Quotes About Mortality

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

We won't all disappear on a remote country road in the Monroe Valley, but like The Admiral and his wife we are all going into the dark. Some of us hope that before we do we have been honest enough to scream back at the fates. Or if we never did it ourselves, that someone, derelict or poet, did it for us once in some euphonic way our inadequate capacity for love did not deny our hearing.

We won't all disappear on a remote country road in the Monroe Valley, but like The Admiral and his wife we are all going into the dark. Some of us hope that before we do we have been honest enough to scream back at the fates. Or if we never did it ourselves, that someone, derelict or poet, did it for us once in some euphonic way our inadequate capacity for love did not deny our hearing. * From Brewster Ghiselin, Against the Circle (New York: Dutton, 1946), p. 60.

You live that long, things start happening to you. You get too impressed with yourself. Ends up, you think you're God. Suddenly the little people, thirty, maybe forty years old, well, they don't really matter anymore. You've seen whole societies rise and fall, and you start to feel you're standing outside it all, and none of it really matters to you. And maybe you'll start snuffing those little people, just like picking daisies, if they get under your feet.

The dead think they can get away with anything because you'll feel sorry for them. If you play cards with the dead, make sure you deal and don't let them buy you drinks. They'll slip you a formaldehyde roofie and pry the gold fillings out of your teeth.

Vices shouldn't be safe. They're what remind us we're alive and mortal.

To the dead. Let's think of them always, but not join them too soon.

Death smiles at us all and all a man can do is smile back.

All are equal in the grave.

Here's to all the guys better looking than us. May they all die first.

I believe we're going to be dead a lot longer than we're alive, so anything you like you should do to excess. I believe America lost its soul when they took the big-block V-8 out of Mustangs. I believe Hollywood should stop remaking A Star Is Born.

Dying isn't the worst thing in the world, but dying because you're stupid is.

I guess with Heaven closed to mortals, it's been on my mind. Poor slobs living so-called good lives, praying for Heaven and ending up eyeball-deep in shit with all the other losers." "It sounds like you actually feel sorry for the righteous." "Fuck the righteous. I just don't like con jobs. You angels built Heaven and Hell, but you don't want kids playing on your lawns, so you locked everybody out.

The closer I get, the shittier Abbot looks. His hair is long and he seems weak and frail. He was never a big guy and it looks like he lost twenty pounds and his surgical mask droops on his face. With his bony cheekbones, when he smiles he looks like a well-dressed corpse.

The moment you will be most stiff is when you die - you never get stiffer than that. So you've got to sleep well, eat well and keep moving.

The thing about being dead, Mr. Lehman, is that there's no future in it.

Life is not yours to take.

Our culture's quest to hide death behind a facade of denial has made fools and pretended immortals of us all. Perhaps it would be more helpful and liberating to begin each day by repeating the words of Crazy Horse, "Today is a good day to die.

remember that death is the punctuation at the end of the sentence. It's up to us to decide what kind of punctuation it will be—a period or an exclamation point.

It's a shame people don't have the advantage of knowing when their time's up..They would stop trading time for trinkets –

Of all, clockmakers and morticians should bear the keenest sense of priority - their lives daily spent in observance of the unflagging procession of time...and the end thereof.

None of us has a death wish.

between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.' " She looked up.

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.