Quotes About Mortality

The diffeence between a fake death and a real one is slim. Mara

There's 6.5 billion people curled up like fists protesting death, but every breath we take has to be given back; a nine year old boy taught me that.

If I should fall from grace with God Where no doctor can relieve me If I'm buried 'neath the sod But the angels won't receive me Let me go, boys Let me go, boys Let me go down in the mud Where rivers all run dry

My ma says a rock lasts forever, but people don't, and that's what makes them more precious.

I wonder if everyone who faces death hurts like this. It's as though for the first time I realize how much just being alive makes my body ache. But I don't want that ache to stop.

The only guarantee we are given when we are born is that we will die.

Some other kid has to die so I can live?" This was too horrifying to wrap my head around. Like, how do you wish for something like that? But then, how do you not, if your own heart isn't working right? [pp.70]

and love seemed to rest, on us, in a place where, for that hour, it felt death could not reach, and someone was singing in my hearing, without words, that no one can live without reaching death, but I could have lived without having loved almost without reserve, and for a moment, then, I thought I lived forever with him.

We have always been going back, since birth, back toward not being alive.

And now I could hear the music think, as I had heard it then, the unspooling of the logic of being mortal—of dying, as my best friend had, when I was nine, and my beloved, when I was sixteen. I heard, again, what loving and being loved might sound like—or I heard what some comfort for the loss of that might sound like. I heard the body and soul of death—of love and death.

Many cells inside my ears, in the ossicle, and malleus, cochlea, have died where they lived and worked—I don't know if they're there, still, looking like themselves but dead, or if their corpses wore away, broke down to their elements and were shuffled off by capillaries, I don't know if I peed them out and now they're in an ocean bay or trench, or if I breathed them out, I might breathe one in again.

Did I ask with the space in the ground, like a portion of breath, where my body will rest, when it is motionless, when its elements move back into the earth?

Then every scene I thought of I visited accompanied by a death-spirit, everything was chilled with it, each time I woke, I lay in dreading bliss to feel and hear him sigh and snore.

You seem sad, Coriel." I nodded. "The world makes me sad these days. Things I would not have noticed a year ago seem dreadful to me now. Is that a function of growing older? And will everything seem more dreadful every year, from now until I die?

Death is no respecter of love.

The flood of time is rolling on; We stand upon its brink, whilst they are gone To glide in peace down death's mysterious stream. Have ye done well?

We preach to men as if they were conscious they were dying sinners, they are not; they are having a good time.

All-devouring time, envious age, Nought can escape you, and by slow degrees, Worn by your teeth, all things will lingering die.

We see time's furrows on another's brow, And death intrench'd, preparing his assault; How few themselves in that just mirror see!

Youth is not rich in time; it may be poor; Part with it as with money, sparing; pay No moment but in purchase of its worth, And what it's worth, ask death-beds; they can tell.

Time destroyed Is suicide, where more than blood is spilt.

I've realized that aging is the younger cousin of dying. ... How much time do I have left? We become aware that we're on the downside of the mountain, coasting toward our final days.

Living a very long time would be a very scary thing.

I deny the fact that when I kill time, time is actually killing me