Quotes About Mortality

How terrible a thing time is.

It is not death, but dying, which is terrible.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

It's silly to keep people alive who have a terrible disease.

Most people come to fear not death itself, but the many terrible ways of dying.

A terrible thing about getting oldish is that your friends start dying, and in the last ten years I have lost seven or eight of my closest.

We keep making the same mistakes as a species, and you can usually draw it back to the fact that we are all terrified of dying. We also all think that we are going to escape it until we get to 65!

If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we'd be terrified.

I'm terrified I'm about to die, or that all the people I love are about to die, every second of every day.

I've always been terrified of dying, always. It was a concern of mine long before it had to be.

Once you realise that heroes die, everything becomes that much more terrifying.

I'm not very interested in charting a day-to-day familiar reality. I'm always looking for territory in which to explore the BIG subjects, the life-or-death stories.

To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

I've done a lot of death cartoons - tombstones, Grim Reaper, illness, obituaries... I'm not great at analyzing things, but my guess is that maybe the only relief from the terror of being alive is jokes.

I'm not a luddite. Science, computers, medicine, they're all great. But nature is context. That which we can't control. Its constant mortality and immortality is an answer to the terror of finite existence. It reassures the soul.

The main thing is not to be dead.

We are reluctant to believe that all of what we are gets erased in death; we seam to ourselves deeper than the mere stoppage of life can reach. Yet the writings on "survival" and the evidence for it seem jejune. Perhaps whatever continues is unable to communicate with us, or has more important things to do, or things we'll find out soon enough anyway—how much energy, after all, do we devote to signaling to fetuses that there is a realm to follow?

Don't smoke too much, drink too much, eat too much or work too much. We're all on the road to the grave–but there's no need to be in the passing lane.

No one's death comes to pass without making some impression, and those close to the deceased inherit part of the liberated soul and become richer in their humaneness.

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something (All The King's Men)

But someone I know is dying-- And though one might say glibly, "everyone is," The different pace makes the difference absolute.

Human beings, in other words, are always already dead. This proleptic knowledge of finitude predetermines their most creative as well as their most destructive dispositions.

It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.