Quotes About Mortality

Because if the whole universe could just explode out of Nothing and then just Be, don't you see that the opposite could also be true? That it is possible to implode and Un-Be as well as to explode and Be? That it's possible to implode and Un-Be as well as to explode and Be? That all human beings, Napoleon Bonaparte, for example, or the emperor Akbar, or Angelina Jolie or your father, could simply return to Nothing once they're...done? In a sort of Little, by which I mean personal, Un-Bang?

I sigh therefore I am . . . In the beginning and unto the end was and is the lung: divine afflatus, baby's first yowl, shaped air of speech, staccato gusts of laughter, exalted airs of song, happy lover's groan, unhappy lover's lament, miser's whine, crone's croak, illness's stench, dying whisper, and beyond and beyond the airless, silent void. A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.

we can best understand the nature of this culture if we say that it found its truest mirror in a corpse

All over the world great writers were dying young: Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, and now here was Angela wrestling with the Reaper. A fatwa was not the only way to die. There were older types of death sentence that still worked very well.

Will you love me when I get sick and start to fail, to descend, as is inevitable, toward death?" he said. "Do you really want to nurse a dying man and have to grieve for all the love you wasted on him?" "Love is never a waste," she said.

But the truth was that she still felt the past moving like a thrombosis in the blood. It might reach her heart and kill her one of these days.

Even great Bellow, he saw in the Times, had been unclear on the question of the heart, and had asked on his deathbed: "Was I a man, or was I a jerk?

I had thought myself free of him, but that was vanity. Death shows us the power of blood.

just as we cannot write the stories of our own deaths, which is our tragedy, to be stories whose endings can never be known, not even to ourselves, because we are no longer there to know them.

Human life was lived between two chasms, a Russian writer had said, the one that preceded our birth, "the cradle rocks above an abyss," and the one we were all "heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought. I have to go back soon, she told herself, I need to reclaim it or it will be gone, I will be gone from it, and nobody will mourn my loss. She thought about Wile E. Coyote rushing out over the chasm and not falling until he looked down. That's me, her weak voice thought, and then her strong voice answered, Then don't look down.

Anyone in the vicinity of a dying man was utterly at his mercy. Punches delivered from a deathbed left bruises that never faded.

Yaln?z benim (renkli ve gösteriÅŸli olmas?na raÄŸmen) pek uzun say?lamayacak hayat?m?n sonunda, çivileyip asacak tezlerim taze bitti. Hayat da çarm?ha çivilenmekten pek farkl? deÄŸil zaten.

He was a heartless monster, she told him; did he not understand—O abominable one!—that human life was short and that each day of love stolen from it was a crime against life itself?

I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape it. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape it. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape it. There is no way to escape being separated from everyone I love, and all that is dear to me. My actions are my only true belongings. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

I'm too young to die. The fallacy of youth. Death had never cared about the ages of those it claimed.

Ci offendiamo facilmente, mortalmente. Siamo arrivati a pensare che offendersi sia uno dei diritti fondamentali. Pochissime cose apprezziamo più della nostra indignazione, che ci dà, a parer nostro, la giustificazione morale. Dall'alto di questa posizione possiamo sparare ai nostri nemici e infliggere loro gravi perdite. Siamo fieri della nostra suscettibilità.

how he was going to die for his verses, but could not find it in himself to call the death-sentence unjust.

What one believes happens after death dictates much of what one believes about life, and this is why faith-based religion, in presuming to fill in the blanks in our knowledge of the hereafter, does such heavy lifting for those who fall under its power. A single proposition – you will not die – once believed, determines a response to life that would be otherwise unthinkable.

Every person you have ever met, every person you will pass in the street today, is going to die. Living long enough, each will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?

If your denial of death is sufficiently explicit and persuasive that you believe death isn't real, then what you deny isn't death but the significance of life.

Living, dying, and thinking... they're all team sports.

There are two things you can be certain of: dying and getting the arse as a football coach.

If you think, you are late. If you are late, you use strength. If you use strength you get tired. And if you get tired, you die!