in a room full of the dying. They're always waiting, and in their sleep they are waiting most of all. When you're around them, you're waiting too, measuring all the time their breaths, their sighs. — Tea Obreht

The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters - it was something about the way they carried themselves, something that had broken too soon and had not mended, marking them in spite of their lightheartedness. — Jhumpa Lahiri

I'm so sad to hear the horrible news of Amy Winehouse's death. I'm so happy I knew you Amy ... Rest Well. Gone Too Soon ... we'll miss you!! — Usher

At the moment developing a nice little inoffensive cancer somewhere on dry land seemed infinitely preferable to what she was grimly convinced was soon to be her death by drowning way too far out at sea. — Dana Stabenow

She had been given a wonderful gift: life. Sometimes it was cruelly taken away too soon, but it's what you did with it that counted, not how long it lasted. — Cecelia Ahern

I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later - yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering? — Ludwig Van Beethoven

How soon do you want to move in?" "As soon as possible after school is out. In about six or seven weeks." "Are you a teacher too?" AJ asked. Shelby shook her head. "I have a first grader. And a three-year-old." "You're married?" As AJ's brown eyes flitted to her left hand, she self-consciously folded it into her waist. It'd been over a year since Gary's death, but she still wore her wedding band. More for her daughters' sakes than her own. "I was. — Johnnie Alexander

A fool I was to sleep at noon,
And wake when night is chilly
Beneath the comfortless cold moon;
A fool to pluck my rose too soon,
A fool to snap my lily.
My garden-plot I have not kept;
Faded and all-forsaken,
I weep as I have never wept:
Oh it was summer when I slept,
It's winter now I waken.
Talk what you please of future spring
And sun-warm'd sweet to-orrow:
Stripp'd bare of hope and everything,
No more to laugh, no more to sing,
I sit alone with sorrow. — Christina Rossetti

Something about the time of year depressed him deeply. Overcast skies and cutting wind, leaves falling, dusk falling, dark too soon, night flying down before you are ready. It's a terror. It's a bareness of the soul. He hears the rustle of nuns. Here comes winter in the bone. We've set it loose on the land. There must be some song or poem, some folk magic we can use to ease this fear. Skelly Bone Pete. Here it is in the landscape and sky. We've set it loose. We've opened up the ground and here it is. He took Interstate 45 south. He didn't want them to kill Leon. He felt a saturating sense of death, a dread in the soft filling of his bones, the suckable part, approaching Galveston now. — Don DeLillo

Trouble is you never knew her. Died too soon. It's always a pity when they die too soon, but maybe it's worse when they live too long. — Florence Stevenson

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

As an adult, I know about life and death. I know that good people can die too soon and bad ones can live too long. I know that life's not fair, and you take the bitter with the sweet and balance it all as best you can. — Elsie Hillman-Gordon

We were too greedy, grasping for immortality too soon. Perhaps if we had only been patient, content to wait, we would all have forever in the end. — Jessica Khoury

You are so young, Lyra, too young to understand this, but I shall tell you anyway and you'll understand it later: men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. We bear their children, who are witches if they are female, human if not; and then in the blink of an eye they are gone, felled, slain, lost. Our sons, too. When a little boy is growing, he thinks he is immortal. His mother knows he isn't. Each time becomes more painful, until finally your heart is broken. Perhaps that is when Yambe-Akka comes for you. She is older than the tundra. Perhaps, for her, witches' lives are as brief as men's are to us. — Philip Pullman

Subjectively, a gnat doubtless feels that its span of a few days is a reasonably long lifetime. A tortoise, with its span of several hundred years, would feel subjectively the same as the gnat. Not so long ago the life expectancy of the average man was about forty-five years. Today it is from sixty-five to seventy years, but subjectively the years are faster, and death, when it comes, is always all too soon. — Alan W. Watts

We all had dreams, regrets, accomplishments, people we'd loved and disappointed, and at some point, for each of us, those earthly concerns would fall away, our lives replaced in an instant by darkness or--if you believed--light. Sometimes deaths came too soon, sometimes not soon enough, and only for certain sinners did it come at a time of one's choosing. — Laura McHugh

