Quotes About Mortality

Are you okay?" he asked. "I'm fine, yeah," she said. She wiped tears off her cheeks. "Somebody who totally fucked me over died today," she said. "Then why are you sad?" he asked. "I mean, fuck him. If it was a him." "I don't know. I guess because it means what he did can never be changed. His death makes it permanent." "I think I get that.

We are all circling the drain, he thought. Some are closer to the black hole than others;

We are all circling the drain, he thought. Some are closer to the black hole than others. Some will see it coming and some will have no clue when the undertow of the whirlpool grabs them and pulls them down into darkness forever.

I read once in a book that it doesn't matter if you're lying beneath a marble tombstone on a hill or at the bottom of an oil sump, when you're dead you're dead.

The rock, for its part, is not even aware of our existence because we are alive for only a brief instant of its lifespan. To it, we are like flashes in the dark.

Animals die, friends die, and I shall die, but one thing never dies, and that is the reputation we leave behind at our death.

And I think the answer is that we are, in reality, terribly frail animals. And we don't like to be reminded of how frail we are—how delicate the balances are inside our own bodies, how short our stay on Earth, and how easily it is ended.

Life is too short, and DNA too long.

And I think the answer is that we are, in reality, terribly frail animals. And we don't like to be reminded of how frail we are—how delicate the balances are inside our own bodies, how short our stay on Earth, and how easily it is ended. So

Perhaps the fact that we bleed to death makes us human.

And I think the answer is that we are, in reality, terribly frail animals. And we don't like to be reminded of how frail we are—how delicate the balances are inside our own bodies, how short our stay on Earth, and how easily it is ended.

Biography," observed Oscar Wilde, "lends to death a new terror.

Do not think ahead, and be cheerful by knowing that no man lives forever.

We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep--it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself.

You live with the threat of my extinction. I live with it too.

We worship numberless gods or idols, but we all need to be the grandest possible versions of ourselves, we need to walk across the face of the earth with as much grace and beauty as we can muster before we're wrapped in our winding sheets, and returned.

This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining.

What did Shakespeare say? Or little lives are rounded with a sleep.

There is no one there to see it. The world is doing what it always does, demonstrating itself to itself. The world has no interest in the little figures that come and go, the phantoms that worry and worship, that rake the graveled paths and erect the occasional rock garden, the bronze boy-man, the hammered cup for snow to fall into.

A što s beskrajnim trudom da prona?eš ravnotežu izme?u osje?aja i ironije, ljepote i strogosti, i pritom otvoriš pukotinu u supstanci svijeta kroz koju bi mogla zasjati istina za smrtnike?

I've felt it for some time now, closing around me like the jaws of a gigantic flower. Isn't that a peculiar analogy? It feels that way, though. It has a certain vegetable inevitability. Think of the Venus flytrap. Think of kudzu choking a forest. It's a sort of juicy, green, thriving process. Toward, well, you know. The green silence. Isn't it funny that, even now, it's difficult to say the word 'death'?

To philosophise is to learn how to die.

Why waste a life in search of an epitaph? 'Fondly Remembered'. Who other than a halfwit has that chiselled above his head?

Nothing lasts, not forever. Not laughter, not lust, not even life itself. Not forever. Which is why we make the most of what we have.