Top 160 Caitlin Doughty Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “I wanted to quiet my brain, to stop its incessant ruminations on the whys and hows of mortality.”

— Caitlin Doughty

102. “Death represented a failure of the medical system; it would not be permitted to upset the patients or their families.”

— Caitlin Doughty

103. “Mexican poet Octavio Paz famously said that while citizens of Western cities like New York, Paris, and London would “burn their lips” if they so much as uttered the word “death,” “the Mexican, on the other hand, frequents it, mocks it, caresses it, sleeps with it, entertains it; it is one of his favorite playthings and his most enduring love.”

— Caitlin Doughty

104. “Four thousand years ago, the Hindu Vedas described cremation as necessary for a trapped soul to be released from the impure dead body.”

— Caitlin Doughty

105. “With Q-tips and cotton I cleaned out Elena’s nose, ears, and mouth – a deeply unpleasant task. In the last throes of life, basic hygiene is often ignored. This is reasonable, but reason does not make the aftermath any less abhorrent. In moving the corpse, there is always a chance there may be a sudden burst of “purge” – a frothy, reddish-brown liquid expunged from the lungs and stomach. I did not envy nurses, whose living patients produced these disagreeable fluids every day.”

— Caitlin Doughty

106. “My own grandfather died after a long, debilitating bout with Alzheimer’s, including one memorable Christmas Eve where he managed to steal the car keys in the middle of the night and disappear for seven hours into downtown Honolulu. Ho-ho-horrible Christmas morning to you too, family.”

— Caitlin Doughty

107. “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

108. “The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran said that suicide is the only right a person truly has.”

— Caitlin Doughty

109. “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.”

— Caitlin Doughty

110. “In a moving – and often funny – memoir about working in a crematorium and other parts of the ‘death industry,’ Caitlin Doughty argues for radical change in how we face the details of death.”

— Caitlin Doughty

111. “Even if we move through the day finding creative ways to deny our mortality, no matter how powerful, loved, or special we may feel, we know we are ultimately doomed to death and decay.”

— Caitlin Doughty

112. “So why do these local governments continue to resist? The answer is as bleak as it is obvious: money. The average American funeral costs $8,000 to $10,000 – not including the burial plot and cemetery costs. A Crestone End of Life funeral costs $500, technically a donation “to cover wood, fire department presence, stretcher, and land use.”

— Caitlin Doughty

113. “Every time a woman gives birth, she is creating not only a life, but also a death.”

— Caitlin Doughty

114. “This isn’t for other people,” he explained. “This is for me. I’m terrified at the thought of my body decaying. I don’t want to die. I want to live forever.”

— Caitlin Doughty

115. “Even with the knowledge that they may die a slow, grueling death, many people still wish to remain kept alive at all costs. Larry Ellison, the third wealthiest man in America, has sunk millions of dollars into research aimed at extending life, because, he says, “Death makes me very angry. It doesn’t make sense to me.” Ellison has made death his enemy and believes that we should expand our arsenal of medical technology to end it altogether.”

— Caitlin Doughty

116. “A heart kept on ice can be transplanted up to four hours after death. A liver, ten. A particularly good kidney will last twenty-four hours, and sometimes as long as seventy-two if doctors use the right equipment after surgery. This is known as the “cold ischemic time.” Consider it the five-second rule, but for organs.”

— Caitlin Doughty

117. “The archetypal woman is as a bringer of life,” Sarah said, “but my body was a tomb.”

— Caitlin Doughty

118. “No matter what I did, Byron refused to act in a manner befitting a gentleman about to get his afternoon shave.”

— Caitlin Doughty

119. “Buddhists say that thoughts are like drops of water on the brain; when you reinforce the same thought, it will etch a new stream into your consciousness, like water eroding the side of a mountain.”

— Caitlin Doughty

120. “It is worth noting that the main players in the recomposition project are women – scientists, anthropologists, lawyers, architects. Educated women, who have the privilege to devote their efforts to righting a wrong.”

— Caitlin Doughty

121. “In spite of my fear of living, I chose not to die.”

— Caitlin Doughty

122. “Here’s the deal: It’s normal to be curious about death. But as people grow up, they internalize this idea that wondering about death is “morbid” or “weird.” They grow scared, and criticize other people’s interest in the topic to keep from having to confront death themselves.”

— Caitlin Doughty

123. “Since I first discovered sky burial I have known what I wanted for my mortal remains. In my view burial by animals is the safest, cleanest, and most humane way of disposing of corpses, and offers a new ritual that might bring us closer to the realities of death and our true place on this planet.”

— Caitlin Doughty

124. “Look at young people today in the presence of death... the first thing they do is call a funeral company. They act like helpless children. Such an embarrassing situation never arose in the past. The truly shocking part... is that young people today don’t seem to be embarrassed about it either. So not only do the young have zero death literacy, they don’t seem to mind.”

