Quotes About Mortality

Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.

A writer's definitive death is when no one reads his books anymore. That's the final death.

I know that I am going to die, and I'm ready to do so.

There's a thing I think children realise at a certain age, which is that if their parents say, 'Don't do it', and they go ahead and do it, they're still not going to die. And I think that's what it is: that no matter what you do, you're not going to die.

I think I'm rather young and sprightly, but then you see pictures of yourself and think, 'Who is that old man?' and I realise I'm not as young as I thought I was.

I started to realise that it wasn't for me. Perhaps I didn't have to give my Hamlet before I died, that the world might be an OK place without my Hamlet, in fact.

It doesn't take that many years for a kid to realise that they're going to die. It's always there in the back of their mind the rest of their lives.

In your mid-20s, you think you'll go on for eternity. Then a point comes where you realise that's not going to be the case.

Cancer makes you realise that you will be dead one day. It's so common seeing people dying and falling sick, but we aren't really ever able to comprehend it ourselves. The realisation that I am here for a certain period of time and will be gone after that made me value my time and life.

I hate Sridevi. I hate her for making me realise that she, too, is finally only just a human being. I hate that her heart, too, has to beat to live.

Why are we born? We're born eventually to die, of course. But what happens between the time we're born and we die? We're born to live. One is a realist if one hopes.

Prince Philip prides himself on being a realist. He knows he is not going to live for ever.

Macbeth is contending with the realities of this world, Hamlet with those of the next.

For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It's impossible to do.

Death and sex are the dominant reality of our day.

Even if you live forty or fifty years in this world, and then die, you cannot take all your goods with you.

You can only live to be so old, then you gotta let go.

The worst day ever was when I found out my grandfather was going to die.

You get into your late fifties, people start falling like flies all around you. I don't take life for granted any more. I'm really glad to be here.

Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.

Maybe it's just my own chronic morbidity and melancholia, but I really do think about it a great deal and quite often in the small hours of the night when, it is said, the greatest numbers of people die.

In 1900, the average life expectancy of a US citizen was 48, so most menopausal women were dead, which is not a great place to be.

To achieve greatness one should live as if they will never die.

To me, death is dark, pain, grief.