Quotes About Mortality

I used to think death might be hidden somewhere on our bodies. Tucked behind the pupil like a coin, slid beneath the thumb nail, ribbon-wrapped "around a wrist bone. A sharp, dark sliver; a loose, pale pellet. Each person different. Each lifespan set. On the day of your death, it melts out through your entire body, a warm, broken bath bead. Until then, it waits-sealed and silent.

It is difficult to want to tell a grave that it is not immortal. It's so obvious at that point.

Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.

Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.

The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life.

After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.

Contemplating our mortality may give us the courage to unhook our lives from the more gratuitous of society's expectations

Our mortality does not call for panic, but for a sense of awe.

Because I have this thing about birthdays--they always remind me of death and forced jollity.

Among the thin birch trees and simple flowers on the rough land of the Pentland Hills is set a tablet, like an ancient tomb stone, on the base of which has been carved the resonant Latin phrase et in arcadia ego. The words are the voice of the tomb: I, death, am here, in the midst of life.

we shouldn't have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.

yet men die miserably every day

If we wanted to think about it,' wrote Proust, 'perhaps there is no really loving mother who could not, on her dying day, and often long before, address this reproach to her son. The truth is that as we grow older we kill all those who love us by the cares we give them, by the anxious tenderness we inspire in them and constantly arouse.

When I consider … the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me ['l'infinie immensité des espaces que j'ignore et qui m'ignorent'], I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? Pascal, Pensées

TIMMS: I don't see how we can understand it. Most of the stuff poetry's about hasn't happened to us yet. HECTOR: But it will, Timms. It will. And then you will have the antidote ready! Grief. Happiness. Even when you're dying. We're making your deathbeds here, boys. LOCKWOOD: Fucking Ada. HECTOR: Poetry is the trailer! Forthcoming attractions!

When dead she would exist only in the memories of people. She, who had never been subject to anyone would now be on the par with everybody else. Reading could not change that. Though writing might.

I used to wonder, why did God give children leprosy? Now I believe: God doesn't give anyone leprosy. He gives us, if we choose to use it, the spirit to live with leprosy, and with the imminence of death. Because it is in our own mortality that we are most Divine.

I used to wonder, why did God give children leprosy? Now I believe God doesn't give anyone leprosy. He gives us, if we choose to use it, the spirit to live with leprosy, and with the imminence of death, Because it is in our own mortality that we are most Divine.

I've come to believe that how we choose to live with pain, or injustice, or death... is the true measure of the Divine within us. ... I used to wonder, why did God give children leprosy? Now I believe: God doesn't give anyone leprosy. He gives us, if we choose to use it, the spirit to live with leprosy, and with the imminence of death. Because it is in our own mortality that we are most Divine.

With a shock, the trooper who had arrived to render aid to his fallen comrade recognized the one whose life was now bleeding out inside his armor. They had trained together. Shared meals, stories, experiences together. Now they were sharing death together.

As all foot soldiers have known for thousands of years, there's nothing noble about dying. Only an irritating finality.

The philosophy that accepts death must itself be considered dead, its questions meaningless, its consolations worn out.

The catchers delight in the moment so frozen but soon discover that the nightingale expires, its clear flutelike song diminishes to silence, the trapped moment grows withered and without life.

part of the grief was that each member of the family was mourning his own mortality.