Quotes About Mortality

What do they find then, that this lover has committed the unpardonable error of not being able to exist—and they come down with a dummy in their arms. God's last round, shadow-boxing, that the heart may be murdered and swept into that quiet still place where it can sit and say: 'Once I was, now I can rest.

It's a gruesome thing that man learns only by what he has between the one leg and the other! Oh, that short dangle! We corrupt mortality by its industry.

Man is born as he dies, rebuking cleanliness;

Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.

To our friends,' he answered, 'we die every day, but to ourselves we die only at the end.

We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.

For a lover who dies, no matter how forgotten, will take somewhat of you to the grave.

Don't hate or fear to death because death is the only one who set us free from life's slavery...

The French phrase "femme fatale" literally means "deadly woman," which understates the human embodiment of lust and peril, that intoxicating allure of sex and death that makes these creatures so fascinating. The femme fatale is a sleek and sensuous creature, dangerous either physically or emotionally to her victims.

To love is to be vulnerable: if God loves, then God is mortal.

All life is dying life – including the life of God.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.

When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.

Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.

oh i should worry and fretdeath and i will coquettethere s a dance in the old dame yettoujours gai toujours gai

Each man's death was his own. He may not choose the time or place, he may not even realize that he was dying, but no two departures from this life were ever perfectly identical.

Life is trying to kill us," she says. Life, Malone thinks, is trying to kill everyone. And it always succeeds. Sometimes before you die.

Some aspects of success seem rather silly as death approaches.

The simple question 'What color do you want to paint that upstairs room?' might, if we follow things to their logical conclusions, be stated: 'How do I live, knowing that I will one day die and leave you?

Jane has been dead for more than two decades. Earlier this year I grieved for her in a way I had never grieved before. At eighty-six, I was sick and thought I was dying. Twenty and twenty-one years ago, every day of her dying for eighteen months, I stayed by her side. It was miserable that Jane should die so young, and it was redemptive that I could be with her every hour of every day. Last February I grieved again, this time that she would not sit over me as I died.

If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.

I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.