Quotes About Mortality

Boys play with death as though it were a game, cutting their teeth on daggers.

We're so old that the winds of age echo along our ribs and pick at our eye sockets. We could be gone tomorrow. A chill, say, or a little slip on the cliff side. I feel as fragile as a dried flower. I rattle a little in the moving air, but I'm only coherent dust-a shape of what once was. My essence is going.

Woman is not "in reality" any closer to (or further from) nature than man - both have consciousness, both are mortal.

I realize why women die in childbirth - it's preferable.

We are all going to die soon. Do you really wish to waste time being angry at me?" "Yes. I remain an unrepentant optimist. If i see that I am about to die, or you, I will forgive you. But not until then, you bastard.

Every triumph over some major pathology, no matter how ringing the victory, is only a reprieve from the inevitable end.

These days (if I may steal a term from the jargon of the contemporary rialto), it is not politically correct to admit that some people die of old age.

The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope we all can achieve… the hope that resides in the meaning of what our lives have been.

reasons that one generation must give way to the next, as made clear in another of the letters Jefferson wrote to the equally venerable John Adams near the end of his life: "There is a ripeness of time for death, regarding others as well as ourselves, when it is reasonable we should drop off, and make room for another growth. When we have lived our generation out, we should not wish to encroach on another.

Poets, essayists, chroniclers, wags, and wise men write often about death ut have rarely seen it. Physicians and nurses, who see it often, rarely write about it.

Unless we are aware that we are dying and so far as possible know the conditions of our death, we cannot share any sort of final consummation with those who love us. Without this consummation, no matter their presence at the hour of passing, we will remain

Far from being irreplaceable, we should be replaced. Fantasies of staying the hand of mortality are incompatible with the best interests of our species and the continuity of humankind's progress. More directly, they are incompatible with the best interests of our very own children. Tennyson says it clearly: "Old men must die; or the world would grow moldy, would only breed the past again.

Today the law defines death, with appropriate blurriness, as the cessation of brain function. Though the heart may still throb and the unknowing bone marrow create new cells, no man's history can outlive his brain.

if peace and dignity are what we delude ourselves to expect, most of us will die wondering what we, or our doctors, have done wrong.

Whether the result of wear, tear, and exhaustion of resources or whether genetically programmed, all life has a finite span and each species has its own particular longevity. For human beings, this would appear to be approximately 100 to 110 years. This means that even were it possible to prevent or cure every disease that carries people off before the ravages of senescence do, virtually no one would live beyond a century or a bit more.

Since human beings first began to write, they have recorded their wish for an idealized ending some call the "good death," as if any of us can ever be sure of it or have any reason to expect it. There are pitfalls of decision-making to be sidestepped and varieties of hope to seek, but beyond that we must forgive ourselves when we cannot achieve some preconceived image of dying right.

It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.

To the wise advice that we live every day as though it will be our last, we do well to add the admonition to live every day as though we will be on this earth forever.

The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope we call all achieve, and it is the most abiding of all. Hope resides in the meaning of what our lives have been.

when the human spirit departs, it takes with it the vital stuffing of life. Then, only the inanimate corpus remains, which is the least of all the things that make us human.

The very old do not succomb to disease-they implode their way into eternity. (How We Die)

The dignity we create in the time allotted to us becomes a continuum with the dignity we achieve by the altruism of accepting the necessity of death.

Every life is different from any that has gone before it, and so is every death.

The lesson is never learned—there will always be those who persist in seeking the Fountain of Youth, or at least delaying what is irrevocably ordained.