Quotes About Mortality

If God had been like a toad, you could have rid the globe of toads, but when God was like yourself, it was no good being content with stone figures — you had to kill yourself among the graves.

Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying.

Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look around at the little I would be leaving.

I've reached the age when sex isn't the problem so much as old age and death. I wake up with these in mind and not a woman's body. I just don't want to be alone in my last decade, that's all. I wouldn't know what to think about all day long.

Don't be too sorry for those who die after some pain. It makes them ready to go. Think of how a death sentence must sound when you are full of health and vigour.

It seemed odd that a man's smell should cling in the folds of a curtain so long after the man himself had become dead matter, a gas, a decay.

Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever.

Aren't we all better dead? the opium reasoned within me.

Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look at the little I will be leaving.

The dead were to be envied. It was the living who had to suffer from loneliness and distrust.

From behind he looked younger than he was in his dark thin ready-made suit a little too big for him at the hips, but when you met him face to face he looked older, the slatey eyes were touched with the annihilating eternity from which he had come and to which he went.

How bright we all bur. No wonder we were not made to last.

No man lives forever and even as memory fades, so too will any remembrance of him.

Such arrogant certainty,' said the serpent with relish. 'How pleasing that is to me. All the very worst sins are accomplished with such certainty: gluttony, wrath, lust… pride. No force in existence can compete with mortals in the grip of certainty.

Fear is a drug you need to survive. Without fear, you die quicker; that's part of basic, that's what the old guys instill in us when we're fledglings waiting and eager to fly; fear is your friend, but only in controlled doses, never in such flooding waves that you panic. Panic kills you quicker than bullets. Panic turns you into doomed animals.

Living things see only the surface, can't exist in the depths. Life is painted on the surface of the real. Death is the great unexplored volume. Death rises from the inaccessible, depth and death sounding so much alike … There

And I learned a long time ago, if you're going to wait for this world to be fair, you're going to be waiting in the grave.

Because death is the end, and if a man doesn't speak before it silences him, then the things he holds closest die with him.

It was so easy to forget the man was dying. Danny wondered if Shields forgot it himself sometimes. For the first second or two after he woke up in the morn ings, maybe. Danny had a paraplegic friend who'd ex perienced that. He said there was nothing worse than the crushing weight of remembering that he was para lyzed and couldn't get out of bed.

I've seen a lot of men on the south side of twenty die for no reason at all. Shot or mortared out of a clear blue sky, some times by their own side. I've heard them screaming in the back of my chopper with no hope of getting to a field hospital in time. And they don't scream to God, Doc. They don't scream to Daddy, either. They scream to Mama. Because they know Mama loved them more than anyone else ever could. More than even God, if there is one.

16So don't be dismayed when the wicked grow rich and their homes become ever more splendid. 17For when they die, they take nothing with them. Their wealth will not follow them into the grave.

But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near

Death's sure and steady measure was not pure evil. It brought an intense poignant richness to every moment. To mortal men each day came once and forever and struck sure into the heart. The machines would never know that. They lived in a kind of still gray death, where no one moment meant anything, because all moments were alike. Only the dreaming vertebrates knew that life held more than that.

almost everyone I've ever loved is dead. And the only way to live with the constant cull of what you love is to take a little of that cold grave into yourself, every time.