Quotes About Mortality

Loving our parents, we bring them into us. They inhabit us. For a long time I believed that I could not bear to live without Mom and Dad—I could not bear to "outlive" them—for to be a daughter without parents did not seem possible to me.

A library is a mausoleum: books of the dead. And so many. And so many secrets lost to him forever. Hadn't time for it all and if he couldn't do it all then there was no point in doing any of it. For such an effort would be like drawing a single breath in the knowledge that you would not draw another. You were fated to suffocate, to die. You were fated to become extinct.

Living's immediacy, you go full sail, you're in a fever of motion. Until it's safe and past and done and dead and you can say, like waking from a dream, Yes I was happy then, yes now it's all over I can see I was happy then. Maybe that's the advantage of dying?

First thing is when your on Death Row long enough you don't ask WHO AM I because you have learnt nobody would be there anyway.

Oh, it's a terrible, cruel thing—first you're young, and that takes up such a long time you think it's forever, then suddenly you're not young, and you never get used to it—and, oh dear, there's just the one way out." ? Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys

A dog's life is a speeded-up version of your own. After a while, you can hardly bear to be a witness.

she'd studied herself in mirrors half her life in despair and hope knowing it's power you need, oh, Jesus, power; if you're beautiful you'll have it over other people, over men, you'll be loved, desired, never have to die.

It is that time he cannot realize—he is still alive. He is laughing and his face is bright-glaring with happiness because he is alive and cannot imagine any time when he will be not-alive for (it is said) no animal can comprehend its own death.

La desesperación es una enfermedad del espíritu, del yo, y puede adoptar, en consecuencia, tres formas: la desesperación de no ser consciente de tener un yo; la desesperación de no querer ser uno mismo; la desesperación de querer ser uno mismo.   SØREN KIERKEGAARD, La enfermedad mortal     La muerte de una hermosa niña de

Nobody on their death bed ever worried about their bank balance.

17The world is passing away, and with it its lusts [the shameful pursuits and ungodly longings]; but the one who does the will of God and carries out His purposes lives forever.

Death, I now see, may not come when I am 85 and weary, or after I have solved all my problems or met all my deadlines. It will come whenever it damn well pleases; all I can control is the time between. So when I see something I want, I grab it. If the tulips are particularly yellow, I buy them.

This world presses in on us from every side; it scatters fistfuls of our dust across the land and takes bits and pieces of us as if to water the earth with our blood. What did we do? Why have our souls rotted away?

La muerte no se reparte como si fuera un bien.

Sospirava molto - Quello è male. Ogni sospiro è come un sorso di vita che se va.

Eso es malo. Cada suspiro es como un sorbo de vida del que uno se deshace.

Vsak vzdih je izdih življenja, ki gre iz tebe.

He was used to seeing some part of him die every day. He watched the leaves falling from the Paradise tree. They all follow the same road. They all go away.

Este mundo, que lo aprieta a uno por todos lados, que va vaciando puños de nuestro polvo aquí y allá, deshaciéndonos en pedazos como si rociara la tierra con nuestra sangre. ¿Qué hemos hecho? ¿Por qué se nos ha podrido el alma?

Ya descansaremos bien a bien cuando estemos muertos.

Hace calor aquí- dije. -Si, y esto no es nada- me contestó el otro. Cálmese. Ya lo sentirá más fuerte cuando lleguemos a Comala. Aquello está sobre las brasas de la tierra, en la mera boca del infierno. Con decirle que muchos de los que allí se mueren, al llegar al infierno regresan por su cobija.

Nancy Mairs, in Remembering the Bone House

Wake up and smell the corpses.

You take the shit; you make an art of it; then, you die.