Quotes About Mortality

When you're dying in America, at the end of the millennium, you're not alone

The real cruelty of dying was not the way your own obscene dreams went gray. It was the fact that you lost the chance to tell your story.

A man dies at twenty and it is a great shame. He dies at thirty or forty and he has been taken from us too soon. But if one reaches the age of eighty-three, all the shock eventually begins to flow the other way, even in a murder case. The chief question becomes: How on earth did he survive so long?

There were always reasons for what I did. Good reasons or bad reasons, I don't know, in any case human reasons. Those who kill are humans, just like those who are killed, that's what's terrible. You

It was one thing or the other: either you are dead, and then in any case there's nothing else to understand, or else you are not yet dead, and in that case, even with the rifle at the back of your head or the rope around your neck, death remains incomprehensible, a pure abstraction, this absurd idea that I, the only living person in the world, could disappear.

Every single zom, every man, woman and child, no matter how decayed or how frightening they are, no matter how dangerous they are—they were all once real people. They had names, and lives, and personalities, and families. They had dreams and goals. They had pasts and they thought they had futures, but something came and took that away from them.

We forget that winter will come again. We forget that nothing really endures and that, like the flowers that die at the end of the growing season, we'll join them in the cold ground.

Stabbing is for suckers who want to die.

I'm going to be dead for a long time. Let me be awake as much as I can for now.

Death walked everywhere and there was no one who didn't know the sound of the Reaper's voice.

Some sexual theorists have argued that the perceptual link between orgasm and death is traceable to the elevated state in which orgasm in a rare few cases is accompanied by a loss of consciousness. Another explanation for the petit mort idea is inherent in a rare but persistent folk belief, of uncertain origin but found in cultures from Europe to the Far East, that a person is born with a certain number of orgasms in him or her, and that when the last is used, the person died.

You will be late for your own funeral.

It's great to be alive, isn't it? Especially when you consider the alternative.

Wrangham estimated that around thirty per cent of adult male chimpanzees had died as the result of violence by another member of their own species.

I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.

It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.

Unlike the Greeks, we believe that the dead are beyond harm, so we need often overlook the toxic residue left behind by disrespectful treatment of enemy dead.

I don't know how old the man was... but he was definitely closer to coffin than crib.

Wenn man schon eines grässlichen Todes sterben muss, sollte man wenigstens einen stilvollen Abgang hinlegen.

According to some, heroic deaths are admirable things. I've never been convinced by this argument, mainly because, no matter how cool, stylish, composed, unflappable, manly, or defiant you are, at the end of the day you're also dead. Which is a little too permanent for my liking.

I shall be like that tree, I shall die at the top.

To mix the brew that wakes Death sleep Fill one spread hand with silver deep. In hungry pool moons raise their heads: Pluck one and add the tears it sheds. Stir slowly with new fighter's quill, Three times, no more, and let it still. Add venom from your greatest fear-- One drop--and then the truth is clear.

We're all immortal until we die.

We cannot resist the lure of that mortal brilliance. It is its own kind of glamour, that dazzles the senses. And once we have found it, we cannot turn away.