Quotes About Mortality

Write as if you were dying.

The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but what we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.

I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonshingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagence goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives, Henle's loops and all. Every glistening egg is a memento mori.

The Mahabharata says, "Of all the world's wonders, which is the most wonderful? That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that he himself will die.

What is the sound of an eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking?

The world begins anew with every birth, my father used to say. He forgot to say, with every death it ends. Or did not think he needed to. Because for a goodly part of his life he worked in a graveyard.

I wanted to listen to him, but I did not want to answer now. That strange responsibility we feel towards others when they speak, to offer them the solace of any answer. Poor humans! And anyway he had not asked a question. He was merely floating there in the room, insubstantial, a living man in the midst of life, dying imperceptibly on his feet, like all of us.

Time makes us pointless.

He saw a picture in his mind of a terrible piling up of the dead. It came from his contemplation of the church, but it had its own clarity: the row on row, the deep rotting earth hollowed out to hold them, while the efforts of the living, with all their works and wars and great buildings, were no more than the beat of a wing against the weight of time.

I wonder what it's like to be dead.

His own men, those who would attack in the morning, knelt on the earth, faces hidden behind one hand, in an agonizing tunnel of their own, a darkness where there was no time but where they tried to look on death.

I looked at him on the bed. He coughed once and a trail of brownish dead blood came out of his mouth and ran down the side of his chin. Then he stopped breathing. And I thought, I'll make sure I never end up here, either.

Until she had had children of her own she had not been able to contemplate the death of either of her parents; when the subject had arisen, in conversation or in her own imagining, she had said only: I just don't know what I'd do.

There was a pretty young woman I used to see pegging out sheets and I worried that she would grow old there and that no one would know how beautiful she was. And maybe she would die without ever having really lived.

Many times I hav elaid down and longed for death. No future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand. When it is over we will go quietly among them living and we will note tell them. We will talk and step and go about our business like human beings. We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us.

Her life had reached an age at which she should no longer be the last to die; there ought to be someone younger than her, a generation of her children who should now be enjoying that luxurious safety of knowing that grandparents and parents still lay like a barrier between them and their mortality.

One of God's greatest oversights is that dogs don't live as long as man.

Like wealth discrepancies, mortality rates provide a rough indication of relative freedom, and when social classes die at radically different rates from one another, some are obviously less free. An important part of freedom is not having to make sacrifices for people who don't have to make sacrifices for you.

Our life is but a grain of sand in the indifferent ocean of infinity.

Who would fardels bear, To groan and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus, conscience does make cowards of us all;

You don't have to die in the next year if you die this year.

Let life be short, else shame will be too long.

Heroes are damned. No mortal conquers Death.

Tomorrow we will be nothing but earth and dust. Who will remember the love a soldier once knew?