Quotes About Mortality

But this flower comes in the form of a human; it must soon succumb to disease, atrophy, ruined skin, broken teeth, the unbearable frailty of mortality.

Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life?

And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old—or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.

I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn't just an idea.

We do not think of it every day, but we never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

I think this is the prettiest world—so long as you don't mind a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life that doesn't have its splash of happiness?

so long as you don't mind a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life that doesn't have its splash of happiness?

What lay on the road was no mere handful of snake. It was the copperhead at last, golden under the street lamp. I hope to see everything in this world before I die.

To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go

The question is, what will it be like after the last day? Will I float into the sky or will I fray within the earth or a river— remembering nothing? How desperate I would be if I couldn't remember the sun rising, if I couldn't remember trees, rivers; if I couldn't even remember, beloved, your beloved name.

When I think of death it is a bright enough city

If it is...not just one's own accomplishment that carries one from this green and mortal world--that lifts the latch and gives a glimpse into a greater paradise--then perhaps one has the sensibility: a gratitude apart from authorship, a fervor and desire beyond the margins of the self.

Have you noticed? Where so many millions of powerful bawling beasts lay down on the earth and died it's hard to tell now what's bone, and what merely was once.

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us — as soft as feathers — that we are instantly weary of looking

life is real, and pain is real, but death is an imposter

and how could anyone believe that anything in this world is only what it appears to be— that anything is ever final— that anything, in spite of its absence, ever dies a perfect death?

How perfect to be aboard a ship with maybe a hundred years still in my pocket, but it's late for all of us. And in truth, the only ship there is, is the ship we are all on, burning the world as we go.

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Not that there's anything wrong with just lying around on your back. In it's way, rotting is interesting too, as we will see. It's just that there are other ways to spend your time as a cadaver.

When you get right down to it, there is no dignified way to go, be it decomposition, incineration, dissection, tissue digestion, or composting. They're all, bottom line, a little disagreeable. It takes the careful application of a well-considered euphemism—burial, cremation, anatomical gift-giving, water reduction, ecological funeral—to bring it to the point of acceptance.

As brain cells die from oxygen starvation, euphoria sets in, and one last, grand erection.) Space

One woman confessed that her group had passed comment on the "extremely large genitalia" of their cadaver. (What she perhaps didn't realize is that the embalming fluid pumped into the veins expands the body's erectile tissues, with the result that male anatomy lab cadavers may be markedly better endowed in death than they were in life.)