“It’s okay to talk about it. Death is so normal, I don’t know why everyone gets so hung up about it. We all have to deal with it. Most people that you talk to have lost someone, but nobody talks about it.”

“Is anyone who’s supposed to be dead actually dead?”

“Anyway, lots of warrior tribes think that when they die, they go to a heavenly land somewhere,” said the toad. “You know, where they can drink and fight and feast forever? So maybe this is theirs.””But this is a real place!””So? That’s what they believe. Besides, they’re only small. Maybe the universe is a bit crowded and they have to put heavens anywhere there’s room? I’m a toad, so you’ll appreciate that I’m having to guess a lot here.”

“It was all very strange, Mr. Gray thought, as he wiped the coffee canister clean with a sponge. Very, very mysterious. You were born; you lived a whole life; and at the end, you wound up in a coffee canister.”Ah, well,” he said out loud quietly. “That’s just the way things are. Life’s a funny business.” Death, he supposed, was the punch line.”

“A penny for my thoughts, oh no, I’ll sell them for a dollarThey’re worth so much more after I’m a gonerAnd maybe then you’ll hear the words I been singin’Funny when you’re dead how people start listenin”

“I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”

“For Death is the meaning of night;The eternal shadowInto which all lives must fall, All hopes expire.”

“Shinji slowly fell forward onto his face. Debris bounced up on impact. It took less than thirty seconds for the rest of his body to die. The memento of his beloved uncle–the earring worn by the woman he loved–was now stained with the blood running down Shinji’s left ear, reflecting the glow from the red flames of the farm building.And so the boy known as the Third Man, Shinji Mimura, was dead.”

“Charitably… I think… sometimes, perhaps, one must change or die. And, in the end, there were, perhaps, limits to how much he could let himself change.”

“For 3 million you could give everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we could dig a hole so deep we could hand her over to Satan in person. (on Margaret Thatcher)”

“I just got a rather nasty shock. In looking for something or other I came across the fact that one of my cats is about to be nine years old, and that another of them will shortly thereafter be eight; I have been labouring under the delusion they were about five and six. And yesterday I happened to notice in the mirror that while I have long since grown used to my beard being very grey indeed, I was not prepared to discover that my eyebrows are becoming noticeably shaggy. I feel the tomb is just around the corner. And there are all these books I haven’t read yet, even if I am simultaneously reading at least twenty…”

“What is it that dies? A log of wood dies to become a few planks. The planks die to become a chair. The chair dies to become a piece of firewood, and the firewood dies to become ash. You give different names to the different shapes the wood takes, but the basic substance is there always. If we could always remember this, we would never worry about the loss of anything. We never lose anything; we never gain anything. By such discrimination we put an end to unhappiness. (118-119)”

“What is the difference between a living thing and a dead thing? In the medical world, a clinical definition of death is a body that does not change. Change is life. Stagnation is death. If you don’t change, you die. It’s that simple. It’s that scary.”

“I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression ‘killing time.’ It’s a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.”

“Why is it we have so little choice? We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated – defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Sill, to cease living is unacceptable.”