There’s a reason why this prison is the worst hell on earth… Hope. Every man who has ventured here over the centuries has looked up to the light and imagined climbing to freedom. So easy… So simple… And like shipwrecked men turning to sea water from uncontrollable thirst, many have died trying. I learned here that there can be no true despair without hope.

1. Ernest Hemingway: “Goodnight my kitten.” Spoken to his wife before he killed himself.
2. Jane Austen: “I want nothing but death.” In response to her sister, Cassandra, who was asking her if she wanted anything.
3. J.M Barrie: “I can’t sleep.”
4. L. Frank Baum: “Now I can cross the shifting sands.”
5. Edgar Allan Poe: “Lord help my poor soul.”
6. Thomas Hobbes: “I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap into the dark,”
7. Alfred Jarry: “I am dying…please, bring me a toothpick.”
8. Hunter S. Thompson: “Relax — this won’t hurt.”
9. Henrik Ibsen: “On the contrary!”
10. Anton Chekhov: “I haven’t had champagne for a long time.”
11. Mark Twain: “Good bye. If we meet—” Spoken to his daughter Clara.
12. Louisa May Alcott: “Is it not meningitis?” Alcott did not have meningitis, though she believed it to be so. She died from mercury poison.
13. Jean Cocteau: “Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking towards me, without hurrying.”
14. Washington Irving: “I have to set my pillows one more night, when will this end already?”
15. Leo Tolstoy: “But the peasants…how do the peasants die?”
16. Hans Christian Andersen: “Don’t ask me how I am! I understand nothing more.”
17. Charles Dickens: “On the ground!” He suffered a stroke outside his home and was asking to be laid on the ground.
18. H.G. Wells: “Go away! I’m all right.” He didn’t know he was dying.
19. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “More light.”
20. W.C. Fields: “Goddamn the whole fucking world and everyone in it except you, Carlotta!” “Carlotta” was Carlotta Monti, actress and his mistress.
21. Voltaire: “Now, now, my good man, this is no time for making enemies.” When asked by a priest to renounce Satan.
22. Dylan Thomas: “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies…I think that’s the record.”
23. George Bernard Shaw: “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”
24. Henry David Thoreau: “Moose…Indian.”
25. James Joyce: “Does nobody understand?”
26. Oscar Wilde: “Either the wallpaper goes, or I do.” 
27. Bob Hope: “Surprise me.” He was responding to his wife asking where he wanted to be buried.
28. Roald Dahl’s last words are commonly believed to be “you know, I’m not frightened. It’s just that I will miss you all so much!” which are the perfect last words. But, after he appeared to fall unconscious, a nurse injected him with morphine to ease his passing. His actual last words were a whispered “ow, fuck”
29. Salvador Dali hoped his last words would be “I do not believe in my death,” but instead, they were actually, “Where is my clock?”
30. Emily Dickinson: “I must go in, the fog is rising.”