Top 160 Caitlin Doughty Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “In death, corpses don’t hold themselves together. They no longer have to play by the living’s rules.”

— Caitlin Doughty

52. “The question is: how do we get to be that guy? The one who is facing his own death with complete calm, ready to get on with the moving-on.”

— Caitlin Doughty

53. “There is a freedom found in decomposition, a body rendered messy, chaotic, and wild.”

— Caitlin Doughty

54. “He had been a criminal, but he was also beautiful. I wasn’t there to judge, only to make him clean and dressed him in his powder-blue polyester suit with the ruffled tuxedo shirt. Holding up his arm to wash it, I paused: I was comfortable. I wanted other people to know that they could do this too. The washing, the comfort. This confident, stable feeling was available to anyone, if society could overcome the burden of superstition.”

— Caitlin Doughty

55. “Even if we recognize the benefits of another culture’s ritual, we often allow bias to undermine those feelings of acceptance.”

— Caitlin Doughty

56. “White blood cells have several days of activity left in them after the heart stops beating. If the blood is sterile and in good condition, cadaver blood donation is perfectly fine.”

— Caitlin Doughty

57. “As a business, the funeral industry has developed by selling a certain type of “dignity.” Dignity is having a well-orchestrated final moment for the family, complete with a well-orchestrated corpse. Funeral directors become like directors for the stage, curating the evening’s performance. The corpse is the star of the show and pains are taken to make sure the fourth wall is never broken, that the corpse does not interact with the audience and spoil the illusion.”

— Caitlin Doughty

58. “In many ways, women are death’s natural companions. Every time a woman gives birth, she is creating not only a life, but a death. Samuel Beckett wrote that women “give birth astride of a grave.” Mother Nature is indeed a real mother, creating and destroying in a constant loop.”

— Caitlin Doughty

59. “Many children and grandchildren of immigrants, have, like Sarah, found themselves severed from their family’s cultural rituals. The funeral system in the United States is notorious for passing laws and regulations interfering with diverse death practices and enforcing assimilation toward Americanized norms.”

— Caitlin Doughty

60. “Insist on going to the cremation, insist on going to the burial. Insist on being involved, even if it is just brushing your mother’s hair as she lies in her casket. Insist on applying her favorite shade of lipstick, the one she wouldn’t dream of going to the grave without. Insist on cutting a small lock of her hair to place in a locket or a ring. Do not be afraid. These are human acts, acts of bravery and love in the face of death and loss.”

— Caitlin Doughty

61. “Holding the space doesn’t mean swaddling the family immobile in their grief. It also means giving them meaningful tasks... A sense of purpose helps the mourner grieve. Grieving helps the mourner begin to heal.”

— Caitlin Doughty

62. “Death should be KNOWN. Known as a difficult mental, physical and emotional process, respected and feared for what it is.”

— Caitlin Doughty

63. “In my practice as a mortician I’ve found that both cleaning the body and spending time with it serves a powerful role in processing grief. It helps mourners see the corpse not as a cursed object, but as a beautiful vessel that once held their loved one.”

— Caitlin Doughty

64. “The psychoanalyst Otto Rank declared modern love a religious problem. As we grow increasingly secular and move away from the towns where we were born, we can no longer use religion or community to confirm our meaning in the world, so we seize a love partner instead, someone to distract us from the fact of our animal existence. 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

65. “Your cat might eat you after you die, but a vulture can’t wait to rip you to pieces and carry you off into the sky.”

— Caitlin Doughty

66. “Even if all we love will die, I still ached for a love like theirs, to be adored so completely. Had not Disney guaranteed all of us such an ending?”

— Caitlin Doughty

67. “There are many words a woman in love longs to hear. “I’ll love you forever, darling,” and “Will it be a diamond this year?” are two fine examples. But young lovers take note: above all else, the phrase every girl truly wants to hear is “Hi, this is Amy from Science Support; I’m dropping off some heads.”

— Caitlin Doughty

68. “This is a fantastic question. You, young person, are a pint-sized death revolutionary. Everyone should be on the lookout for new possibilities for our future corpses. Let’s hang out and brainstorm ideas sometime.”

— Caitlin Doughty

69. “Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create... The great achievements of humanity were born out of the deadlines imposed by death... if he lived forever, chances are he would be rendered boring, listless, and unmotivated, robbed of life’s richness, by dull routine.”

— Caitlin Doughty

70. “It is no surprise that the people trying so frantically to extend our lifespans are almost entirely rich, white men. Men who have lived lives of systematic privilege, and believe that privilege should extend indefinitely.”

— Caitlin Doughty

71. “He won’t be diving straight for the human flesh. But a cat has got to eat, and you are the person who feeds him. This is the cat-human compact. Death doesn’t free you from performing your contractual obligations.”

— Caitlin Doughty

72. “When the feelings would come, the emotions, the grief, I would push them down deeper, furious at myself for allowing them to peek through. My inner dialogue could be ruthless: You’re fine. You’re not starving, no one beats you. Your parents are still alive. There is real sadness in the world and yours is pathetic, you whiny, insignificant cow.”

— Caitlin Doughty

73. “As Kafka said, “The meaning of life is that it ends.”

