Quotes About Mortality

Where there is life, George, there is hope. Death is so terribly final. It will come soon enough to us all. I would hesitate to wish it hastened upon anyone.

Death—so feared and so dodged—was, once you faced it, the simplest thing going. In order to die, one merely had to stop attempting to live. One merely had to agree to vanish. If Alma simply remained still, pinned beneath the bulk of this unknown opponent, she would be effortlessly erased.

The war had invested me with an understanding that life is both dangerous and fleeting, and thus there is no point in denying yourself pleasure or adventure while you are here.

Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death

Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time

Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time - when pursued like a bandit - will behave like one; always remaining one county or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping out the back door of the motel just as you're banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you.

We all know that we'll die someday, but believing it is another thing entirely.

Sometimes I imagine a whole future made out of the moment after I've died and you are still sitting beside me.' 'You imagine I'll be there at your deathbed?' 'Yes.' 'And if I stayed away, would you live for ever?

Old women who live long enough mainly count the bodies, whether we want to or not.

This corner of history was as real as the tiled floor under our feet or the wooden tabletop under our fingers. The people to whom it had happened had actually lived and breathed and felt and thought and then died, as we did - as we would.

Of death I am as certain as any mortal, Ammerlin, but defeat is certain only in despair.

Fists and rocks and clubs can do a limited amount of harm, but a gun is entirely different. It makes a weak man feel like a hero and a strong man feel as if he is immortal, and it removes the last inhibition a killer might feel. You don't have to be close to a man to put a bullet in him. You don't have to have to see his face.

She felt locked away in herself, but ignorant of her identity, and often she awoke suddenly in the night, without any idea of who she was; thinking, firstly, that she had died.

One went on and on, never dreaming of the sudden dreadful day when the coverings were going to be dropped and one would see it was death after all, that it had been death all the time, death pretending, death waiting

Imagine, thought Scrap, having most of one's life at the wrong end. Imagine being old for two or three times as long as being young. Stupid, stupid.

remembered how I was only a speck after all in uncomfortably limitless space, of no account whatever in the general scheme of things, but with a horrid private capacity for being often and easily hurt; and how specks have a trick of dying, which I in my turn would presently do, and a fresh speck, not nearly so nice, as I hoped and believed, would immediately start up and fill my vacancy, perhaps so exactly my vacancy that it would even wear my gloves and stockings.

Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter.

Why do anything-- why wash my hair, why read Moby Dick, why fall in love, why sit through six hours of Nicholas Nickleby, why care about American intervention in Central America, why spend time trying to get into the right schools, why dance to the music when all of us are just slouching toward the same inevitable conclusion? The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death.

The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death. When I look ahead, all I can see is my final demise. And they say, But maybe not for seventy or eighty years. And I say, Maybe you, but me, I'm already gone.

The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death.

I hated him for not being depressed. He seemed a fool-- everyone who didn't feel like me was a fool. I alone knew the truth about life, knew that it was all a miserable downward spiral that you could either admit to or ignore, but sooner or later we were all going to die.

Death is senseless yet makes way for the living.

Anybody who doesn't want or need something is dead. And anyone who does need something can be hurt.

She looked from his face into the face of the dead man. She knew he was dead. She also knew that the dead speak, often in thunder.