Quotes About Mortality

Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.

When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tup and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank into sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.

The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars Letting in the light, peephole after peephole--- A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things. --from Insomniac, written April 1961

I am I am I am.

How many different deaths I can die?

Compared with me, a tree is immortal.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough. Nor youth to old age long enough. Immortality and permanence be damned. Sure I want them, but they are nonexistent, and won't matter when I rot underground. All I want to say is: I made the best of a mediocre job. It was a good fight while it lasted. And so life goes.

Tomorrow is another day toward death.

God has to remind us this isn't heaven by a long shot, so he increases the radios and lethal flies.

I don't see,' I said, 'how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.

To feel the tender skin of sensitive child-fingers thicken; to feel the sex organs develop and call loudly to the flesh; to become aware of school, exams (the very words as unlovely as the sound of chalk shrilling on the blackboard,) bread and butter, marriage, sex, compatibility, war, economics, death and self. What a pathetic blighting of the beauty and reality of childhood.

Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don't want to die.

Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is Number Three. What a trash To annihilate each decade. --from Lady Lazarus, written 23-29 October 1962

Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say 'I'll go take a hot bath.

Sheep In Fog The hills step off into whiteness. People or stars Regard me sadly, I disappoint them. The train leaves a line of breath. O slow Horse the colour of rust, Hooves, dolorous bells ---- All morning the Morning has been blackening, A flower left out. My bones hold a stillness, the far Fields melt my heart. They threaten To let me through to a heaven Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don't want to die.

I don't see, I said, how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.

Then he would lean back in his chair and match the tips of his fingers together in a little steeple and tell me why I couldn't sleep and why I couldn't read and why I couldn't eat and why everything everyone did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.

Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, "Do you know what a poem is, Esther?" "No, what?" I would say. "A piece of dust." Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, "So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.

Then he would lean back in his chair and match the tips of his fingers together in a little steeple and tell me why I couldn't sleep and why I couldn't read and why I couldn't eat and why everything everyone did seem so silly, because they only died in the end.

He would lean back in his chair and match the tips of his fingers together in a little steeple and tell me why I couldn't sleep and why I couldn't read and why I couldn't eat and why everything people did seemed so silly because they only died in the end.

So you will rot in the ground, and so you say, what the hell? Who cares? But you care, and somehow you don't want to live just one life.

Io sono il presente, ma so che anch'io me ne andrò. L'instante sublime, la fiamma che consuma arriva e subito scompare: sabbie mobili, semore. E io non voglio morire.

What am I doing with a lung full of dust and a tongue of wood, Knee-deep in the cold swamped by flowers? — Sylvia Plath, from Leaving Early," Crossing the Water . (Harper Perennial May 9, 1980) Originally published 1971.