Quotes About Mortality

Maybe the key to acclaim is simply to live long enough. But then, maybe acclaim is the foyer to death.

Smart enough to see that you're a sack of rotting meat wrapped around a little sewage tube that's going to give out in—what? Another few thousand sunrises?

The tree will outlive, by a hundred years and more, the man who has never heard of it.

What else is there to say to a bear? 'Apologize!' I tell him. People very stupid. They forget everything--where they come from, where they go. I say, 'Don't worry. People leaving this world very soon. Then the bear get top bunk to himself again.

His appetite for human self-regard is dead.

They can't see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.

I tell him, people very stupid. They forget everything—where they come from, where they go. I say: Don't worry. Human being leaving this world, very soon. Then the bear get top bunk to himself again.

Muziek dient ertoe ons eraan te herinneren dat we maar heel kort een lichaam hebben.

But people have no idea what time is. They think it's a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can't see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.

What else is there to say, to a bear? "Apologize! I tell him, people very stupid. They forget everything—where they come from, where they go. I say: Don't worry. Human being leaving this world, very soon. Then the bear get top bunk to himself again.

He's reached the age when dead is the new normal.

Death is everywhere, oppressive and beautiful.

the family of filoviruses comprised Marburg along with two types of a virus called Ebola. The Ebolas were named Ebola Zaire and Ebola Sudan. Marburg was the mildest of the three filovirus sisters. The worst of them was Ebola Zaire. The kill rate in humans infected with Ebola Zaire is nine out of ten. Ninety percent of the people who come down with Ebola Zaire die of it. Ebola Zaire is a slate wiper in humans.

How ethical is it to let these animals go a long time before they die?

Only very rarely does an animal living under natural conditions in the wild die of old age.

Generosity is meaningless to a god, who never suffers shortage or want; courage is meaningless to a god, who is immortal and can never suffer permanent injury, and so on. Our virtues and our dignity arise from our mortality, our humanity—and not from any success in being God.

Human unhappiness is evidence of our immortality.

Non basta una vita One life isn't enough

In my own way, I too was unable to execute his wishes. He'd begged me before I left that afternoon when he'd tried to go home to stay away from the hospital, now that it was just a matter of time. But I couldn't, and toward the end I saw in his eyes each time that I appeared beside his bed that he was glad to see me, and scared as hell of dying alone. Which he ended up doing anyway. The

a knowledge of how to live was a knowledge of how to die.

You can't make me do nothing but die!

How could one find out about life when one was about to die?

Outside of time and space, he looked down upon the earth and saw that each fleeting day was a day of dying, that men died slowly with each passing moment as much as they did in war, that human grief and sorrow were utterly insufficient to this vast, dreary spectacle.

Esta foi assim a última lição que Francisca me ensinou: que eu, John Zarco, não tinha qualquer poder mágico. Não havia canções de amor suficientemente poderosas para derrotar a morte. Todas as coisas mais importantes estavam fora do nosso controlo.