Quotes About Mortality

Death, the real simile for disease - for when we are ill, do we not always feel like we are dying, even if it's only a little? - remains, despite our secularism, the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all.

If I'm taking a picture of Brancusi's grave, I know that there's something of him, of his mortal remains, beneath my feet, and there's something beautiful about that.

I've met so many remarkable people so far, coming up through stand-up all these years, who just aren't alive anymore. Because they are dead. Some really great people who helped change my life and career, people like Richard Pryor, Sam Kinison, Rodney Dangerfield, Johnny Carson.

What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide, but existential authenticity each person must find on her own... the angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.

Do you remember when you found out you wouldn't live forever? People don't talk about this, but everybody had to go through it because you're not born with that knowledge.

We don't want to be reminded that life ends at some point, so they don't put older people on the screen.

I am a serial denier. I try not to be. I tell myself, 'You are going to die.' I repeat it. I grasp it for a second or two, but then it escapes me, and I'm back to before.

Once DNA acquires the ability to persist forever, the carriers become disposable. Essentially, our bodies are designed to last long enough to reproduce.

The idea that because you're born in Haiti you could die having a child. The idea that because you're born in you know Malawi your children may go to bed hungry. We want to take some of the chance out of that.

I'm hungry in the ways that every artist is, but I also have this extra layer. I've done a lot of things that were consciously not for money, but because I'm so convinced I'm going to die in my mid-30s, I'm like, 'That's not what's important. Doing cool stuff and having that legacy is what's important.'

I tell myself to hurry up, that I have to do everything before death catches me.

It hurts, it hurts... Im dying, I'm dying.

'Biutiful' is not about death. It's about life. It's a hymn to life.

We want our idols to be dead because it makes death a much less scary place.

I think about death most of the day, every day. We can't escape death, and choosing to ignore it only makes it more scary.

Life is so fragile, so brief. And we seemingly work so hard at trying to ignore that.

Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.

Sometimes it takes a brush with eternity - a crash, an illness, some shock to the system - to get you really thinking about what you want to do with your limited time here, and why you're living on this wobbling dirt clod in the first place.

Although many of us fear death, I think there is something illogical about it.

The doctors who have examined me say I am healthy enough for a long life, so don't have any illusions that I'll soon leave this world.

After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can't bring back anything to life.

My great-great-grandfather lived to age 28, my immigrant great-grandfather Pedro Gotiaoco died at 66, my grandfather was 68, and my father died at 34.

As I think about the future, I'm back where most people live their lives. Which is, death is not imminent, and that's different.

We all have to die some day. Not very many immortals have shown up in this world.