Top 160 Caitlin Doughty Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “As Kafka said, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create.”

— Caitlin Doughty

2. “Death avoidance is not an individual failing; it’s a cultural one. Facing death is not for the faint-hearted. It is far too challenging to expect that each citizen will do so on his or her own.”

— Caitlin Doughty

3. “We can’t make death fun, but we can make learning about it fun. Death is science and history, art and literature. It bridges every culture and unites the whole of humanity!”

— Caitlin Doughty

4. “A cult leader alone in his beliefs is just a crazy dude with a beard.”

— Caitlin Doughty

5. “To be fair, death is hard! We love someone and then they die. It feels unfair. Sometimes death can be violent, sudden, and unbearably sad. But it’s also reality, and reality doesn’t change just because you don’t like it.”

— Caitlin Doughty

6. “The site of the whale fall turns into a decades-long version of “Be Our Guest” from Beauty and the Beast, a debauched, celebratory party where creatures devour the whale “course by course, one by one.” The whale is the epitome of a postmortem benefactor, part of an arrangement as beautiful as it is sensible – an animal dying and donating its body so that others may thrive. “Try the grey stuff, it’s delicious,” the carcass seems to say. The whale, in short, is a valuable necrocitizen.”

— Caitlin Doughty

7. “The silence of death, of the cemetery, was no punishment, but a reward for a life well lived.”

— Caitlin Doughty

8. “They say you can put lipstick on a pig and it’s still a pig. The same holds true for a dead body. Put lipstick on a corpse and you’ve played dress-up with a corpse.”

— Caitlin Doughty

9. “French existentialist Albert Camus said it best: “Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.”

— Caitlin Doughty

10. “Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create.”

— Caitlin Doughty

11. “Sifting through an urn of cremated remains you cannot tell if a person had successes, failures, grandchildren, felonies. “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” As an adult human, your dust is the same as my dust, four to seven pounds of greyish ash and bone.”

— Caitlin Doughty

12. “A culture of death denial. This denial takes many forms. Our obsession with youth, the creams and chemicals and detoxifying diets pushed by those who would sell the idea that the natural aging of our bodies is grotesque. Spending over $100 billion a year on anti-aging products as 3.1 million children under 5 starve to death. The denial manifests in our technology and buildings, which create the illusion that we have less in common with road kill than with the sleek lines of a MacBook.”

— Caitlin Doughty

13. “The Portuguese have a word with no equivalent in English, saudade, which indicates a longing, tinged with nostalgia, madness, and sickness over something you have lost.”

— Caitlin Doughty

14. “In writing The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford wasn’t trying to improve our relationship with death, she was trying to improve out relationship with the price point. That is where she went wrong. It was death that the public was being cheated out of by the funeral industry, not money. The realistic interaction with death and the chance to face our own mortality.”

— Caitlin Doughty

15. “We owe our very lives to the soil, and, as William Bryant Logan said, “the bodies we give it back are not payment enough.” Though, presumably, they are a start.”

— Caitlin Doughty

16. “Death drives every creative and destructive impulse we have as human beings. The closer we come to understanding it, the closer we come to understanding ourselves. This.”

— Caitlin Doughty

17. “One of the many lessons to emerge from Hurricane Katrina is that Americans are not accustomed to seeing unattended bodies on the streets of a major city.” Understatement of the century, Doctor.”

— Caitlin Doughty

18. “Some consider it gauche to visit so-called ruin porn, but I like to witness firsthand the way nature will declare war against our hubris, building in places unintended for human habitation.”

— Caitlin Doughty

19. “Death might appear to destroy the meaning in our lives, but in fact it is the very source of our creativity. As Kafka said, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create. Philosophers have proclaimed this for thousands of years just as vehemently as we insist upon ignoring it generation after generation.”

— Caitlin Doughty

20. “Your relationship to mortality is your own.”

— Caitlin Doughty

21. “Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create. Philosophers have proclaimed this for thousands of years just as vehemently as we insist upon ignoring it generation after generation.”

— Caitlin Doughty

22. “The great achievements of humanity were born out of the deadlines imposed by death.”

— Caitlin Doughty

23. “Looking mortality straight in the eyeis n easy feat. To avoid the exercise, we choose to stay blindfolded, in the dark as to the realities of death and dying. But ignorance is not bliss, only a deeper kind of terror.”

— Caitlin Doughty

24. “Exposing a young child to the realities of love and death is far less dangerous than exposing them to the lie of the happy ending. Children of the Disney princess era grew up with a whitewashed version of reality filled with animal sidekicks and unrealistic expectations.”

— Caitlin Doughty

25. “The Cremulator” sounds like a cartoon villain or the name of a monster truck but is in fact the name of what is essentially a bone blender, roughly the size of a kitchen crockpot. I.”

— Caitlin Doughty

26. “As long as the death was relatively sudden and the dead person was in otherwise good health, cadaver blood remains usable, as Dr. Shamov discovered, for up to six hours.”

— Caitlin Doughty

27. “Mother Nature, as Tennyson said, is “red in tooth and claw,” demolishing every beautiful thing she has ever created.”