— Caitlin Doughty

125. “The tragedy of the women who were accused of witchcraft was that they never actually ground the bones of babies to help them fly to a midnight devil’s Sabbath. But they were unjustly killed for it anyway, burned alive at the stake. I, on the other hand, did grind the bones of babies. Often I was thanked by their poor parents for my care and concern. Things change.”

— Caitlin Doughty

126. “Most unsettling of all was the possibility that he was one of the rare creatures genuinely comfortable with bodies that have already moved into the stages of decomposition. In which case Mike was right, maybe this guy was my dream man.”

— Caitlin Doughty

127. “My next drone folk album will be called “The Cremation Reforms of Octavius B. Frothingham”.”

— Caitlin Doughty

128. “What remains consistent is that the pyre experience, for those present, is transformative.”

— Caitlin Doughty

129. “Encountering a corpse forced the man who would be Buddha to see life as a process of unpredictable and constant change. It was life without corpses, trapped behind the palace walls, that had prevented him from reaching enlightenment.”

— Caitlin Doughty

130. “At just the right time, a wooden staff is brought forth and used to crack open the dead man’s skull. At that moment, it is believed the man’s soul is released.”

— Caitlin Doughty

131. “As a general rule, if anyone ever asks you to put stockings on a ninety-year old deceased Romanian woman with oedema, your answer should be no.”

— Caitlin Doughty

132. “The most salacious stories – bones ground in a metal blender or torture-spike eye caps – had the power to disrupt people’s polite complacency about death. Rather than denying the truth, it was a revelation to embrace it, however disgusting it might sometimes be.”

— Caitlin Doughty

133. “Some animals, like vultures, can safely consume rotting flesh because of their highly corrosive stomach acid.”

— Caitlin Doughty

134. “To market the effectiveness of their services, the embalmers would display real preserved bodies they had plucked from the unknown dead, propping the corpses up on their feet outside the tents to better demonstrate their talents.”

— Caitlin Doughty

135. “I practiced what I would say if the worst occurred: Oh, yes, that conveyer belt always stops right there. This is the part where I take a sprint across the crematory and slam myself into the box containing your mother and shoot her into the flames. Common procedure, sir; worry not.”

— Caitlin Doughty

136. “The girl kept up at night by fear, crouched under the covers, believing if death couldn’t see her, then he couldn’t take her.”

— Caitlin Doughty

137. “Young people were braver and often more perceptive than the adults. And they weren’t shy about guts and gore. They wondered about their dead parakeet’s everlasting soul, but really they wanted to know how fast the parakeet was putrefying in the shoebox under the maple tree.”

— Caitlin Doughty

138. “The hat, worn in combination with the gold beads that hung from his pointy black beard, made him look like Genghis Khan on his way to a furry convention.”

— Caitlin Doughty

139. “The ICU was not the thrill ride I had expected. Turns out, they never called the high school student in from the reception desk to assist the doctors in lifesaving procedures. Instead, the job entailed hours of watching incredibly worried families wander in and out of the waiting room to use the restroom and retrieve cups of coffee.”

— Caitlin Doughty

140. “What little information we have comes from studies done in altitude chambers on unfortunate humans and even more unfortunate animals.”

— Caitlin Doughty

141. “A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death.”

— Caitlin Doughty

142. “Whereas before a religious leader might preside over a dying person and guide the family in grief, now it was doctors who attended to a patient’s final moments. Medicine addressed life-and-death issues, not appeals to heaven.”

— Caitlin Doughty

143. “Sometimes I think about my childhood would have been different if I had been introduced directly to death. Made to sit in his presence, shake his hand. Told that he would be an intimate companion, influencing my every move and decision, whispering, “You are food for worms” in my ear. Maybe he would have been a friend.”

— Caitlin Doughty

144. “But ignorance is not bliss, only a deeper kind of terror. We.”

— Caitlin Doughty

145. “Strange, since corpse parts are used in medicine all the time. I found out that one of my friends has tissue from a cadaver butt in her mouth. Turns out quite a few people do. When gums are receding, due to teeth grinding or health issues, they can be rebuilt by implanting cells from the butt of a human cadaver. So, cadaver butt is in, but cadaver blood is out.”

— Caitlin Doughty

146. “What dignity translates to, more often than not, is silence, a forced poise, a rigid formality.”

— Caitlin Doughty

147. “Hundreds of years ago, across Europe, people afraid of witchcraft would seal cats inside the walls of their homes, believing they would ward off supernatural threats.”

— Caitlin Doughty

148. “We know that media vita in morte sumus or, “in the midst of life we are in death.” We begin dying the day we are born, after all.”

— Caitlin Doughty

149. “In many ways, women are death’s natural companions. Every time a woman gives birth, she is creating not only a life, but also a death. Samuel.”

— Caitlin Doughty

150. “A corpse doesn’t need you to remember it. In fact, it doesn’t need anything anymore-it’s more than happy to lie there and rot away. It is you who needs the corpse. Looking at the body you understand the person is gone, no longer an active player in the game of life. Looking at the body you see yourself, and you know that you, too, will die. The visual is a call to self-awareness. It is the beginning of wisdom.”

— Caitlin Doughty