Quotes About Mortality

My mother died of colon cancer one week after my eleventh birthday, and that fact has shaped my life. All that I have become and much that I have not become, I trace directly or indirectly to her death. ... In my professional and personal life, I have lived with the awareness of death's imminence for more than half a century, and labored in its constant presence for all but the first decade of that time.

The eighteen years he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of humanity. Already he hears death calling. With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another. If he prefers that the other be a woman, that is because he believes that a woman will be gentle, that she will understand. He wants, most of all, understanding.

The eighteen years he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of humanity. Already he hears death calling. With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another.

From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy.

Decades from now, people will look back and wonder how societies could have acquiesced in a sex slave trade in the twenty-first century that is... bigger than the transatlantic slave trade was in the nineteenth. They will be perplexed that we shrugged as a lack of investment in maternal health caused half a million women to perish in childbirth each year.

When the gravity of death first touched me, I'd found preoccupation with the minutiae of daily life meaningless. If we ultimately die, and turn to dust in the ground, should it ever truly upset us if the floor hasn't been swept quite recently enough.

At the other end of the room the three old men discussed infirmities; exchanging symptoms in undertones as boys might speak of lust.

The doctors said it was something called commotio cordis, a direct blow to the heart between beats. It was instant, a fluke, and deadly.

Oh, how a small portion of earth will hold us when we are dead, who ambitiously seek after the whole world while we are living!

First of all, I'm over sixty. And second of all, I'm the sort of fellow to whom life and death are the same.

Who could guess he'd have a tooth pulled by Shmelke the healer and lie down the next morning and die? It's as my mother says: "Tomorrow is another day—but whose?

Sie töten so gerne Tiere, weil es unter Strafe steht, Menschen umzubringen, und weil sie doch so gerne auslöschen, am liebsten sich. Wie die Augen blind werden, im Augenblick des Übergangs von einem beseelten Lebewesen zu einem Fleisch. Seele. Das Wort für den Herzschlag.

He imagined that the people here would never die: they would simply evaporate into the carnal smoke of the music, their loins wrapped around each other, self and sorrow abandoned to the roar of lust.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work," he said. "I want to achieve it by not dying." But

We all begin to die from the moment we are born. Some do it faster than others. All we can do is enjoy our lives.

When they die no one will ever know that once they lived.

One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave.

If I ever thought of myself as a man of thirty-five it was a visualization of dreary decrepitude.

None of us could know how insignificant we were...

No one believes in his own death.

Someone has said, When you are born into this world there are at least two of you, but going out you are on your own. Death happens to every one of us, yet it remains the most solitary of human experiences, one that separates rather than unites us.

He reflected that what is important is not things, but the meaning we give to things. Sooner or later death comes for everyone. More important than putting off death, is giving it a meaning.

L'importante non sono le cose, ma il senso che noi diamo alle cose. Prima o poi la morte attende tutti. Più importante del rimandare la morte è darle un senso.

I'm still young enough to think that death is something that happens to other people.