— Caitlin Doughty

74. “We are all just future corpses.”

— Caitlin Doughty

75. “They say the way to figure out your porn-star name is to combine the name of your childhood pet with the name of the street that you grew up on. By that rule, my porn-star name would be Superfly Punalei. I have no intention of pursuing a career in pornography, but the name is almost reason enough to try.”

— Caitlin Doughty

76. “A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death. Overcoming our fears and wild misconceptions about death will be no small task, but we shouldn’t forget how quickly other cultural prejudices – racism, sexism, homophobia – have begun to topple in the recent past. It is high time death had its own moment of truth.”

— Caitlin Doughty

77. “The concept of the body as canvas becomes more powerful if the canvas is dead.”

— Caitlin Doughty

78. “Death had brought them all here for a kind of United Nations summit, a roundtable discussion on nonexistence.”

— Caitlin Doughty

79. “Today, not being forced to see corpses is a privilege of the developed world.”

— Caitlin Doughty

80. “Dying in the sanitary environment of a hospital is a relatively new concept. In the late nineteenth century, dying at a hospital was reserved for indigents, the people who had nothing and no one. Given the choice, a person wanted to die at home in their bed, surrounded by friends and family. As late as the beginning of the twentieth century, more than 85 percent of Americans still died at home.”

— Caitlin Doughty

81. “Mythologist Joseph Campbell wisely tells us to scorn the happy ending, “for the world as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.”

— Caitlin Doughty

82. “Our great-grandparents were told that babies were found under gooseberry bushes or cabbages; our children are likely to be told that those who have passed on... are changed into flowers, or lie at rest in lovely gardens.”

— Caitlin Doughty

83. “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

84. “I could see why the discovery of a six-foot-tall white girl in a polka-dot dress in the corner of a cave filled with skulls would be an Instagrammable moment.”

— Caitlin Doughty

85. “I understood that I had been given my atoms, the ones that made up my heart and toenails and kidneys and brain, on a kind of universal loan program. The time would come when I would have to give the atoms back, and I didn’t want to attempt to hold on to them through the chemical preservation of my future corpse. There.”

— Caitlin Doughty

86. “Making the choice to be naturally buried says, “Not only am I aware that I’m a helpless, fragmented mass of organic matter, I celebrate it. Vive la decay!”

— Caitlin Doughty

87. “All that surrounds us comes from death, every part of every city, and every part of every person.”

— Caitlin Doughty

88. “Such was the case with dead bodies. Every time you opened the box you could find anything from a ninety-five-year-old woman who died peacefully under home hospice care to a thirty-year-old man they found in a dumpster behind a Home Depot after eight days of putrefaction. Each person was a new adventure.”

— Caitlin Doughty

89. “The earth is expertly designed to take back what it has created.”

— Caitlin Doughty

90. “Good afternoon, here I am in your multimillion-dollar home covered in people dust and smelling vaguely of rot. Please pay me a large sum of money to mold the impressionable mind of your teenager.”

— Caitlin Doughty

91. “The headstone is placed on top of the whole affair, like the cherry on a death-denial sundae.”

— Caitlin Doughty

92. “The fastest-growing religion in America is “no religion” – a group that comprises almost 20 percent of the population in the United States. Even.”

— Caitlin Doughty

93. “It would be simple to allow open-air pyres in any community that wanted them. Yet government cemetery and funeral boards put up enormous resistance to the idea. Like the curmudgeonly neighbors in Crestone, they argue that outdoor pyres would prove too hard to control, and that they would impact air quality and the environment in unknown ways. Crestone has proven that open-air pyres can be inspected for safety compliance just like any industrial crematory.”

— Caitlin Doughty

94. “The earth is expertly designed to take back what it has created. Bodies left for carrion in enclosed, regulated spaces could be the answer to the environmental problems of burial and cremation. There is no limit to where our engagement with death can take us.”

— Caitlin Doughty

95. “Dead people look very, very dead. It is difficult to grasp what that means, since it’s unlikely that any of us will stumble across a roving pack of dead bodies in the wild. We live in a world where people rarely die in their homes, and if they do, they’re carted off to the funeral home the second after taking their last breath. If a North American has seen a dead body, that body has likely been embalmed, made up, and dressed in its Sunday finest by a funeral-home employee.”

— Caitlin Doughty

96. “Accepting death doesn’t mean you won’t be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like, “Why do people die?” and “Why is this happening to me?” Death isn’t happening to you. Death is happening to us all.”

— Caitlin Doughty

97. “Women’s bodies are so often under the purview of men, whether it’s our reproductive organs, our sexuality, our weight, our manner of dress. There is a freedom found in decomposition, a body rendered messy, chaotic, and wild. I relish this image when visualizing what will become of my future corpse.”

— Caitlin Doughty

98. “Because this ever-growing geriatric army reminds us of our own mortality, we push them into the shadows.”

— Caitlin Doughty

99. “Then again, death brings the inevitable loss of control. It seemed unfair that I could spend a lifetime making sure I was dressed well and saying all the right things only to end up dead and powerless at the end.”

— Caitlin Doughty

100. “That’s why all the questions in this book come from 100 percent ethically sourced, free-range, organic children.”

— Caitlin Doughty