Quotes About Mortality

No sooner do we come into this world, than bits of us start to fall off.

Young, middle-aged, elderly, old, dead: this was how life conjugated. (No, life was a noun, so this is how life declined. Yes, that was better in any case, life declined.

To die from 'a draining away of one's strength caused by extreme old age' was in Montaigne's day a 'rare, singular and extraordinary death.' Nowadays we assume it as our right.

Opera cuts to the chase—as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.

Look what she has lost, now that she has lost life. Her body, her spirit; her radiant curiosity about life. At times it feels as if life itself is the greatest loser, the true bereaved party, because it is no longer subjected to that radiant curiosity of hers.

Manchmal glaube ich, es ist der Sinn des Lebens, uns mit seinem letzendlichen Verlust zu versöhnen, indem es uns zermürbt, uns beweist, auch wenn das eine Weile dauern kann, dass das Leben gar nicht so toll ist.

Perhaps a sense of death is like a sense of humour. We all think the one we've got - or haven't got - is just about right, and appropriate to the proper understanding of life. It's everyone else who's out of step.

Cheer up! Death is round the corner.

The one thing that is very good in life today is death.

Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love when she dies. You got it right. This is part of it all.

Habíamos juzgado filosóficamente evidente que el suicidio era un derecho de cualquier persona libre: un acto lógico frente a una enfermedad terminal o la senilidad; una acción heroica frente a la tortura o la muerte evitable de otros; un acto elegante en la rabia del amor contrariado.

Mortality often gatecrashes my consciousness when the outside world presents an obvious parallel: as evening falls, as the days shorten, or towards the end of a long day's hiking.

No sooner do we come into this world,' said Flaubert, 'than bits of us start to fall off.

he thought he probably wouldn't have sex again before he died. Probably. Possibly. Unless. But on balance, he thought not. Sex involved two people. Two persons, first person and second person: you and I, you and me. But nowadays, the raucousness of the first person within him was stilled. It was as if he viewed, and lived, his life in the third person. Which allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed.

Tek što do?emo na svet, rekao je Flober, ,,a ve? s nas po?nu da otpadaju komadi?i.

Ás veces penso que o sentido da vida é desgastarnos para reconciliarnos coa súa perda final, demostrándonos que, á marxe do tempo que lle leve, a vida non está en absoluto á altura da súa propia fama.

now some were keeping themselves at bay, having reached the age when illness arrives. There were emails about prostate cancer, and back operations, and that little bit of heart trouble which maybe wasn't such good news. Vitamin pills and statins were consumed, while the World Service kept them company in their sleeplessness. And soon, no doubt, the funeral years would begin.

And then there is the inevitable third stylisation—of posthumous memory. Leading to the moment when the last living person to remember you has their very last thought about you. There ought to be a name for that final event, which marks your final extinction.

When we killed - or exiled - God we also killed ourselves. Did we notice sufficiently at the time? No God, no afterlife, no us. We were right to kill Him, of course, this long-standing imaginary friend of ours. And we weren't going to get an afterlife anyway. But we sawed off the branch we were sitting on. And the view from there, from that height - even if it was only the illusion of a view - wasn't so bad.

While Nigel chattered away about the ghoulish features of dying which interested him, I grew melancholy at the half-finished things which a death persuades you to focus on.

Ich glaube nicht, dass ich sie je wiedersehen werde. Ich werde sie nie wieder sehen, hören, berühren, in den Armen halten, ihr zuhören, mit ihr lachen; nie wieder auf ihre Schritte horchen, lächeln, wenn eine Tür aufgeht; nie wieder ihren Körper an meinen, meinen an ihren drücken. Ich glaube auch nicht, dass wir uns in entmaterialisierter Form wiedertreffen. Ich glaube, tot ist tot.

Don't talk about dying? You want me to talk about love. They're one and the same, child. One and the same.

We did everything we could to save him, to defend him and still we knew he was going to die. One never feels more like speck upon the breast of the universe in those moments.

Life is short, Tommy. Short and dangerous. A bit like you.