Quotes About Mortality

When all you have is a shard of papyrus with a few words on it...or a single line quoted in somebody else's text, the potential of what's lost haunts you. It's like the boys who died in Korea. We grieve them the most because we never saw the men they would become....How much easier it was to be a hero when you no longer walked the earth.

a world warmer by two degrees centigrade, 150 million more people—most of them poor—will die from air pollution alone. Not violence, not floods, just inferior air.

Between 365 million and one billion birds die just from crashing into windows in the United States each year.

Open your eyes, and see what you can see with them before they close forever

You'll die of old age, we'll die of climate change.

He thinks of the old broken miners he'd see in Zollverein, sitting in chairs or on crates, not moving for hours, waiting to die. To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it's a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.

Open your eyes, concludes the man, and see what you can with them before they close forever, and

I'm only alive because I have not yet died.

Another hour, another day, another year. Lump of carbon no larger than a chestnut. Mantled with algae, bedecked with barnacles. Crawled over by snails. It stirs among the pebbles.

Moonlight: his ropy tail, his shaggy cloven hooves. God knits him together in the womb of Beauty beside his brother and he lives for three winters and dies hundreds of miles from home and for what? Tree lies down in the reeds and fouls the air around him and Omeir wonders what the animal understands and what will happen to Moonlight's two beautiful horns and every breath sends another crack through his heart.

Open your eyes and see what you can before they close forever.

Men lie injured and dying between the old headstones: Macedonians, Albanians, Wallachians, Serbians, some in so much agony that they seem reduced to something less than human, as though pain were a leveling wave, a mortar troweled over everything that person once was.

For as long as we have been a species, whether with medicine or technology, by gathering power, by embarking on journeys, or by telling stories, we humans have tried to defeat death. None of us ever has.

Doesn't everything," he says, "die at last and too soon?

Every cell in a dying body winks out at its own pace.

What is death, after all, but a cessation of involvement with the world, a departure from those you love, and those who love you?

They die so easily, he boasts. It is like sprinkling salt onto the backs of slugs.

We are dust only after all our water evaporates.

We all go back to the mud. Until we rise again in ribbons of light.

We are all just tenants here. Even the one thing we believe is ours—the time we're given on earth—does that belong to us?

but one of the dying's imperatives is to make the living see them. This is nobody's fault, but it is everybody's burden.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.

Beneath the Moon there is nothing that is not mortal and doomed to decay, except for the souls which, by the grace of the gods, have been conferred on humankind. But above the Moon everything is eternal.