Chanu went on."This artist, Abedin- he painted the famine which came to our country in 1942 and '43. These famous paintings hang now in a museum in Dhaka. I will take you to see them. In the famine, there was life and there was death. The people of Bangladesh died and the crows and the vultures lived. Abedin shows it all: the child who is too weak to walk or even to crawl, and the fat, black crows- how patiently they wait by the child for their next feast.
" This is how it was. Three million people died because of starvation. Can you imagine that? You cannot. Can you imagine something else? While the crows and vultures stripped our bones, the British, our rulers, exported grain from the country. This is something you cannot imagine, but now that you know it, you will never forget."
Chanu breathed deeply but his face remained still. "That's it," he said. "It will be time to go very soon. — Rohinton Mistry

Wherever in any society there are too many laws, it is a sure sign that that society will soon die. If you study the characteristics of India, you will find that no nation possesses so many laws as the Hindus, and national death is the result. — Swami Vivekananda

I was going to be a concert pianist, and when I was in high school, my parents were scared to death that I would focus too much on that too soon. And that I'd end up in some sort of dead end, and not fulfilling whatever potential they thought I had. — David Hyde Pierce

He thought, that all men, trickled away, changing constantly, until they finally dissolved, while the artist-created images remained unchangeably the same. He thought that the fear of death was perhaps the root of all art, perhaps also of all things of the mind. We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do. Perhaps the woman after whom the master shaped his beautiful Madonna is already wilted or dead, and soon he, too, will be dead; others will live in his house and eat at his table- but his work will still be standing hundreds of years from now, and longer. It will go on shimmering in the quiet cloister church, unchangingly beautiful, forever smiling with the same sad, flowering mouth. — Hermann Hesse

Seve was one of the most talented and exciting golfers to ever play the game. His creativity and inventiveness on the golf course may never be surpassed. His death came much too soon. — Tiger Woods

The death of a young wolfe doth never come too soon. — George Herbert

You are told from the moment you enter school that time is constant. It never changes. It is one of those set things in life that you can always rely on ... much like death and taxes. There will always be sixty seconds in a minute. There will always be sixty minutes in an hour. And there will always be twenty-four hours in a day.
Time was not fluctuating. It moved on at the same, constant pace at every moment in your life.
And that was the biggest load of crap that I'd ever been taught in school.
Truth was, time did fluctuate. It was easy to lose hours or even days in a blink of an eye. Other times, it was a struggle to get through a mere hour. It ebbed and flowed as relentlessly as the
tides, and just as powerfully too. The moments that you wanted to last forever were the ones that were washed away all too soon. The moments that you wanted to speed up, were slowed down to a snail's pace.
That was the truth of the matter. — S.C. Stephens

I liked Jim Morrison a lot as a person. He was this very poetic character, and death was always on his mind. And it showed up in his songs - I mean, almost every song he wrote had something to do with dying. He was an American treasure that went way too soon. — Alice Cooper

Ravenpaw might have made a fine warrior. His death has come too soon, and his loss will be felt by many of us for a long time." Empty words! thought Firepaw bitterly. What — Erin Hunter

What is the matter with you?" asked Shcherbatsky.
"Nothing much, but there is little to be happy about in this world."
"Little? You'd better come with me to Paris instead of going to some Mulhausen or other. You'll see how jolly it will be!"
"No, I have done with that; it is time for me to die."
"That is a fine thing!" said Shcherbatsky, laughing. "I am only just beginning to live."
"Yes, I thought so too till lately; but now I know that I shall soon die."
Levin was saying what of late he had really been thinking. He saw death and the apprroach of death in everything; but the work he had begun interested him all the more. After all, he had to live his life somehow, til death came. Everything for him was wrapped in darkness; but just because of the darkness, feeling his work to be the only thread to guide him through the darkness, he seized upon it and clung to it with all his might. — Leo Tolstoy