Quotes About Mortality

When I was young, my parents were these titanic, infallible figures. But Mum's illness and Dad's battles with diabetes and heart attacks had a ripple effect on me - reminding me of my own mortality and that these illnesses are genetic.

Money, titles, belts - you're not going to take with you when you die. History stays forever. That's why I decided to go for history.

I would hate the thought of dying full stop; I've got to be honest with you.

A person's life is over in 50, 100 years. But a company lives on through the people it is composed of, and SoftBank group has to survive even after I'm gone.

If you want to survive Ebola, you need to be young. If you're in your late 30s, the death rate is about 80 percent, and if you're over 45, then the death rate goes up to about 90 percent.

matter how well you take care of the dying, no matter if you sit beside them every minute, every day—in the end they must go, and you stay.

No matter how well you take care of the dying, no matter if you sit beside them every minute, every day—in the end they must go, and you stay. And you wave them off. You lie.

The Devil may take the reckless, but the good will surely die of boredom. Boredom and frustration.

Birth, coupling, death. The more she thinks about it, the more it seems that that is all there is: a wheel turning over and over, moving so fast that sometimes you cannot even make out the spokes. It is a wonder there is any room for poetry.

It was one of those perfect New York October afternoons, when the explosion of oranges and yellows against the bright blue sky makes you feel like your life is passing through your fingers, that you've felt this autumn-feeling before and you'll probably get to feel it again, but one day you won't anymore, because you'll be dead.

And the air was rent with cries of the living glaring at the rotted bones and rags of their kin and friends just a-swingin in the winds circling about the land, and pulling the bones and rags--some crumbling and dry, some still squirming with the worms eating away at them--from those once mighty roots, and putting them back in the gaping holes.

Just breathing in and out suddenly seemed to require a series of massive, separately considered decisions, as if each small action of mine had abruptly become huge compared to all the ones the dead man was not taking.

I dreamt I went to the doctor's and she gave me eight minutes to live-I'd been sitting in the fucking waiting room half an hour.

Don't even think about it. Who would have children. You have kids, they grow up, they hate you and you die.

Burning in a hot tunnel of dismay, my humiliation complete as I shake without reason and stumble over words and have nothing to say about my 'illness' which anyway amounts only to knowing that there's no point in anything because I'm going to die.

No one survives life.

In a hundred and fifty years no one alive will ever have known me. Being forgotten like that, entering that great and ongoing blank, seems more like death than death. ?

Inner beauty can fade, too.

I read obituaries every day to learn what sorts of lives are available to us, to see an entire life compressed into a few column inches, to fit the whole story in my eye at once.

The quality that all last words share: the silence after.

What fails to kill me will kill me eventually.

Death will reveal what you otherwise would have finished. Also what you never would have finished. I found the notes for a book a woman had been working on for thirty years: sixteen pages.

For just a moment, with great effort, I could imagine my will as a force that would not disappear but redistribute when I died, and that all life contained the same force, and that I needn't worry about my impending death because the great responsibility of my life was to contain the force for a while and then relinquish it.

Turn forty and suddenly you're too old to die tragically young.