Quotes About Mortality

Stevie had no fears of the dead. The living, however, sometimes gave her the creeps.

You know, I'm not any kind of a great man. I couldn't have built that railroad. If it goes, I won't be able to bring it back. I'll have to go with it. . . .

There is no such thing as a temporary suicide.

In 1918, a strain of H1N1 that came to be known as "the Spanish flu" had infected an estimated half a billion people and killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million—roughly 4 percent of the world's population. In Philadelphia alone, more than 12,000 died in the span of a few weeks.

In fact, if you're not prepared to die when you're almost sixty, then I would say you've been falling down on your philosophical responsibilities as a grown-up human being.

I couldn't help noticing that the existential space in which a friend had earnestly advised me to 'confront [my] mortality' bore a striking resemblance to the mall.

Once I realized I was old enough to die, I decided that I was also old enough not to incur any more suffering, annoyance, or boredom in the pursuit of a longer life.

It's not only "my work"—forgive the pompous phrase—that I bequeath to my survivors but all the mental and sensual pleasures that come with being a living human: sitting in the spring sunshine, feeling the warmth of friends, solving a difficult equation. All that will go on without me. I am content, in the time that remains, to be a transient cell in the larger human super-being.

Once I realized I was old enough to die, I decided that I was also old enough not to incur any more suffering, annoyance, or boredom in the pursuit of a longer life." No more annual exams, cancer screenings, mammograms, and any other measure "expected of a responsible person with health insurance….Not only do I reject the torment of a medicalized death, but I refuse to accept a medicalized life.

Pitiful, puling, like all your kin the slave of time that rots the body before the mind has seen more than a single flower in all the meadows of the Cosmos.

To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.

Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.

To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.

Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity *after* their deaths than the eternity that happened before they were born. But it's the same amount of infinity, rolling out in all directions from where we stand.

To live is to be marked, to live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.

The backs of his hands remind him of paper burning in the fireplace, the moment the taut membrane goes slack into a thousand wrinkles, just before it withers to ash and air.

To live is to be marked, she said without speaking. To live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.

Alive, nobody matters much in the long run. But dead, some men matter more than others.

The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill.

center, in bigger print: And if I die no soul will pity me. And why should they since I myself find in myself no pity to myself. I asked what it was

tries, and tries very hard, but she doesn't know what it's like to be the sole survivor, the only one left of one's contemporaries. They've all gone now. They're all dead and buried. My dearest friends, my loved ones. Even my enemies are no longer around to get my goat and spark the will in me to fight.

If you live only for yourself, dying is an especially scary proposition.

some traveler from the undiscovered country. I know as well as I know anything the dead are simply dead.

Death catches everyone eventually, and I had never harbored any illusions about its ability to catch me. That it had hesitated so long to do so seemed born more of a desire to mock me than of any real inclination to wait. Death had tired of that game, and had finally moved in to collect what we all owe.