— Caitlin Doughty

28. “I spent the first thirty years of my life devouring animals. So why, when I die, should they not have their turn with me? Am I not an animal?”

— Caitlin Doughty

29. “A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves. It is the only event in her life more awkward than her first kiss or the loss of her virginity. The hands of time will never move quite so slowly as when you are standing over the dead body of an elderly man with a pink plastic razor in your hand. Under.”

— Caitlin Doughty

30. “To my dearest friends So supportive, so gracious A morbid haiku.”

— Caitlin Doughty

31. “There has never been a time in the history of the world when a culture has broken so completely with traditional methods of body disposition and beliefs surrounding mortality.”

— Caitlin Doughty

32. “When deathcare became an industry in the early twentieth century, there was a seismic shift in who was responsible for the dead. Caring for the corpse went from visceral, primeval work performed by women to a “profession,” an “art,” and even a “science,” performed by well-paid men.”

— Caitlin Doughty

33. “Death might appear to destroy the meaning in our lives, but in fact it is the very source of our creativity. As Kafka said, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create.”

— Caitlin Doughty

34. “Ever since childhood, when I found out that the ultimate fate for all humans was death, sheer terror and morbid curiosity had been fighting for supremacy in my mind.”

— Caitlin Doughty

35. “I forgot to mention that Paul in person looks just as outlandish as his house – a claim I lay with the utmost aesthetic respect. He has thick dreadlocks, a beaded wizard’s beard, and tattoos. He traveled in a purple velvet frock coat and a top hat with an ermine skull attached to the brim. No one knows his age. He was once described by a mutual friend of ours as “an eighteenth-century highwayman reimagined by Tim Burton.” Paul refers to himself as “a cross between Prince and Vlad the Impaler.”

— Caitlin Doughty

36. “The hospital was a place where the dying could undergo the indignities of death without offending the sensibilities of the living.”

— Caitlin Doughty

37. “For those who do not wish to read realistic depictions of death and dead bodies, you have stumbled onto the wrong book.”

— Caitlin Doughty

38. “Why do we refuse to have these conversations, asking our family and friends what they want done with their body when they die? Our avoidance is self-defeating. By dodging the talk about our inevitable end, we put both our pocketbooks and our ability to mourn at risk.”

— Caitlin Doughty

39. “Dear God, Mike, reiterate all procedures and dispense positive reinforcement immediately!”

— Caitlin Doughty

40. “Holding the space is crucial, and exactly what we are missing. To hold the space is to create a ring of safety around the family and friends of the dead, providing a place where they can grieve openly and honestly, without fear of being judged.”

— Caitlin Doughty

41. “Muslim communities, it is considered a “meritorious deed” to wash and shroud the dead in a ritual washing known as Ghusl. The person who performs the Ghusl is chosen by the dying man or woman themselves.”

— Caitlin Doughty

42. “Holding the space doesn’t mean swaddling the family immobile in their grief. It also means giving them meaningful tasks. Using chopsticks to methodically clutch bone after bone and place them in an urn, building an altar to invite a spirit to visit once a year, even taking a body from the grave to clean and redress it: these activities give the mourner a sense of purpose. A sense of purpose helps the mourner grieve. Grieving helps the mourner begin to heal.”

— Caitlin Doughty

43. “Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land and their loyalty to high ideals.”

— Caitlin Doughty

44. “To future corpses of all ages.”

— Caitlin Doughty

45. “Though you may have never attended a funeral, two of the world’s humans die every second. Eight in the time it took you to read that sentence. Now we’re at fourteen. If this is too abstract, consider this number: 2.5 million. The 2.5 million people who die in the United States every year.”

— Caitlin Doughty

46. “The longer you spend doing something you don’t believe in, the more the systems of your body rebel.”

— Caitlin Doughty

47. “Unable to choose how I would die physically, I could only choose how I would die mentally. Whether my mortality caught me at twenty-eight or ninety-three, I made the choice to die content, slipped into the nothingness, my atoms becoming the very fog that cloaked the trees. The silence of death, of the cemetery, was no punishment, but a rewards for a life well lived.”

— Caitlin Doughty

48. “It was death that the public was being cheated out of by the funeral industry, not money. The realistic interaction with death and the chance to face our own mortality.”

— Caitlin Doughty

49. “Death avoidance is not an individual failing; it’s a cultural one. Facing death is not for the faint-hearted. It is far too challenging to expect that each citizen will do so on his or her own. Death acceptance is the responsibility of all death professionals – funeral directors, cemetery managers, hospital workers. It is the responsibility of those who have been tasked with creating physical and emotional environments where safe, open interaction with death and dead bodies is possible.”

— Caitlin Doughty

50. “No matter how many heavy-metal album covers you’ve seen, how many Hieronymus Bosch prints of the tortures of Hell, or even the scene in Indiana Jones where the Nazi’s face melts off, you cannot be prepared to view a body being cremated. Seeing a flaming human skull is intense beyond your wildest flights of imagination.”

— Caitlin Doughty