Quotes About Mortality

Every man has to die. Choosing oblivion is the only way of triumphing over this.

Sea fleas," Frank said. "They're everywhere, very wee, practically invisible. They love our bait. If you fell overboard and weren't picked up until the next day, those sea fleas would eat you right up, and your skeleton would sink to the bottom!" Cody lifted me up and hung me over the side. "Want to try it?" he said. "Not funny, Cody," I said. I didn't much like the idea of sea fleas nibbling me down to my bones.

what an unfair advantage the dead had over the living, for there could be no rebuttal, no denial, nothing but the accusing silence of the grave.

How fragile life was, how fleeting their days on earth, and how fickle was Death, claiming the young as often as the old, the healthy as often as the ailing, cruelly stealing away a baby's first breath, a mother's fading heartbeat.

He supposed he'd always known he would not make old bones. Scriptures spoke plainly enough on that. For all they that take up the sword shall perish by the sword.

An intimate enemy, death, capricious and cruel, ultimately invincible.

Why would you take a drug that is guaranteed to kill you in forty years? One reason, right? It's the only thing that will stop you dying tomorrow.

Even as we live with the knowledge that each day might be our last, we don't want to believe it.

To overcome your fear of death, you have to move from 'the world ends with me' to 'the world goes on without me'. It is a great leap, the biggest step a human can take.

Surely there comes a moment in every human's life when he or she says, like the Sibyl - I wish to die.

Forget heaven and hell, yaar," he says as he leaves. "It's purgatory I'm concerned about. We call it Earth.

He could do little. Brandy might help, he thought, but when he poured some into the hurt man's mouth it ran back out again. Presently a colonel, Johnston's chief of staff, came hurrying into the ravine. But he could do nothing either. He knelt down facing the general. "Johnston, do you know me? Johnston, do you know me?" he kept asking, over and over, nudging the general's shoulder as he spoke. But Johnston did not know him. Johnston was dead.

when corps commanders started toppling, alive one minute and dead the next, struck down as if by a bolt of blue-sky lightning, who was safe? All down the line, from brigadiers to privates, spirits were heavy with intimations of mortality.

Man is characterized by a number of things - one of 'em is he is the only animal that knows he's going to die someday.

I can't imagine pain greater than stepping across the veil and realizing I had not done what I came here to do - or realizing that I had given up my life to little or nothing, only then to find that it was gone. p 3

While life is meant to test, challenge, and strengthen us, if we are attempting to negotiate the twists and turns and ups and downs of mortality alone, we're doing it all wrong. Mortality is a test, but it is an open book test. We have access not only to the divine text but to Him who authored it.

The Lord has set no limits on what He is willing to teach us and give us. We are the only ones who set limits--through our neglect our disobedience or ignorance. We are in large measure the ones who determine what we will learn and experience in mortality, and what we will receive eternally.

Only fools insist upon life at any cost.... Others would say that life may be laid down when it becomes too heavy. Where does it go, after all, but into the keeping of the Powers who gave it and will give it once again?

When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.

Standing on the shore, I prayed for my dead. I praised them. I stupidly hoped that the lake would heal my small wounds. Then I stripped off my clothes and waded naked into the water. Jesus, I don't want to die today or tomorrow, but I don't want to live forever.

Did you know that you can be killed by a benign tumor? Imagine that news headline: Native American poet killed by oxymoron.

I'm dying from about ninety-nine kinds of shame

Jesus, I don't want to die today or tomorrow, but I don't want to live forever.

I know that death is never added to death; it multiplies.