Quotes About Mortality

The rest of his life. How long that time had once felt to him. How quickly it has sped by. How much of it has been wasted. How soon it will be over.

What pays for all this? Grief in the face of inevitable death. The wish to stop time. The human condition.

Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.

Dead was not an absolute concept to her. Some people were more dead than others, and finally it was a matter of opinion who was dead and who was alive, so it was best not to discuss such a thing.

That's the kind of stories I know. Sad ones. Anyway, taken to it's logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies.

He would have died soon, but more painfully. Anyway, it was Urban Bloodshed Limitation. First rule: limit bloodshed by making sure that none of your own gets spilled.

My life had a tendency to spread, get flabby, to scroll and festoon like the frame of a baroque mirror, which came from following the line of least resistance. I wanted my death, by contrast, to be neat and simple, understated, even a little severe, like a Quaker church or the basic black dress with a single strand of pearls...

I shiver: whose feet are walking on my grave? Time, I plead to the air, just a little more time. That's all I need.

And I wondered what would become of me, and comforted myself that in a hundred years I would be dead and at peace, and in my grave; and I thought it might be less trouble altogether, to be in it a good deal sooner than that.

Thy only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die, John and Mary die, John and Mary die.

You will flicker in these words and in the words of others for a while and then go out. Even if I send them, you will never get these letters. Even if I see you again, I will never see you again.

Immortality and mortality didn't mix well: it was fire and mud, only the fire always won. The gods were never averse to making a mess. In fact they enjoyed it.

A shadow flits before me, Not thou, but like to thee. Ah, Christ, that it were possible For one short hour to see The souls we loved, that they might tell us What and where they be! —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, Maud, 1855.

They say that a nightmare can frighten you to death, that your heart can literally stop. Will this bad dream kill me, one of these nights? Surely it will take more than that.

Just remember, dear Friends, What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.

What do I want? I want you to talk about normal things. No I don't. I want you to look me in the eye and say, I know you're dying.

The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish, drying on sand. He

In restaurants we argue over which of us will pay for your funeral / though the real question is whether or not I will make you immortal.

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.

Right now I still have some choice in the matter. Not whether to die, but when and how. Isn't that freedom of a sort? Oh, and who to take down with me. I have made my list.

Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk, it's the universal protest against Time. Just remember, dear Friends: What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.

the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul — it was a consequence of grammar.

I even spent a certain amount of time worrying about the Spiritualist doctrines: If The Other Side was so wonderful, why did the spirits devote most of their messages to warnings? Instead of telling their loved ones to avoid slippery stairs and unsafe cars and starchy foods, they should have been luring them over cliffs and bridges and into lakes, spurring them on to greater feats of intemperance and gluttony, in order to hasten their passage to the brighter shore.

Yesterday I went to the doctor, to see about these dizzy spells. He told me that I have developed what used to be called a heart, as if healthy people didn't have one. It seems I will not after all keep on living forever, merely getting smaller and greyer and dustier, like Sibyl in her bottle. Having long ago whispered I want to die, I now realise that this wish will indeed be fulfilled, and sooner rather than later. No matter that I've changed my mind.